Those words were spoken by a fictional character, C. J. of West Wing, to National Security Advisor Nancy McNally. The complete line is "They're killing women. They hate women. The only reason they keep women alive is to make more men." The Quirini of that episode were bad. The Hutu militias of the Congo are worse.
They are raping the women, and the little girls. Multiple times. With sex organs and with any object that's handy.
Nicholas Kristof has written about this. I recently wrote this diary about 1 of his columns. Yesterday, in The World Capital of Killing, he argues the death total may have exceeded the 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. He still writes about rape, and about Dr. Denis Mukwege, who has treated many of the raped, whose insides have been destroyed.
So does Eve Ensler, in a powerful piece in Glamour, Women Left for Dead—and the Man Who’s Saving Them. I ask that you please keep reading.
At the end of December of 2008 I wrote a diary whose entire title was one word. Rape began like this:
It's not rape if she is my wife.
It's not rape if she is my daughter.
It's not rape if she was drunk.
It's not rape if my culture mandates intercourse.
That was a diary inspired by an op ed by the director of Women's Rights for Human Rights Watch, Marianne Mollmann. Those "excuses" do not include one of most widely used justifications: Rape is okay if she is the enemy however that last word might be defined. Historically we look back to the people who would become the Romans, one of whose first national acts according to legened was the rape of the Sabine women, the deliberate abducting of local women in order to obtain wives. In that context, the word "rape" did not carry the meaning it does for us.
In more recent times we can look at the deliberate use of large scale rape by the Pakistani Army in its attempted suppression of the move towards independence of its Eastern portion, which was splitting away into Bangladesh. This mass rape was part of a larger episode that was genocidal, with the death total reaching the millions, and rapes not only by Pakistanis against the Bengali independence movement, but retaliation by Bengali nationalists against minorities like the Biharis. Hundreds of thousands were raped.
I do not wish to make this a recitation of history. I mention these events - and could mention others - because there is a long history of groups of armed men perpetuating rape on a large scale, sometimes for military and political reasons, sometimes because the troops are undisciplined, and sometimes just because they can, because men are stronger than women even without their weapons. They may keep some as sex slaves - that happened in Bangladesh. Or, as is happening in the Congo, they attempt to destroy the women they have raped by violating them with objects, mutilating them internally as well as by amputating limbs, such as I describe the last time I addressed this subject.
A longtime friend to whom I sent the link to that recent diary sent me several links to Eve Ensler, including the piece mentioned above the fold. In my last addressing of this subject, I made the point, as did Kristof, that his column was ultimately a story of hope. So is Ensler's, which is subtitled In the Congo, where tens of thousands of women are brutally raped every year, Dr. Denis Mukwege repairs their broken bodies and souls. Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, visits him and finds hope amid the horror.
Let me offer her opening two paragraphs from this August, 2007 article:
I have just returned from hell. I am trying for the life of me to figure out how to communicate what I have seen and heard in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. How do I convey these stories of atrocities without your shutting down, quickly turning the page or feeling too disturbed?
How do I tell you of girls as young as nine raped by gangs of soldiers, of women whose insides were blown apart by rifle blasts and whose bodies now leak uncontrollable streams of urine and feces?
Perhaps at this point you might be tempted to stop reading. Like the examples cited by Kristof in his two recent columns, the stories told about what happens to this women shock us. It seems hard to imagine such cruelty, yet it should not be: anyone who knows history knows that in armed conflict atrocities happen, far too frequently. Sometimes they are policy, as was the case with the Pakistani Army, and other times it is blood lust, which in the case of rape exemplifies lust as we normally think of it.
It may not seem to matter that those killed or savaged experienced that through bombs and bullets or face to face with bayonets and bottles. War is war, after all, and there will be those that justify anything that destroys the "enemy" and his will to resist - is not that the justification for incendiary bombing of cities in Germany and Japan, for the reduction of Fallujah after the four Blackwater contractors were lynched?
And yet, the deliberate use of rape is something even more horrible. It is the destruction of a culture, of a people. It is a form of killing, even if the women survive.
They're klling women. They hate women.
Eve Ensler, perhaps best known as the author of The Vagina Monologues, has long been dedicated to the issue of women who are raped.
