By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 17 2013 (IPS)

Rape is often perceived as an individual trauma, but in reality its impact extends far beyond a single person and instead affects entire communities, complicating the already challenging task of helping victims of sexual violence.

Thérèse Mema Mapenzi, who works with rape victims in South Kivu of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), adds that in order for victims of rape and other forms of sexual violence to move on, they must have someone to listen to them.

Thérese Mema Mapenzi, who works with rape victims in South Kivu. Photo courtsey of Thérese Mapenzi.

Listening is also important to help devise solutions to deal with rape’s consequences on communities as a whole, explains the social assistant, who works directly with affected populations for the Justice and Peace Commission in Bukavu.

“I give them neither money nor food, but I listen to them and sympathise with them,” says Mapenzi. “What makes me proud is to see that soft words can help to cure the trauma of victims.”

In a conversation with IPS U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis, Mapenzi discusses how rape is used as a tool of war to destroy people, families and communities. Excerpts of the interview follow.

Q: Could you explain the destructive consequences of sexual violence on both individuals and communities?

A: In DRC, rape has been and is used as a weapon of war. Rebels know that in our culture, women are those who protect the culture in their communities. To destabilise the country and help actors of violence reach their goals, they are destroying families and thereby local communities, weakening social cohesion. They raped our sisters, mums, killed our brothers before our very eyes, humiliating and threatening us.

This violence comes with an atmosphere of silence on rape. It is not easy for a survivor of rape to say that he or she has been raped, because in our communities people do not easily speak about sex-related topics, so rape is treated as a taboo.

Many families were and are separated as a result of these experiences; raped women find themselves isolated, the harmony within families broken. Entire communities are weakened and divided, leading to an atmosphere of fear where the rebels become more powerful.If a victim does not speak, the process of healing the trauma cannot proceed.

Q: Often survivors of rape are re-victimised at a community level. Can you explain how that happens?

A: These people suffer terrible treatment from rebel groups. When they return to their communities, they are discriminated against. Until 2010, many victims of rape were not even considered in their communities and discriminated against by their families and neighbours.

Men were often forced to watch their wives being raped and threatened with being killed if they tried to help. Afterwards, it is difficult for men to talk about this experience, because they were supposed to protect the women, so they feel powerless and ashamed.

It also happens that men who were not with their wives when the rapes took place then consider them collaborators with the rebels.

Q: You work with 16 listening centres (trauma centres) in different villages of South Kivu. Why is listening so important?

A: Only by actively listening to people’s problems can one understand them or know what kind of assistance to provide. That is why it is so crucial to listen. By doing so, we contribute to their healing by showing compassion and sympathy. Most of the time, trauma-related secrets that we have to hold back destroy us from within without our even knowing.

For example, many people, especially women, here suffer from stomachaches, tension and headaches because they do not know to whom they can reveal their problems and associated emotions.

Q: Should victims be speaking out as well?

A: Victims must talk about their trauma in order to be healed. In the healing process, one of our goals is to enable traumatised victims to speak out about their situation and where and why they have problems in their daily lives, so they can feel relief. If he or she does not speak, the process of healing the trauma cannot proceed.

Q: What are you concretely doing there to help and support women, children and men?

A: To find survivors of rape, we enter communities to inform people about and make them more sensitive to the physical and psychological consequences of rape. We do that to remind everybody that sexual violence is a community problem.

We also ask them to not stigmatise victims of rape and explain what help our listening centres provide, so they also can tell others about our programmes.

How we then assist them differs from person to person. Sometimes it requires legal assistance, medical care, psychological or economical support. We provide counselling by showing that he or she is not responsible for the rape. If they have never been to a hospital for medical care, we refer them to one.

We also do family mediation, which aims to restore peace within families destroyed by rape. And if the rapist is known or if a child is born from rape – often the most mistreated among victims – we help bring them to justice.

Q: What support does your work need so that you can continue to help others?

A: The first thing I need is security. Sometimes we help a survivor of rape and she reintegrates well. After a while, however, the rebels come back to the village and rape her and others again. This disappoints me so much and makes me feel discouraged.

Another thing is the lack of sufficient financial means. Sometimes we listen to survivors of rape who have gone two days without eating, or to a refugee with children, a pregnant woman or an orphan of three years. Without the financial means to help them, it is difficult to cure their trauma.

Excerpt:

Major donors to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) should withhold aid to both governments until they comply with prior agreements to pacify the DRC’s mineral-rich Kivu provinces, states a new report released Thursday by the International Crisis Group.

The report, “Eastern Congo: Why Stabilisation Failed“, argues that deploying a 4,000-strong neutral force along the border between the two countries – the solution promoted by the 12-state International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR) – is unrealistic and unlikely to be effective.

