Arriving in Bunia, the capital of Ituri District, is like entering a fortified town. The town is an island in the middle of the forest, secured since Operation Artemis in the summer of 2003 by thousands of UN Blue Helmets¹. Their deployment is impressive: 70% of the vehicles in the town’s streets belong to the United Nations, while soldiers, with their fingers on their triggers, man roadblocks and check-points at every strategic intersection, backed up by tanks or automatic machine guns. Shots are rarely heard in town, but the characteristic rumble of tanks patrolling at night remind one that Bunia is isolated at the heart of a region that for the most part remains in thrall to uncontrolled militias.

The arrival of a brigade of the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) in Ituri gradually enabled the UN troops to withdraw from Bunia in the beginning of the year. Military operations conducted jointly by the two forces have improved security along some of the main roads and in some villages, without as yet restoring peace to the region. The deployment of a second FARDC brigade proved to be a double-edged sword, for the poorly equipped, poorly trained troops often failed to distinguish between military action and looting or racketing the locals and quickly had to be pulled out of the region.

Operations to secure the region, which accompanied the determination to disarm the militias, have practically ground to a halt since June 2005, leaving the area in a deadlock marked by sporadic skirmishes.

Constant undercurrents of violence
This apparent calm, which resembles the calm that prevailed throughout 2004, barely masks a recurrent lack of security, with the civilian populations at the mercy of armed men.²

In heading for downtown Bunia from the airport the visitor passes in front of Bon Marché. The complex, which originally housed a department store, has been turned into a huge 300-bed hospital by Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). The hospital, which consists of tents covered by thatched roofs, quickly became the only functional medical facility in the entire region as the others were destroyed and their personnel fled, while the remaining structures charge exorbitant prices. MSF’s Bon Marché Hospital was set up in June 2003 to cope with the immediate emergency situation. Today, two years later, it is still constantly full, despite criteria allowing the admission of only the most serious cases, and remains more necessary than ever.

It is effectively the only place that offers free care and remains open to everyone, without discrimination along ethnic or political lines. The women’s health wing reveals the violence that has persisted throughout the region. Since MSF began working in the area two years ago, some 3,500 women have come for treatment after being raped one or more times. In July 2005, which was a representative month in the last half-year, an average of eight women a day showed up for such care. One hardly dares imagine how many cannot make it to the hospital because of the distance, shame, or unsafe conditions. These women, who range in age from 8 months to 80 years, have experienced the horror of rape first-hand. Eighty percent of the cases were rapes conducted at gun- or knifepoint by multiple assaillants, and 11% were accompanied by other forms of violence, such as torture, slavery, or the murder of friends and family.

All the armed groups engage in rape.³ For them, it is a commonplace act, committed in war, a form of currency when women who are stopped at a roadblock are led into the forest to pay for their right of passage. Women are also considered the booty of war and are often kidnapped to become sex slaves or servants.

Intimate, lasting destruction
While many of these militias claim to defend a specific ethnic group, at least at the start, there have been cases of villagers’ rebelling and going so far as to lynch the militiamen who were supposed to protect them because they were raping their women and daughters. However, such reactions of self-defence are rare, given the hold that armed men have had since the start of the war in Ituri. Often, on the contrary, a woman who has been raped is rejected by her husband, family, and community. In their eyes, she is soiled, even suspected of complicity, and thrown out as a discredit to friends and family. Rather than confront the reality of the rapes, families are reduced to denying the horror to which these women have been subjected. The militiamen have achieved their goal: Women, who are twice victims in a society in which rape is taboo, and through them their communities, are kept in a state of terror and domination. In attacking its women, the militiamen will effectively destroy the foundations of Congolese society, the family. The women, who are the families’ chief providers, no longer dare go out to work their fields, while the men are humiliated at being unable to play their roles as protectors of the family.
In a society in which AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases are wreaking havoc, rape victims live with this sword of Damocles hanging permanently over them: They have survived, but run the risk of dying from disease. And then, they may carry in their wombs the fruit of these rapes, constant reminders of the shame that they have borne. The trauma will be deep, lasting, and collective. No need for battlefields or combat – the insidious lack of security creates just as much fear and terror!

