There is an unprecedented campaign to destroy women in eastern Congo.  Its cruelty is evident in the frightened eyes, stories and bullet scars of the women here in Walungu.  Its enormity is seen through the thousands of women and girls targeted each month.

We met three women at Women for Women’s center in Walungu who had been brutally attacked.  Lucienne was 20 when the FDLR (some of the same people who perpetrated genocide 13 years ago now hiding in the forests nearby), attacked her while she was asleep in her bed with her children.  They killed her brother, and enslaved her in their camp for months in unimaginable conditions.

In 2006, in South Kivu province alone, the United Nations received more than 27,000 reports of women suffering the same brutality as Lucienne.  Women for Women staff tell us that more than 40% of their 5,000 participants in South Kivu are included in these statistics.  And over the past months the numbers are rising to the worst level they have been since the peak of the war 7 years ago.

After their violation many women such as Lucienne are left by their husbands, and shunned by their villages.  Others say their husbands can no longer look them in the eyes, so ashamed and guilty they are of being powerless to protect their loved ones from the FDLR or other soldiers.

Today Lucienne is homeless; her husband left the day she returned from the hospital.  She is staying temporarily with another family, selling bananas by day.  But Lucienne goes each night deep into the fields to sleep, so afraid that the FDLR might find her that she refuses to sleep in the house.

Posted By: Michael Graham | November 30, 2007 | Comments (1)

After breakfast, Jerry, Sara, Mike and I spent the morning with Women for Women International, an organization that supports female survivors of war around the world, from Iraq to here in eastern Congo.  WWI supports more than 5,000 women in North and South Kivu, matching each woman with a sponsor abroad who provides $27 a month, and exchanges letters.

Last year I helped my sister Rachel set up a sponsorship for a woman in Congo.  At the time, and up until today, I gave little thought to the fact beyond noticing that each month it was withdrawn from my bank account.  After all, I thought, it’s less than a dollar a day- how much can this and a few letters a year really do to improve a woman’s life?

We were introduced to a group of women who had just been handed translated letters from their sisters abroad.  The moment they had them in their hands, their guarded expressions turned to smiles, and they began to sing and dance- many of these women have suffered from intense brutality, and to see them happy from such a small gesture brought tears to our eyes.

Hundreds of women walked here this week from miles away to see if they can join the program.  Most were turned away- a new member can be added only when someone who learns about their situation decides on behalf of a sister, daughter or mother to become a sponsor.

Click here to explore stories of women affected by war in Google Earth, from Women for Women International.

Click here to hear a podcast interview with Christine Karumba, DRC Country Director of Women for Women International.

Posted By: Michael Graham | November 29, 2007 | Comments (0)

Last night we crossed the border from Rwanda into Congo just before closing and arrived in Bukavu, a dusty city on the southern shore of Lake Kivu, one of the highest lakes in Africa.  It is difficult to understand how such natural beauty can exist at the heart of one of the most destructive conflicts on earth.

What is happening today in Eastern Congo is not genocide, legally defined under the UN convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide as acts committed “with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.  But the violence does appear to constitute crimes against humanity, and in large part is a direct result of the genocide perpetrated 13 years ago in Rwanda.  According to a report by the International Rescue Committee, 5.4 million Congolese have been killed from violence, preventable disease and malnutrition in the past ten years, and women today face a continuing campaign of brutal sexual violence that is tearing apart their families and entire communities.

Here in the province of South Kivu, former Rwandan government soldiers and the Interahamwe militias who perpetrated the genocide are at the origin of violence different from what is found in most wars.  Known collectively as the ‘FDLR’, they want to maintain control of land held in Eastern Congo and the significal mineral wealth it provides.  Part of its strategy is to strike fear into communities by targeting women; not just violating them, but completely destroying their bodies and families.  Other groups, such as Congo’s undisciplined national army (FARDC) and local militias (Mayi Mayi), also bear responsibility for atrocities committed against women and their families.

Read traveling companion Michael Gerson’s column from this trip in the Washington Post- Thorns in the Congo.

Visit Angelina Jolie and John Prendergast’s interactive journal on the Museum’s website to witness what they saw and heard during a 2004 trip to Eastern Congo.

Posted By: Michael Graham | November 28, 2007 | Comments (0)

As our car pulled into the parking lot of Murambi, the site of one of the largest massacres of the genocide, Gasana mentioned casually that this was his first time coming here, thirteen years after he survived the genocide.  We had hired him to take us to the Congo border in an SUV, and decided to pay our respects at this former school deep in the iridescent green hills of southern Rwanda, surrounded by terraced fields of coffee and banana trees.  Despite a warning that it was a terrible scene, Gasana insisted that he wanted to see for himself.

We walked through room after room filled with the bodies of thousands of victims who had been retrieved from the mass graves and preserved in lime, and through a former dining hall filled with the clothes of tens of thousands who were surrounded by militia for a week without food or water, and then killed.

I asked him a question I immediately regretted.  “Ca va?” Meaning, in French, ‘how are you doing’?

He shook his head slightly without looking up.  A silent no.  Gasana tells me later that he has asked himself since the genocide why he wasn’t killed, sometimes wishing he was.  For him, life next to the genocidaires is beyond difficult, full of fear and memories of what they did to his family.  For many survivors who have visited this school at Murambi, where the death of thousands is captured in lime, the reality is almost too much to bear.

Posted By: Michael Graham | November 27, 2007 | Comments (0)

For an instant I saw the night sky- a thousand points of light on a dark canvas, the Milky Way, and Orion’s belt—but it was almost noon, and other details forced me back to reality: blood stains on the walls and bullet holes in the Virgin Mary; a smashed altar and an iron door twisted nearly off its hinges.  My “stars” were thousands of tiny holes punched into the tin roof by grenade shrapnel.

In the first days after the start of the genocide, thousands of residents of the hills and marshes of Nyamata district gathered in the pews and offices of this Catholic Church.  Surely here, in this sacred place, they would be safe from the slaughter happening around them.

During that final attack, as they lay waiting for the end, did they also look up and see the night sky?  Maybe they thought they were already dead, that the night was finally coming to take them home to their families.

Posted By: Michael Graham | November 25, 2007 | Comments (0)