I am angry.
Why are you so cynical, they ask. Why don't you think this world is not worth fighting for?
"As a United Nations official with a special brief for humanitarian affairs, I have seen many people around the globe suffering under truly tragic circumstances. But Congo is different. Its long-running conflict has always been a brutal one, having claimed nearly 4 million lives between 1998 and 2004 -- the equivalent of five Rwandan genocides. And although the war formally ended years ago, fighting has continued in the eastern part of the country, where the national army is battling local and foreign militias in a struggle involving unresolved ethnic conflicts, regional power dynamics and the powerful tug of greed, with all sides vying for a slice of Congo's rich mineral resources.
Panzi Hospital is housed in rambling quarters outside the city of Bukavu in South Kivu. Of the 15,000 victims of sexual violence treated there since 1999, an estimated two-thirds or more are victims of the FDLR. One-third of the victims are children.
At the hospital, I met a 16-year-old girl, shy but still determined to tell her story. She had been abducted by the FDLR and held as a sex slave for months of unfathomable horrors before she managed to escape, pregnant and alone. I heard from other women who had been raped multiple times, often in front of other villagers or their families. Panzi staff members tell of a woman who was returning from working her fields when she was accosted by seven soldiers who gang-raped her. The last rapist forced the barrel of his gun inside her and pulled the trigger, literally blowing apart her genitals. We heard repeated stories from doctors and other staffers at the hospital of similar incidents involving bayonets or sticks as well as guns.
This sexual violence is an affront not only to the body but to the soul and dignity of every woman assaulted. It is a stain on everyone with influence or authority in Congolese society. Yet somehow it continues, amid widespread indifference and in a climate of impunity, with no functioning justice system to speak of. Even those few who are convicted and jailed in the attacks are likely to "escape." Leaders of the national and provincial governments, military commanders, the Catholic Church and other religious authorities and cultural and sports figures in Congo must do much more to change the culture that allows this to happen."
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/KHII-77W4F4?OpenDocument
And no one who has any authority does anything. They just passively accept this.
I am angry.