The women reach Bon Marché Hospital on their own or are sent by other humanitarian organisations. They often walk for hours to reach the town, for the general lack of security also threatens the humanitarian organisations and prevents MSF and other associations from going out to them. The humanitarian organisations must choose: either go out into the bush under military escort provided by MUNOC or the DRC’s Armed Forces and be considered de facto accomplices of the militias’ enemies, or else abide by the drastic security rules that cannot fail to curtail their movements. The murders of two ICRC members in this region in 2001 and the kidnapping and nine-day sequestration of two MSF workers last June are reminders that humanitarian immunity does not exist in Ituri. Providing the civilian population with care or food is not necessarily welcomed by the parties to the conflict. Aid, like everything else, is a source of goods to be seized.

Insufficient international response
While the humanitarian response is well short of what is needed, the brief that the international community has given itself to stop the war and protect the civilian population is also insufficient. In creating MUNOC – the United Nations Organisation observation mission in the DRC – and then giving it a strong mandate under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter (which allows the use of force to impose peace), the international community has given itself the illusion of mobilising the necessary means to stop the war. The most expensive UN mission of all times launched a demobilisation process that made it possible to disarm up to 15,000 militiamen in Ituri! It is estimated that only a few hundred diehards remain. Unfortunately, we are forced to acknowledge that these residual forces of violence continue to conduct a reign of terror on a daily basis.
Moreover, the Congolese do not seem to have great faith in their national army’s ability to secure the territory. It must be said that the massive desertions from the army’s ranks that occurred in late August recall the limits of this new national army, which is formed of ex-militiamen of all persuasions. These developments, which took place as former rebel generals sent out their calls for war from abroad, are not grounds for much optimism.

Similarly, the pathetic saga of the troops who were sent from Goma to Bunia in the last week of August is not reassuring. The battalion was 6,000 men strong, but only 3,500 set off for Ituri; the others deserted. Cases of cholera broke out rapidly in this body of undernourished soldiers who were transported under horrible conditions of hygiene. The officers nevertheless forced the soldiers to continue advancing, spreading the cholera vibrio along the way. A dozen soldiers died and more than 230 others were treated by MSF, which was the only medical service provider actually present in the field, given the virtual absence of military and government medical personnel.

One can understand the despair of the women, who, raped, beaten, and terrorised, see no end to their trials. Meanwhile, not a single trial for rape or attempted rape has been conducted in Bunia over the past two years. The perpetrators of this abject practice, which undermines society as a whole, enjoy total impunity.

This article was written in September 2005

The Congo wars
After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and flight of hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees, accompanied by the former armed forces of Rwanda and Rwandan militias, to eastern Zaire, the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of the Congo, led by Laurent Désiré Kabila, routed the Zairian army and its Hutu allies. The Alliance, backed by the new regime in Kigali, took power in Kinshasa in May 1992.

Relations between Laurent Désiré Kabila and Paul Kagame quickly deteriorated. A new war broke out in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1998. Regional rebellions, backed by Rwanda and its ally at the time, Uganda, took on the central government, which was backed by other African countries (Zimbabwe, Angola, Sudan, and so on).

Despite the signing of peace accords, the United Nations’ intervention, and the opening of a democratic transition phase throughout the republic, Ituri continues to be controlled by warlords who use ethnic identities for their own ends and plunder the region’s natural resources. Since 1997 the conflicts raging in the eastern DRC are thought to have resulted in 3 to 5 million victims, most of them civilians. Ei

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¹ After a three-month operation French soldiers, operating under the European flag, took control of the town, which had been the theatre of deadly fighting between rival militias, despite the presence of UN troops, which were totally overwhelmed.
² MSF has just published a report on the situation in Ituri that may be consulted on the organisation’s site: www.msf.ch
³ Accounts of rapes committed by members of the Armed Forces of the DRC are not rare. Some sexual assaults by MUNOC soldiers created quite a stir, but they should not be the trees that prevent one from seeing the forest of thousands of rapes committed by the militias.