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May 12, 2005

Not just Rwanda

I renamed this from "Laurent Kabila's Legacy" to reflect the fact that I still place much of the blame on the world community for shedding some tears at "Hotel Rwanda" but doing nothing to stop or prevent the genocide that persists across the African continent. There are real actions we could be taking today to help stop this.

Anyway, it is also more than ironic that in the Congo, they slapped "Democratic Republic" on the name of the country right when they divided it up among the leading war lords.

By Stephanie Nolen

The Congo war has claimed more lives than any conflict since the end of World War II, yet receives almost no attention outside central Africa. An estimated 4 million people have died here since 1996 — the vast majority not by firepower but starvation or preventable diseases, as people hid in the jungle to escape the fighting.

It began when Rwanda’s Tutsi government sent troops over the border to pursue Hutu militias responsible for the 1994 genocide, since many Hutu had escaped to the impenetrable Congolese bush. When the then-Zairian army offered little resistance, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame formed a hasty alliance with a Congolese rebel group attempting to overthrow dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Tutsi-run Burundi and neighboring Uganda saw a lucrative opportunity, and sent troops to help the putsch....

After a 2002 peace deal, a fragile, transitional government holds power, in a uniquely Congolese power-sharing: President Joseph Kabila (thrust into the job at age 29 after his father’s 2001 assassination) shares power with four of the major warlords whose militias have wrought havoc for the past years. This is peace enough to placate international donors, who’ve poured money in to prop up this flimsy government and to repair roads and phone lines in the capital — and reassure international mining companies, who are reopening up shop all over the country.

But beyond Kinshasa’s city limits, there is little sign the war has ended. In the east, where the worst hostilities were fought, a half-dozen armed groups still control territory, holding civilians hostage. Here there is no rebuilding, no phone service, no electrical grid, no roads. Hospitals, when they still stand, have been looted of everything from beds to bandages. No government employee — teachers, judges, nurses — has been paid in 14 years.

If these statistics are even close, the AIDS crisis in Africa has now branched out to millions more in the Congo, with rapists as carriers returning to their villages and infecting their own wives, too:

Shami’s town, Kibombo, changed hands a half-dozen times during the war: the Rwandan army, then the Mai Mai, then Rwandans again. Every time new troops seized Kibombo, they set out systematically to rape. When the soldiers lost the town to a new militia, they often dragged dozens of women with them as they fled, holding them as sexual slaves and cooks in their jungle retreats until the next time they raided the town.

Today, Shami is thin and hunched; she breathes with difficulty. “Maybe I have AIDS,” she murmurs.

An estimated 30 percent of the women raped in Congo ’s war are infected with HIV; as many as 60 percent of the combatants are believed to have the virus. Shami also suffers continual pain in her shredded vagina, but has had no medical help since the rape. There is a hospital in Kibombo, with six wards: Four are empty; two each contain three iron bed frames, stripped of any mats. The director, Jean-Yves Mukamba (the only doctor for this region of 25,000 square kilometers) knows he is surrounded by women suffering raging venereal infections, HIV, prolapsed uteruses, torn vaginas.

Posted by Mike at May 12, 2005 04:39 AM

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