Before I went to the Congo, I’d spent the past 10 years working on V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls. I’d traveled to the rape mines of the world, places like Bosnia, Afghanistan and Haiti, where rape has been used as a tool of war. But nothing I ever experienced felt as ghastly, terrifying and complete as the sexual torture and attempted destruction of the female species here. It is not too strong to call this a femicide, to say that the future of the Congo’s women is in serious jeopardy.
Remember, those words were published in August of 2007. The rape and killing has continued, almost unabated, in the intervening two and half years.
So far I have only quoted from the first of the 9 online pages of the article. Let me offer another quote, pushing fair use:
This journey was a departure for me. It began with a man, Dr. Denis Mukwege, and a conversation we had in New York City in December 2006, when he came to speak about his work helping women at Panzi Hospital in Bukavu. It began with my rusty French and his limited English. It began with the quiet anguish in his bloodshot eyes, eyes that seemed to me to be bleeding from the horrors he’d witnessed.
Something happened in this conversation that compelled me to go halfway around the world to visit the doctor, this holy man who was sewing up women as fast as the mad militiamen could rip them apart.
And let me follow with the first paragraph from the next page:
I learned from my trip that there are men who take their sorrow and helplessness and destroy women’s bodies—and there are others with the same feelings who devote their lives to healing and serving. I do not know all the reasons men end up in one or the other of these groups, but I do know that one good man can create many more. One good man can inspire other men to ache for women, to fight for them and protect them. One good man can win the trust of a community of raped women—and in doing so, keep their faith in humanity alive.
Ensler holds out hope. Consider only her final brief paragraph, which appears after she describes Doctor Mugwege persuading the women to dance, to have a dance contest, which she describes and then writes:
If 250 women who have been raped, torn, starved and tortured can find the strength to dance us up a mountain, surely the rest of us can find the resources and will to guarantee their future.
I am not going to quote further from this article. I have already pushed the limits of fair use, because I want you to read it, to understand its importance.
You can also listen to Ensler - this link will take you to a page which tells you about her more recent work and provides at the top a link for an appearance she made on a Boston radio show. When you have time, listen to the 40+ minutes as Ensler makes reals both the horrors and the hope.
You can also read about V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls Ensler established and funds through benefit performances of The Vagina Monologues and other works. You might read its mission statement whose 3rd (of 8) points reads
V-Day is a demand: Rape, incest, battery, genital mutilation and sexual slavery must end now.
Both Kristof and Ensler call for the arrest of "Gen. Jean Bosco Ntaganda, wanted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges" as Kristof writes in today's column. Kristof focuses today again on one women, this time Jeanne Mukuninwa, now 19, who was only 14 when she was brutalized, upon whom Dr Mukwege has operated 9 times.
This is happening seemingly far away. Yet we can play a role. The US can take the leadership in cutting off the supply of weapons for the warlords whose troops perpetuate these horrors. Horrors is too mild a word, because you will again in Jeanne's story read of brutalities beyond rape. These need to be addressed.
Kristof concludes bluntly:
Unless we see some leadership here, the fighting in Congo — fueled by profits from mineral exports — will continue indefinitely. So if we don’t act now, when will we? When the toll reaches 10 million deaths? When Jeanne is kidnapped and raped for a third time?
All war is horrible. To label some wars "good" is misleading - they may be necessary, but they are still horrible, perhaps less horrible than others, but cities are destroyed, people are killed and damaged physically, psychological and spiritually. We should be glad when any war comes to an end, hopefully also ending the brutality that accompanies it.
There should always be a time to try to prevent war and its horrors.
There must be a time to stop the violence against women, whether it comes under the guise of war or in otherwise "ordinary" life. Because the horrors of the Congo would not exist except that violence against women is somehow an acceptable way of acting. War may unleash a greater and more horrible version of that violence, but it does not by itself create it.
Some women may survive. Dr. Mukwege saves their lives, rebuilds their innards, inspires them to go on, even if in many cases their ability to bear children or to have a meaningful sex life has been destroyed.
That is important. His work should be supported.
His work should also be made unnecessary. This kind of violence against women is violence against humanity. It must stop.
If we have any doubt, all we need to remember is three words.
They're killing women.
Peace?