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http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A04E4DB133CF934A35753C1A9619C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

 Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma Of Congo War

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: October 7, 2007

Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, cannot bear
to listen to the stories his patients tell him
anymore.

Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped
show up at his hospital. Many have been so
sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered
by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that
their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond
repair.

''We don't know why these rapes are happening, but one
thing is clear,'' said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South
Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo's rape epidemic.
''They are done to destroy women.''

Eastern Congo is going through another one of its
convulsions of violence, and this time it seems that
women are being systematically attacked on a scale
never before seen here. According to the United
Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006
in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a
fraction of the total number across the country.

''The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the
world,'' said John Holmes, the United Nations under
secretary general for humanitarian affairs. ''The
sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of
impunity -- it's appalling.''

The days of chaos in Congo were supposed to be over.
Last year, this country of 66 million people held a
historic election that cost $500 million and was
intended to end Congo's various wars and rebellions
and its tradition of epically bad government.

But the elections have not unified the country or
significantly strengthened the Congolese government's
hand to deal with renegade forces, many of them from
outside the country. The justice system and the
military still barely function, and United Nations
officials say Congolese government troops are among
the worst offenders when it comes to rape. Large
swaths of the country, especially in the east, remain
authority-free zones where civilians are at the mercy
of heavily armed groups who have made warfare a
livelihood and survive by raiding villages and
abducting women for ransom.

According to victims, one of the newest groups to
emerge is called the Rastas, a mysterious gang of
dreadlocked fugitives who live deep in the forest,
wear shiny tracksuits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys
and are notorious for burning babies, kidnapping women
and literally chopping up anybody who gets in their
way.

United Nations officials said the so-called Rastas
were once part of the Hutu militias who fled Rwanda
after committing genocide there in 1994, but now it
seems they have split off on their own and specialize
in freelance cruelty.

Honorata Barinjibanwa, an 18-year-old woman with high
cheekbones and downcast eyes, said she was kidnapped
from a village that the Rastas raided in April and
kept as a sex slave until August. Most of that time
she was tied to a tree, and she still has rope marks
ringing her delicate neck. The men would untie her for
a few hours each day to gang-rape her, she said.

''I'm weak, I'm angry, and I don't know how to restart
my life,'' she said from Panzi Hospital in Bukavu,
where she was taken after her captors freed her.

She is also pregnant.

While rape has always been a weapon of war,
researchers say they fear that Congo's problem has
metastasized into a wider social phenomenon.

''It's gone beyond the conflict,'' said Alexandra
Bilak, who has studied various armed groups around
Bukavu, on the shores of Lake Kivu. She said that the
number of women abused and even killed by their
husbands seemed to be going up and that brutality
toward women had become ''almost normal.''

Malteser International, a European aid organization
that runs health clinics in eastern Congo, estimates
that it will treat 8,000 sexual violence cases this
year, compared with 6,338 last year. The organization
said that in one town, Shabunda, 70 percent of the
women reported being sexually brutalized.

At Panzi Hospital, where Dr. Mukwege performs as many
as six rape-related surgeries a day, bed after bed is
filled with women lying on their backs, staring at the
ceiling, with colostomy bags hanging next to them
because of all the internal damage.

''I still have pain and feel chills,'' said Kasindi
Wabulasa, a patient who was raped in February by five
men. The men held an AK-47 rifle to her husband's
chest and made him watch, telling him that if he
closed his eyes, they would shoot him. When they were
finished, Ms. Wabulasa said, they shot him anyway.

In almost all the reported cases, the culprits are
described as young men with guns, and in the
deceptively beautiful hills here, there is no shortage
of them: poorly paid and often mutinous government
soldiers; homegrown militias called the Mai-Mai who
slick themselves with oil before marching into battle;
members of paramilitary groups originally from Uganda
and Rwanda who have destabilized this area over the
past 10 years in a quest for gold and all the other
riches that can be extracted from Congo's exploited
soil.

The attacks go on despite the presence of the largest
United Nations peacekeeping force in the world, with
more than 17,000 troops.

Few seem to be spared. Dr. Mukwege said his oldest
patient was 75, his youngest 3.

''Some of these girls whose insides have been
destroyed are so young that they don't understand what
happened to them,'' Dr. Mukwege said. ''They ask me if
they will ever be able to have children, and it's hard
to look into their eyes.''

No one -- doctors, aid workers, Congolese and Western
researchers -- can explain exactly why this is
happening.

''That is the question,'' said André Bourque, a
Canadian consultant who works with aid groups in
eastern Congo. ''Sexual violence in Congo reaches a
level never reached anywhere else. It is even worse
than in Rwanda during the genocide.''

Impunity may be a contributing factor, Mr. Bourque
added, saying that very few of the culprits are
punished.

Many Congolese aid workers denied that the problem was
cultural and insisted that the widespread rapes were
not the product of something ingrained in the way men
treated women in Congolese society. ''If that were the
case, this would have showed up long ago,'' said
Wilhelmine Ntakebuka, who coordinates a sexual
violence program in Bukavu.

Instead, she said, the epidemic of rapes seems to have
started in the mid-1990s. That coincides with the
waves of Hutu militiamen who escaped into Congo's
forests after exterminating 800,000 Tutsis and
moderate Hutus during Rwanda's genocide 13 years ago.

Mr. Holmes said that while government troops might
have raped thousands of women, the most vicious
attacks had been carried out by Hutu militias.

''These are people who were involved with the genocide
and have been psychologically destroyed by it,'' he
said.

Mr. Bourque called this phenomenon ''reversed values''
and said it could develop in heavily traumatized areas
that had been steeped in conflict for many years, like
eastern Congo.

This place, one of the greenest, hilliest and most
scenic slices of central Africa, continues to
reverberate from the aftershocks of the genocide next
door. Take the recent fighting near Bukavu between the
Congolese Army and Laurent Nkunda, a dissident general
who commands a formidable rebel force. Mr. Nkunda is a
Congolese Tutsi who has accused the Congolese Army of
supporting Hutu militias, which the army denies. Mr.
Nkunda says his rebel force is simply protecting Tutsi
civilians from being victimized again.

But his men may be no better.

Willermine Mulihano said she was raped twice -- first
by Hutu militiamen two years ago and then by Nkunda
soldiers in July. Two soldiers held her legs apart,
while three others took turns violating her.

''When I think about what happened,'' she said, ''I
feel anxious and brokenhearted.''

She is also lonely. Her husband divorced her after the
first rape, saying she was diseased.

In some cases, the attacks are on civilians already
caught in the cross-fire between warring groups. In
one village near Bukavu where 27 women were raped and
18 civilians killed in May, the attackers left behind
a note in broken Swahili telling the villagers that
the violence would go on as long as government troops
were in the area.

The United Nations peacekeepers here seem to be
stepping up efforts to protect women.

Recently, they initiated what they call ''night
flashes,'' in which three truckloads of peacekeepers
drive into the bush and keep their headlights on all
night as a signal to both civilians and armed groups
that the peacekeepers are there. Sometimes, when
morning comes, 3,000 villagers are curled up on the
ground around them.

But the problem seems bigger than the resources
currently devoted to it.

Panzi Hospital has 350 beds, and though a new ward is
being built specifically for rape victims, the
hospital sends women back to their villages before
they have fully recovered because it needs space for
the never-ending stream of new arrivals.

Dr. Mukwege, 52, said he remembered the days when
Bukavu was known for its stunning lake views and
nearby national parks, like Kahuzi-Biega.

''There used to be a lot of gorillas in there,'' he
said. ''But now they've been replaced by much more
savage beasts.'' 

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