Intended Consequences project should be a reminder of work left to be done internationally
“In Rwanda, in 1994, Hutu militia committed a bloody genocide, murdering one million Tutsis. Many of the Tutsi women were spared, only to be held captive and repeatedly raped. Many became pregnant. Intended Consequences tells their stories. See the project at http://mediastorm.com/publication/intended-consequences”
This summer, I visited the church mentioned in this piece and another one, not far down the road. At one of these churches there is a lone coffin containing the body of a woman who was savagely raped nearby. It’s supposed to represent the particular brutality with which women were raped during the genocide.
For all the never agains I’ve heard in the media and during my trip to Rwanda, the knowledge that women in the Democratic Republic of Congo are brutally raped every day, exactly as Rwandan women were during the genocide, is perplexing.
Constantly encouraged to visit the DRC—“Goma’s fun, you know”—I was equally perplexed by the non-issue status rape in the DRC occupies in East Africa. And though there is arguably more awareness around the atrocities being committed in the DRC than there was in Rwanda 17 years ago, world leaders have all but ignored them. They aren’t election issues. And no news organization anywhere feels compelled to devote a week of in-depth-all-hands-on-deck coverage to them.
I didn’t write much about the four genocide memorials I visited, because they impacted me in ways I didn’t expect, and I didn’t think I had time to devote to exploring my thoughts. I cried only at the first one—the least graphic by far—because I was shocked by the faces of completely innocent children, destroyed by a kind of blind hatred I’m not sure most people can fully conceive of. But the other memorials disturbed me because every body, identity card, scrap of clothing and bloodstained wall that are preserved—as they are at Holocaust memorials in Europe—to remind us of those never agains, reminded me that we’ve let it happen again and again. Women continue to be raped, not merely as a weapon of war, but as one of the most blatant yet ignored expressions of the misogyny and racism that are standard across almost all borders.
-RC
BBC News: UN official calls DR Congo ‘rape capital of the world’
