Go to Original
The Brutal Truth
By DeNeen L. Brown
The Washington Post
Tuesday 08 April 2008
A filmmaker confronts the rapists of the
Congo and finds no remorse.
Six rapists in the lush forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo: One in
a green hood, another in a red baseball cap, another in military fatigues and
a camouflage hat, another in black sunglasses. Their guns are pointed down.
Smoking cigarettes, they swagger. They hold up their fingers, counting the number
of women they have raped, violated, damned. Sexual terror as a weapon of war,
perpetrated sometimes with sticks, knives, tree limbs.
The men seem unafraid to confess. They are bragging to an American filmmaker
who holds a camera, recording their words.
"Ask him to tell me what he did," says Lisa F. Jackson, whose chilling
documentary, "The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo," debuts tonight
on HBO. In a 10-year-old conflict that has left some 5 million people dead,
the tens of thousands of women and girls who have been systematically raped
and mutilated by an array of combatants are the silent victims among the living,
Jackson tells us. What makes her documentary more stunning: She goes into the
forest and confronts the rapists.
"I slept with some women," says the rapist, a gray sweater wrapping
his head, the sleeves tied around his neck.
"Did they want you to sleep with them?" Jackson inquires, her voice
incisive, a bit on edge. A translator repeats her words in Swahili. Is it about
control? Sex? Why violate a woman, leave her to bleed in her village, while
her husband watches, tied to a tree? Why would 20 men line up and take turns,
one after the other, raping a girl until she passes out and separates herself
from a pain too evil to imagine?
Why insert a machete into a woman, leaving her organs so torn and dysfunctional
that she flees her village and hides her shame and her stench in the bush, another
victim of war?
"After we've been raped, our men don't want us anymore. We are considered
half-human beings," a lonely woman confides to Jackson and her camera.
In another scene, the gray-sweatered rapist doesn't flinch at Jackson's question:
"If she says no, I must take her by force. If she is strong, I'll call
some of my friends to help me. All this is happening because of the war. We
would live a normal life and treat women naturally if there was no war."
The war started in 1998 when Congolese rebels and Rwandan troops tried to oust
the country's president, Laurent Kabila. But the fighting metastasized into
a conflict over land, ethnicity and natural resources and lasted long after
Kabila's 2001 assassination and well beyond a 2003 peace accord. Eastern Congo,
the flashpoint of the conflict, degenerated into a state of near constant violence,
with regular troops, rebels and regional militias routinely looting villages
and routinely raping women and girls.
Rain pours outside. Jackson's camera takes us inside the shadow of an abandoned
building, pointing at another rapist. His gun is slung across his back. He wears
a green beret and talks of the "magic" that makes him rape.
"Well, we were just abiding by the conditions of our magic potion. We
had to rape women in order to make it work, and beat the enemy."
Another rapist, wearing a black skullcap, is sitting in a corner. "Well,
those women were not taken by force. The thing is they were in a combat zone
where most of the fighters relied on magic power. This magic potion worked in
such a way that you've got to rape women in order to overcome the enemies who've
invaded our country, the Congo. That is why all those things have happened."
Here is where the film shows the twisted layers of damage from war, twisted
until the soldiers believe they must rape to win. Twisted until the viewer becomes
engulfed in the twisted message of magic and enemy control and devastation.
And you shout at the screen. Because the film shows you the pain of women raped
in front of their husbands and children. Rammed with sticks until the uterus
ruptures. And they bleed. And urine seeps forever. And they are cast away. And
children are born of the rapes. And their mothers must carry them because t
How many such children will be born of rape? One cannot say. But the number
of rapes, as told by the film's collection of rapists, is staggering.
"Well, those that I remember, I could number them to 18." It's green
beret again, touting his rape tally.
Camouflage hat says he has raped seven women. Green hood says five. Red T-shirt
admits to two. Black sunglasses: about 20.
Black skullcap says, like an accountant: "It's hard to keep record of
the number of women that I've raped. The thing to keep in mind is the fact that
we have stayed too long in the bush, and that induced us to rape. You know how
things are in combat zones. We raped as we advance from village to village."
The rapists melt back into the bush. But their chilling words now are caught
forever in this film that takes us deep into the horrors of a silent war waged
by Congolese government forces, by rebels, and sometimes even by United Nations
peacekeepers.
"He who rapes a woman rapes an entire nation," a policewoman says
in the film.
Says Jackson, "They are forgotten women in a forgotten war."
She is both witness and survivor. The viewer learns that Jackson herself was
gang-raped - assaulted here in the District in 1976 as she was leaving her
office late one night. "The three men who attacked me that night in Georgetown
were never found," she says in the film.
