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)