“The Kivus do not need a new strategic approach; rather the peace agreements and stabilizing plans should no longer be empty promises,” says the report, which was written in French. “This requires co-ordinated and unequivocal pressure from the donors that pay the bills or the Rwandan and Congolese regimes.”

The report comes amidst continuing violence by a number of militias active in the Kivus, most notably the March 23 (M-23) Movement led by Bosco Ntaganda, a warlord in the eastern DRC who was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in The Hague in 2006 for recruiting and deploying child soldiers earlier in the decade.

Despite his indictment, Ntaganda was inducted into the Congolese army as part of an effort to stabilise the eastern part of the country. In 2009 he was promoted to the rank of general.

Last April, however, after DRC President Joseph Kabila, under pressure from western donors, ordered his arrest, the Rwandan-born Ntanganda staged a mutiny which many analysts believe was instigated and supported by Rwanda.

Since then, the two countries have exchanged a war of words, and violence has intensified across the region. Hundreds of people have been killed in the fighting and nearly 500,000 people are believed to have fled their homes.

At the end of June, the United Nations Security Council released a report that detailed Rwandan support for the mutiny and M-23 Movement. It alleged that Kigali recruited and deployed Rwandans to join Ntaganda’s forces and transmitted key intelligence to the rebels.

Kigali has vehemently rejected allegations that it supports M-23, whose name refers to a 2009 peace agreement between the Kinshasa and the Rwanda-backed National Council for the Defence of the People.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame, a longtime favourite of the United States, who, according to various accounts, sought to delay the report’s release, has insisted that the mutiny was caused by Kinshasa’s failure to pay Ntaganda’s troops and that it had nothing to do with the rebels.

“I’ve never seen such a stupid story like that,” Kagame told TIME magazine in an interview in September. “They wanted Rwanda always to be seen as the culprit in the problems of Congo. Congo is a victim, always.…It doesn’t need a rational story, it doesn’t need facts or logic. It’s just how they want it.”

The Kivus have been in turmoil since the aftermath of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda against members of the Tutsi ethnic group. As Kagame’s Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriot Front (RPF) swept across the country, tens of thousands of Hutus, including army officers and militias that carried out the genocide, fled into eastern DRC, where their remnants have remained active.

More than five million people are believed to have died, most from starvation and disease, as a result of the fighting among some two dozen militias and the military intervention of eight of the DRC’s neighbours, including Rwanda, according to an International Rescue Committee study published in 2008.

The region is rich in minerals, including tin ore, gold, diamonds and tantalum, a rare metal used in cell phones and computer parts. Much of the fighting, including by M-23, has been for control over areas where these resources are mined.

At the urging of human rights and peace activists, the U.S. Congress last year passed legislation that requires U.S. companies to put forth their best efforts to avoid acquiring these minerals from the DRC. Although the move has apparently marginally reduced demand, Asian companies have reportedly moved to fill the vacuum.

In a report published last month, Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused M-23 of committing war crimes, including summary executions, rape and forced recruitment of children. The New York-based group also charged that Rwanda has deployed military units in DRC to support M-23 and thus may also be liable for the crimes committed by the movement.

Yet Rwanda has pointed to atrocities committed in eastern Congo by Mai-Mai militias, particularly against the Banyamulenge, an ethnic group related to the Tutsis and mainly descended from Rwandan immigrants. Indeed, Thursday marked the anniversary of a notorious massacre in South Kivu of seven Banyamulenge humanitarian workers, which renewed a low-intensity conflict in the area. The Congolese government has not arrested the perpetrators.

The United States and members of the European Union (EU) have cut or suspended aid to Rwanda, where external assistance comprises 40 percent of its budget, to compel it to drop its support for M-23, although rights groups and others are calling for even more pressure.

Last week, the Enough Project, a Washington-based anti-genocide group, released a report arguing for the United States and other donors to base approval  World Bank support to Rwanda – 135 million dollars are pending – on Rwanda’s cutting support for and dismantling M-23.

“The U.S. should delay the vote on this package until these conditions are met,” said the authors, Aaron Hall and Sasha Lezhnev.

The ICG report stressed that donors should withhold aid to both governments, noting that the Mai-Mai groups were continuing to commit atrocities in rural areas with impunity.

International donors and African mediators, it said, should seek to resolve the ongoing crisis rather than merely managing it, as they have with the deployment of a 17,000-strong U.N. force whose ability to keep the peace has been severely limited given the vastness of the territory for which it is responsible.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week convened both Kabila and Kagame for a meeting at the United Nations during which she “emphasised the need for honest and sustained dialogue between both countries in pursuit of a political resolution to the crisis”, said a senior State Department official.

“She noted that any solution must include bringing M-23 leadership to justice and both countries committing to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the other,” the official added. No breakthrough was achieved, however, at the ICGLR meeting that took place the next day.

