Never Again is Happening Right Now in the Congo

Darfur. The tsunami. Here’s one you probably haven’t heard of.

By Louis Abelman

Mount Nyiragongo looks like a child’s dream of a volcano, a perfect cone looming sinisterly above the town of Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo. I’m told it isn’t due to erupt for another decade. Still, it’s strange to stand in the hospital compound and watch it smoking over the UNICEF tents that serve as makeshift patient wards. I was in town for a month before I could stop staring at that mountain, but by then the beauty of the heights has been eclipsed by what I was seeing on the ground.

I went to Goma last fall with two friends in film school to make a promotional movie for a medical charity called DOCS, but our attention was grabbed one afternoon by a flatbed truck that arrived packed with thirty women of various ages. Gracefully arrayed in a riot of colorful waxcloth wraps with children in tow, they seemed dazed as they were guided to their wards. With the help of churches and charity, they had come to join hundreds of women being treated at the hospital for a condition we’d never heard of before, the vesico-vaginal fistula.

A vesico-vaginal fistula is a tear in the uterus that opens into the urethra. In the Congolese context, a fistula is a severely debilitating condition, which adds tremendously to the suffering of women already living in dire poverty. The incontinence, infertility, and hygiene problems caused by fistulas lead to social ostracism, depression, and potentially deadly infection.

In many parts of the developing world, fistulas are caused by complications during childbirth. However, in the eastern Congo, they are caused by violent rape. Some estimate that at least 40,000 women have been raped in the past six years. As the world already witnessed during the conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda, fierce ethnic rivalries have led to the widespread use of rape as a weapon of war, as factions seek not only victory, but also the total annihilation of their enemies.

To call the Democratic Republic of Congo a “forgotten crisis” does little justice to what’s happening there. It only serves to point fingers at those of us who have forgotten it. In human terms, it’s the most severe of the world’s human disasters. Over 4 million people have died in the last ten years from a horribly devastating cocktail of civil war, starvation and disease.

But somehow, maybe due to the complexity of the situation, its duration, and an alphabet soup of warring factions, the Congo remains on the back burner of world humanitarian efforts.

Recent movies remind us to commemorate, or somehow come to terms with, Rwanda’s April 1994 genocide, but have made no connection to the aftermath, which continues to unfurl in neighboring Congo’s wild east. In the towns and villages of eastern Congo, in the huge and densely populated provinces of the great lakes region, terror has reigned in the decade since the end of the genocide in Rwanda.

In 1994, the world did not intervene in Rwanda while Hutu power brigades known as “Interhamwe” (which means “our struggle” in Kinyarwanda) killed over 800,000 Tutsis in three months. When exiled Tutsi guerillas routed these killers and sent them, along with millions of Hutu civilians, over the border into the town of Goma, Congo, international humanitarian agencies struggled to catch up with the disaster. Goma became the world’s largest refugee camp, a wasteland where the exiled Interhamwe remade its brigades and held power over a cholera-beset population.

The army of the new Rwandan government successfully attacked the refugee camps in 1996, driving the Interhamwe deep into the Congolese wilds and freeing Rwandan Hutu civilians to return home.

Rwanda’s victory sparked a five-year civil war in Congo, in which the cold-war era dictator Mobutu Sese Seko was deposed and replaced with a corrupt revolutionary and former Che Guevara associate named Joseph Kabila. The armies of seven nations and their proxies were drawn into a protracted, dissipated war, principally fought over Congo’s unique abundance of mineral wealth. After Kabila’s assassination in 2001, a shaky five-party peace treaty was signed and a 15,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping mission, known as the MONUC, was deployed to the region.

Today, peace in the Congo is an official fact but a lived impossibility. Militias of young men who have known nothing but killing stalk the countryside. The U.N. force is wildly overstretched and beset by abuse scandals involving its peacekeepers. The effort towards democratic transition underway in the central government is forever undermined by factionalism and outside interference.

State power is more or less nonexistent, and in large swaths of the country, authority has devolved to its most basic elements—the machete and machine gun. I was told of whole provinces so cut off from the outside world that inhabitants consider salt a precious resource. In vast tracts of equatorial jungle, people on the run from their decimated villages live off of roots and hide from predators, both human and animal. Some armed bands kidnap young girls and take them into the forest as slaves for a year or more. All Congolese suffer from this unending war, but unarmed villagers suffer more, and it’s the vulnerable—women alone in their fields, or on the road to market—that suffer most.

Among the small community of aid workers in Goma, and the many committed residents who serve as caretakers and activists while often barely scraping by themselves, there was no consensus on what action outside countries should take to help. No one thinks it’s as simple as sending more troops or money, though of course that would be welcomed. The peacekeeping mission is already the U.N.’s largest, but the task at hand is too vast for it, even if it does have a mandate to use force that was lacking during the Rwandan genocide.

Unfortunately, there is already a full roster of disaster crowding the world stage and few have time to take stock of the breathtaking complexity of Congo’s horrors. But the only thing worse than suffering is suffering in silence, a notion all too common among the friends I made during my time in Goma. When I left the Congo, the only thing they asked of me was that I spread news of their situation when I got home, and not forget them.

Louis Abelman is an editorial assistant for the New York Times and a freelance writer and filmmaker.

DOCS is the only hospital in its province to perform surgery to repair fistulas.

To learn more about the Congo and the ongoing crisis there, check out Louis’s blog. For a different perspective, visit the Pole Institute, a Congolese think tank. Donate money to the Goma Student Fund, a group committed to providing a strong education to all Congolese children, regardless of their financial situation. They provide scholarships as needed, particularly targeting children orphaned by AIDS, civil war or the Rwandan genocide.