She shared her story with the women in Congo. "They all asked about the
war that was happening in my country. I explained to them that even in peacetime,
women are not safe. . . . The idea to them that women, and white women, could
be raped in peacetime," she said in an interview, "they could not
imagine such things could happen."
It was not her aim to put herself, her story into the film. But once she told
her story, women opened up. "It became clear the connection I had with
the women resulted in incredibly honest interviews," Jackson said. "It
also made the film less voyeuristic. It helped the audience understand."
To gather the women's stories, Jackson, 57, visited hospitals, sat in mud-floored
huts and churches, putting names and faces and grief on camera until the viewer
is moved to feel, turn away, do something. People are always asking Jackson,
"But what can I do?"
"People have to find their own thing to do," she says. "There
is so much you can do. I made a film."
Jackson, who calls herself a "Foreign Service brat," went to Holton-Arms,
a private girls' school in Bethesda. She attended Sarah Lawrence College, then
studied film at MIT with the documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock.
After college, she returned to the District to work at WETA television. For
about two years, she worked as a film editor with legendary documentary filmmaker
Charles Guggenheim. She eventually started her own production company and, over
the next 30 years, made documentaries in Siberia and Guatemala. She won three
Emmy Awards.
For her next film, she wanted to document the fate of women and girls in conflicts
around the world. In 2006, she went to South Kivu, a province in the eastern
Congo.
"I ended up going to the worst place first," Jackson said in the
interview. "I had good friends working for the U.N. peacekeepers there.
I cashed in frequent flier miles and went where the conflict was raging. After
two days, I realized this was not a segment in a larger film. This was the story
nobody was telling."
She "found many dozens of raped women, women of all ages, too many women,
who at times would line up for hours, waiting until after the light disappeared
and my camera could no longer record an image, waiting to talk to me, waiting
to tell their stories to someone who would listen to them without judgment,
hoping that I would relay their stories to a world that seemed indifferent to
their horrific plight."
One woman told of being kidnapped and held with other women in the forest as
sex s
To find the rapists, she asked her guide to find men willing to be interviewed.
"In work with the U.N., he knew a lot of Congolese army officers. He went
to a commanding officer and said there is an American journalist who wants to
interview your men about raping women. He said okay and put the word out among
the soldiers."
She ended up deep in the forest, led by a dozen men.
"For a moment, going into the bush, I was completely panic-stricken,"
Jackson said in the interview. "Then I realized they wanted their moment
on videotape. If anything happened to me and my camera, they wouldn't have that.
My camera was as good as a gun. They wanted to be memorialized, bragging about
what they did to women."
"This type of sexual terrorism is done in a methodical manner by armed
groups."
That is Denis Mukwege, director of the Panzi General Referral Hospital in the
Congolese town of Bukavu, testifying last week before the Senate subcommittee
on human rights and the law. "The rapists are not seeking to satisfy some
kind of sexual desire but to destroy the woman, destroy her family and destroy
her community."
Jackson, who appeared with him as well as several other human rights activists,
asked the senators: "Why is it that rape in conflict is so infrequently
prosecuted in the world's courts? Where is the outrage?"
Rape has been used systemically in several war-torn countries to humiliate,
demoralize and destroy, Physicians for Human Rights said in a report it released
at the hearing.
Millions of women and girls have been tortured, mutilated, impregnated as a
form of ethnic cleansing. It happened during the Rwandan genocide, the civil
wars in Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic, Chad, the former Yugoslavia
and Liberia, as well as during the ongoing conflict in Darfur.
"Mass rape in war is frequently not the random act of individual soldiers
but a determined strategy to destroy populations," said Sen. Dick Durbin
(D-Ill.). "The perpetrators are not held accountable and turn to mass rape
because it is cheaper than using bullets."
Jackson explained that armies and factions in Congo were killing civilians
in order to loot the country of its riches: most recently, tin, cobalt and coltan,
used in electronics.
"Perhaps another hearing might more thoroughly explore the causes and
ruinous consequences of this illegal plundering," she said. But everyone
in this room should consider the fact that there is the blood of Congolese women
on their laptop computers and on their cellphones."
After 90 minutes, the gavel sounded. The hearing adjourned. Senators filed
out. Reporters tapped out stories. People pulled out cellphones. The paneled
room emptied into the marbled halls of power.
But the question remained: What would be done to help the women?
In the film, a 70-year-old rape survivor says: "Women are suffering. We
have forgotten what happiness is."
---------
The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo airs at 10 tonight on HBO.
-------
Jump to today's Truthout Issues:
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on TO may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.
Print This Story
E-mail This Story