To move toward a resolution, the ICG called for the urgent negotiation of a ceasefire between the Congolese authorities and M-23 as well as for the consideration of an arms embargo against Rwanda.

Aid to Kigali should also remain suspended pending the release of a new report by the U.N. Group of experts, the group added, while donors should withhold funding for stabilisation and institutional support for Kinshasa as long as it fails to improve political dialogue, governance, and its army’s performance in the eastern part of the country. Ntaganda, it said, should be arrested and handed over to the ICC.

After weeks of delay, the United Nations released Monday its full annex by the U.N. Security Council condemning the Rwandan government for its support of Congolese rebels.

The 48-page annex, which was leaked partially last week, claims that the Rwandan government was instrumental in the militarisation of M23, a mutinous movement that is allegedly led by, among others, Bosco Ntaganda, a military official wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes relating to the recruitment and use of child soldiers.

Officials say 19 people died and thousands more were displaced from their homes in June, a byproduct of fighting between the M23 and government militia in the eastern Kivu provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

“The war in Congo is bursting into flames, sparked by a new rebellion that Rwanda appears to not only have aided, but that it helped create,” Sasha Lezhnev, senior policy advisor at the Enough Project, a humanitarian group focused on the Congo, told IPS.

“There was a drive to cut off Rwanda’s access to the conflict minerals trade, and the new M23 rebellion was created in large part to retake control of it.”

The main group of Congolese rebels have called themselves M23 -otherwise known the March 23 Movement – after the date of a 2009 peace treaty between the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) and the military.

The CNDP, which was the first incarnation of the M23, switched from a rebel group into a political party after the treaty, and temporarily aligned with the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC). The M23 movement started in March after former CNDP members complained of the conditions in the military.

The U.S. had been accused by Congolese officials of protecting the Rwandan government by delaying the release of the U.N. report.

“There is a risk of the Security Council losing any credibility. We don’t understand the position of the U.S.,” Atoki Ileka, a senior Congolese ambassador, said at the time.

“This will do nothing to protect the people of eastern Congo and will not bring stability to the region. The path they are taking is not intelligent.”

Victoria Nuland, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said in a statement Saturday that the United States is “deeply concerned about the report’s findings that Rwanda is implicated in the provision of support to Congolese rebel groups.”

Nuland said the U.S. had “asked Rwanda to halt and prevent the provision of such support from its territory”.

The war in these Central and Eastern African nations has also been rife with conflicts of interests, according to some.

“At the same time, the U.S. is training some units of the Congolese army … (while) other Anglo-Saxon companies enjoy the lion share in all mining contracts in Congo,” Antoine Roger Lokongo, a London-based Congolese investigative journalist, told IPS. “But still the U.S. supports Rwanda against Congo.”

Nevertheless, the U.S. gave the DRC more than 350 million dollars in combined aid in 2010, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The U.S. also has strong financial ties to the DRC through a bilateral investment treaty, one of 41 investment treaties the U.S. has in total, meant to strengthen economic ties between the two countries.

Human rights groups had been pushing for more sustained pressure on the Rwandan government by major global players. “The UK and U.S. governments are the two largest bilateral donors to Rwanda,” Sophia Pickles, an activist at Global Witness, said in a statement Friday. “This gives them significant influence and in cases like this they have a responsibility to use it.

“They cannot stand by and watch a regime they bankroll orchestrating a new war in Congo. The lives of thousands of Congolese civilians, as well as the stability of the region, are on the line.”

The Rwandan government, which is vying for a seat on the U.N. Security Council, has been quick to deny the allegations in the report that they have supported the rebels.

“Of course, Rwanda’s top army leadership in no way would be involved in destroying the peace they have been working very hard to build,” said Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo.

Diplomatic relations between Rwanda and neighbouring DRC have soured following the U.N. report, which also stated that top Rwandan government officials, including General James Kabarebe, the Rwandan minister of defence, were behind the recruitment and mobilisation of Rwandan citizens who back the rebellion.

In June, Lambert Mende Omalanga, the DRC’s minister of communications, stated that 200 rebel soldiers had been
killed since March, and more than 370 had surrendered – including 25 Rwandan citizens.

According to Human Rights Watch, Rwandan military officials provided weapons, ammunition, and an estimated 200 to 300 recruits to support Ntaganda and his militia. They also published eyewitness testimony attesting to the execution of recruits who tried to escape.

“I saw six people who were killed because they tried to flee. They were shot dead, and I was ordered to bury their bodies,” an unnamed Rwandan soldier, who was forced into Ntaganda’s army, told Human Rights Watch. “All of us wanted to flee to the government troops, but many of us didn’t know how and we were scared.”