Beatrice cradles her infant son as she tells how her husband and a friend were bound, thrashed and stabbed before she was dragged out of her hut and raped by two men in uniform. By the standards of the Democratic Republic of the Congo she is lucky.
The Congolese soldiers who attacked her did not indulge in the sexual mutilations that are the calling card of their enemies, the Rwandan Interahamwe Hutu militia. She survived, as did her husband, his friend and her son.
Unlike many hundreds of thousands of women who have endured similar attacks, she has not been rejected by her spouse nor has she been chased from away from her community. But she lives in a camp, a refugee in her own land, an eight-hour drive from Goma.
Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, is scheduled to visit Goma, the capital of Congo’s ravaged North Kivu province, next week on the final leg of her 11-day African tour. She will arrive amid a surge in the already epidemic levels of rape of women, and increasingly of men, by armed groups. It has coincided with a Congolese government offensive against the Interahamwe, supported by United Nations peacekeepers.
Human rights researchers say that government troops have caused a doubling or tripling in the number of rapes in the areas that they pass through. The army, which includes hastily integrated militia from the Mai-Mai and the formerly Rwanda-backed ethnic Tutsi rebels of Laurent Nkunda’s National Congress for the Defence of the People, has also been accused of pillage.
“I just want to be free of this — of the chaos in my country,” says Beatrice, who now relies on medical care, including antiretroviral drugs to head off HIV infection, from a small clinic run by the Paris-based Médecins sans Frontières in Nyanzale.
With a mandate authorising the use of force to protect civilians and restore government control in the Congo, the UN is supplying training, food, advice and fire support to government troops. The UN hopes that if the Government can break the back of the Interahamwe, who were responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and fled into the Congo, an end to chaos might be conceivable.
For the first time in living memory a handful of Congolese troops have been prosecuted recently for attacks on civilians after President Kabila announced a “zero tolerance” policy. UN officers have been impressed at least by improved rhetoric from government commanders on the ground.
With an annual budget of $1.35 billion (£800 million) and 17,000 troops, the UN mission in Congo, which is known by its French acronym Monuc, is the biggest UN operation in the world. But with a conflict area three quarters the size of France, the blue helmets remain woefully undermanned and a Security Council appeal for another 3,000 troops at the beginning of the year has gone unheeded.
The Interahamwe has exploited government and UN shortages with vicious reprisals on Congo’s civilians.
“Kipopo, 17 dead; Busuringi, 96 dead; Ninja, three decapitated and their heads paraded through the village with a warning that this is what happens to anyone who helps the government troops,” a human rights worker working undercover in Goma said.
Britain has invested heavily in the Congo with a £340 million package for the country over three years and another £91 million a year for Monuc.
A delicate rapprochement between the Congo and Rwanda hangs on the destruction of the Interahamwe. Intelligence sources say that its leadership is on the run but intact.
“It’s very far from perfect but there is a glimmer of hope,” a senior UN military officer said.
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