CPTnet
28 November 2005

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO: All sides use rape as a weapon of war, Part I

by Maia Williams-Carpenter

We are standing at the port of Bukavu, while port authorities check our
passports. A small child approaches, selling plastic bags. Is this a
street child? Is his mother a rape survivor? Everywhere we travel, school
age children are asking for money, selling water, plastic bags and cassava
bread. The children of raped women often become street children because the
mother can no longer take care of them.

Amalie* was standing in front of her students when the Interahamwe militia
(responsible for the 1993-94 Rwandan genocide) broke into her classroom.
They raped her in front of her students and the other teachers. They had
already killed her husband. She told us she could not return to her
village. Often the Interahamwe are still living in the village after raping
the women and the women are afraid to return. Their families are ashamed
and fearful, often chasing the women and their children out of the house.
The rape survivors become poor and homeless.

Armed groups come into the villages and capture twenty to thirty women,
take them deep into the forest and rape them for months until the women
become pregnant. Then the armed groups send these women back into their
villages. Most of the time, the women's families reject them, and they are
left wounded, traumatized and destitute. They commit suicide, have secret
abortions, or carry their pregnancies to term. In the small percentage of
cases where the husband accepts his wife back into thehome, he usually
demands that she kills the child or give it away. If the child is allowed
to live in the home, s/he is often ostracized and maltreated. These children
also may join the growing number of street children.

'It is the women and their children that suffer most in this war,"
reiterated woman after woman during my time in the Congo.

*Names have been changed