DRC: Congo's Women Stand up Against Rape

In her early days as US secretary of state in 2009, Hillary Clinton went to the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo and was moved to tears when she heard first-hand stories about what rape had done, and was continuing to do to destroy women, families, communities. In the small world of people who had been trying to highlight the issue for more than a decade, she received a lot of credit for making the trip, and hopes were high that she would be the catalyst for change. It didn't happen, as Katharine Viner's report makes so clear.

There have never been any political careers made by focusing on rape in DRC. A White House aide quoted in the article sums up that reality by saying, "Congo was not going to be part of the Michelle brand", when a bold effort was made to enlist Michelle Obama.

It has taken a very different kind of American political woman, the fearless and tireless writer Eve Ensler, to do what a powerful western woman, with access to a network of the rich and the glossy, could do for these women – give them power over their lives through a centre where they learn their rights and the skills to demand them .

The voices they have already. One of the women, Jeanne, speaking to her foreign audience, said:

"When you look at me, what do you see? Do you see me as an animal? Because you are letting animals treat me like one. You, the government, if it was your children, would you stop it? You, you white people: if this violence was happening in your country, would you end it?"

Well, we haven't ended rape in the west by any means, but Jeanne is right that the appalling scale of past and present atrocities against Congo's women would not be tolerated elsewhere.

Clinton's visit did bring some much-needed money for the incomparable Panzi hospital, where tens of thousands of women and little girls have had their lives saved after gang rapes. But, like the vast majority of visitors to this area, she listened to the stories, left her visiting card with the admirably fierce long-time advocate for the women, Christine Schuler Deschryver, and returned to her own life.

Clinton could, of course, with her position, have chosen to make a really loud and annoying noise that echoed through the state department, the White House, the UN and G20 summits so that rape in the DRC became an issue that simply could no longer be left as something shocking that gets a little lip service, a little money, and just goes on happening.

Given the enormous amount that has been written on this subject, it is a wonder it has never been on the radar for more than the occasional flurry of concern. It has not been for want of trying. For more than a decade, the great spokeswoman for this issue has been Human Rights Watch's senior researcher on Congo, Anneke van Woudenberg. HRW has documented case after case, in village after hidden forest village, dozens of meticulous reports have been written, and presentations made by Van Woudenberg to all sorts of audiences in the US and Europe. Countless academic reports have been written – I've done some myself.

Adam Hochschild, the great historian of the vicious exploitation of the Congo before independence, who also revisited the country in 2009, has written about the politics that Clinton needed to focus on beyond those momentary tears. Hochschild memorably describes the incorporation of killers into government, the corruption of the judiciary, and of the Congolese army, from top to bottom, and the incapacity of the enormously expensive UN forces to prevent the massacres and rapes perpetrated by the various armies and rebel groups led by warlords from neighbouring Uganda, Rwanda, and DRC itself. The great wealth of DRC's natural resources, especially minerals, is the source of much of this instability, just as it was the magnet that drew in the Belgian colonialists, and then the western interests that backed the rotten, predatory state of Mobutu Sese Seko.

Ensler's women are not going to change all this from their City of Joy in eastern Congo, but she has given them the chance to become their own powerful advocates, multiplying the incomparable work of Van Woudenberg and Christine Schuler Deschryver. They just may start political transformation in Congo from the only place possible – the people with nothing to lose.