Faux Real

Tuesday night HBO premiered the award-winning documentary “The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo,” a harrowing look into the lives of rape victims who are the uncounted casualties of the Congolese civil war. Directed by Lisa F. Jackson, a celebrated documentarian who was herself the victim of a gang rape, the movie spans the lives of those in Eastern Congo, the women who were raped, their physical, economic, and emotional struggles, and how the experts predict this widespread trauma will affect the nation for generations to come.

In wars the world over, rape has proven an effective way to extort, incite terror, control ethnic and village populations, and to break up extended family units that are so vital to communities. The Democratic Republic of Congo has been entrenched in an economic civil war for close to a decade, the most deadly conflict since World War II, and rape is one of the main weapons used against the opposition populations and their supporters. To date some sources believe that as many as 200,000 women and girls have been raped since the beginning of this particular conflict — a population the size of, say, Arlington, Virginia. In the DRC, this continuous force has become so commonplace that it is unremarkable among the various militias sent to fight and/or protect — a woman’s rapists could as easily be the interhamwe, the Rwandan paramilitary group primarily responsible for that country’s nightmarish genocide, or a team of UN peace keepers who will offer a family milk and eggs in exchange for the use of their twelve-year-old daughter.

Unenlightened Western folks find it easy to blame the corruption and instability on some racist assumption that Africa and Africans are inherently incorrigible, but the West has a steady hand in the conflict. We’ve reaped abundant benefits by keeping the conflict out of sight, mostly in the form of affordable engagement rings from the mall and the minerals necessary to manufacture cheaper, smaller, more efficient iPhones. Chris Clarke aptly covered this part of the equation last year at Pandagon:

With the boom in consumer electronics starting in the late 1990s, tantalum demand rose worldwide. So did its price. Coltan went from 40 bucks a pound in January 2000 to $380 that December. That kind of money is a huge draw in a place like the Congo Basin, and miners flocked to the east DRC… Armed factions within the DRC, and a few from neighboring countries such as Rwanda, Zimbabwe and Uganda, moved in to seize control of most of the mines, lured by the potential wealth… At one point the Rwandan army, which functioned as an intermediary between militias and metals dealers, pocketed $250 million over a period of 18 months.

Freelance miners were removed from their own operations and forced at gunpoint to work in militia-controlled mines. War raged back and forth as militias fought for control of the mines, conflict raging and abating as the world price of tantalum fluctuated. The price went up, and militias forced more people into slave labor. The price went down and the free workers had no money, some of them joining the militias in order to eat. A Lancet study found 600,000 additional deaths attributable to the war in the 16 months following January 2003: 1,200 people a day…

To sum up:
– We bought computers, digital cameras and wireless PDAs, making the blog world as we know it possible (among other things)
– we thus consumed 25¢ or so worth of tantalum in each device
– there were hundreds of millions of us buying the stuff
– the boosted price of tantalum attracted murderous rapist thugs to the DRC’s coltan mines
– Congolese women paid, and are still paying, the price.

The female victims of this civil war have mostly suffered in silence. Hospitals have been constructed whose only function is to piece together the bodies of women and girls who were gang raped, who have had guns and sticks repeatedly rammed in their vaginas to intentionally destroy their sexual organs, an injury known as a fistula which is extremely difficult to repair and often leaves the woman incontinent for life. A raped woman is considered damaged, unrecoverable goods, and a raped women with a fistula leaks feces and urine from her vagina for the rest of her life unless she can receive medical attention, and until she does she runs the risk of deadly infection. She is abandoned by her family and usually has to travel miles on foot to receive medical attention to repair her wounds.

If you think it cannot get worse, 30% of women and girls who are raped will contract HIV.

“The Greatest Silence” is not an easy movie to watch, but it is necessary because it deftly puts human faces to an otherwise unimaginable atrocity. Some critics have pooh-poohed the director’s decision to insert her person so sharply into the film, saying that she cheapens the message by comparing her own rape with the horrors her subjects have endured. But as a viewer, a feminist, and a rape victim myself, I get her need to tie in her own traumatic experience, and the sexual trauma of a good portion of the female viewing audience, because rape is largely a female experience, and one that is often silenced and suffered alone. While there is danger in comparison, her story is a bridge for empathy and understanding. Many of the women she interviewed did not think that a white woman from a peaceful (heh) nation could even be raped, and learning that they shared this trauma with the director allowed themselves to open up to her camera and this international audience. Conversely, one hopes the shared narrative will spur a Western audience to action.

The movie has two major strengths that drive the narrative, primarily by allowing the women to tell their own stories in as much or as little depth as they can muster, and also showing how various groups combat the legacy of the violence by giving women work skills, income, community, and healing. Two-thirds of Congolese women are illiterate and do not have skills beyond the domestic, and when they are forced from their villages by violence, there are few places for them to work or learn. Groups like Women For Women International, the free Panzi Hospital, and networks of rural Catholic churches allow safe spaces for women and girls to get medical attention and learn how to live with the trauma of war and sexual violence. And while it is reassuring that there are international organizations in place to help those injured by sexual violence, the conflict shows little signs of end. Yesterday’s rapist is today’s authority, and as long as the money flows into the hands of the people who use rape to dominate the pattern will continue.

As the rapes continue, individual, familial, economic, and state instability will continue. Raped women will continue to be abandoned by their families, and the children of rape will be raised in orphanages or by unwilling mothers. Generations of people who have suffered the physical and emotional trauma of rape will pass this legacy down to their children in fear, mistrust, and terror. Young men will continue to believe that they are entitled to make women suffer war as they suffer war, that they are entitled to the bodies of the unwilling at any cost, that their greatest weapon is the violation of the human need for agency and bodily integrity, and that rape is, as one militia member says, patriotic.

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See also: Corporate Rapists in Congo
Rape still a powerful weapon of war
The Greatest Silence
Hunters of black women: mass rape and mutilation in the Congo