The Panzi hospital is an oasis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Located in Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu, it is known as the place where women survivors of rape can go to get treatment. Most of Bukavu is red: The roads aren't paved, and the vegetation has gone up in smoke. Thousands of people who have fled from the countryside to the city are using it to fuel their fires for cooking, leaving the red earth exposed.
But the Panzi hospital grounds are green. There is a new swimming pool, and the children of inpatients have their own play area. The hospital sees about ten rape survivors a day, and three of them usually have been subjected to so much brutality that they need fistula surgery.
Dr. Denis Mukwege, the medical director of the Panzi hospital, makes the rounds and does consultations here. He is one of the world's most experienced in this kind of trauma and has performed thousands of surgical repairs over the past fifteen years.
I interview him at the end of the day, when the outpatients have left and the hospital is quiet. I'd expected him to be harried and hurried, but his bedside manner seems to extend to interviews: I feel his time is mine and he's completely available to talk.
Something is bothering him, though. He takes aside our mutual friend Brad Macintosh of SAFER (Social Aid For the Elimination of Rape), a Canadian NGO dedicated to raising funds for the Panzi hospital. Later on Brad tells me that Mukwege showed him a photo of a survivor who had been raped so brutally that it shocked even him, a man who had spent years operating on women who have been literally torn apart.
"When I first started working at Panzi," the fifty-four-year old Mukwege tells me, "I was a gynecologist expecting to be doing C-sections. I wanted to help poor women, work on women's health, and maternal mortality was very high, so I thought to make my competence in the operating room available. We saw women coming in with histories of rape and genital mutilation."
As a result, Dr. Mukwege's focus kept expanding. "You can't treat the physical trauma without addressing the psychological trauma," he says. "You can't stop at treating the psychological, but you have to think about the survivor's reinsertion into society, which means socioeconomic and vocational programs. You can't allow these crimes to continue with impunity, which means legal and juridical assistance to try to get justice for victims. And you have to address the political root causes, which means campaigning nationally and internationally against rape."
One of those root causes is the Congo's natural wealth: rubber, ivory, gold, copper, diamonds, cassiterite, tin, and coltan, which is used in cell phones and computers. The grab for these riches incites conflict.
The indifference of the West appalls him.
"How is it possible that people in the West can see 5 million people die and think nothing of it? Is it racism?" When I don't have an answer, he continues. "Write this down. I won't say 'Congo's riches are for the Congolese.' I don't believe in that. Congo's riches are the world's patrimony. But Congolese are a part of the world! You can't take Congo's riches without a thought for the Congolese."
Dr. Mukwege has spoken before the U.N. Security Council several times. He won the U.N. Prize in the Field of Human Rights last year. But he doesn't put much hope in the United Nations or politicians. "They say, 'Thank you, wonderful what you are doing,' but they ignore what I am saying."
He has toured the United States with activist/writer Eve Ensler, who visits Bukavu frequently and whose "V-Day" campaign and posters adorn one of Panzi hospital's walls. I first saw him in Toronto last November sharing the stage with Ensler and Stephen Lewis, the former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations and former special U.N. envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. At the time, he mentioned that rape in the Congo was something worse than war rape: It was the use of rape as a strategy. I'd waited six months to ask him about that in person.
A strategy implies actors and objectives, I say. What are these, for rape in the Congo?
"Actors? On one side, there are the local indigenous armed groups. On the other, the combatants of Rwandan origin. Objectives? The Rwandan military have demographic and natural resource problems: a lack of land and a lack of resources, and demographic pressure. So both the Rwandan groups that say they are fighting each other are actually fighting a war against the Congolese population in these areas."
What is the difference between rape as a strategy and war rape?
"Here is the difference. The armed group will come to a village, and all the men in the group will rape all of the women in the village, without distinction, publicly. I believe the objective is to maximize the risk of sexually transmitted infections -- chlamydia is the worst, but HIV is also present."
And the effects?
"In the short-term, people flee the countryside and communities, they die of infections, and the areas come under firm control of the militias. If the militias need slave labor, they face a terrorized population that will submit to them. There is long-term mortality, the secondary deaths due to the STDs, like radioactive fallout after a nuclear bomb. The third effect is the destruction of social organization. Raping and sodomizing in front of the family -- it destroys the mother-child and father-child relations. A father says, 'I failed to protect my family, I am not a dignified father.' So he flees to the forest, never to be seen again. All these links cease to exist. The community loses its identity."
Panzi is actually Mukwege's second home. He started his career as a gynecologist in the town of Lemera, which was overrun and destroyed in the Rwandan invasion of 1996. The Rwandan-backed CNDP militia, when they besieged Bukavu in 2004, came to the hospital looking for Mukwege, but he escaped.
Congolese appreciate his heroic efforts. When he returned from receiving the U.N. prize, I was told that thousands were waiting for him at the border. "It was only about two thousand," he says, "and you have to understand, it's not a prize for me. They came because they see it as their own prize."
In return, he appreciates their efforts, especially of the women. "Congolese women are very strong, smart," he says. "Their organization can change things, now that the men have failed."
Brad Macintosh of SAFER agrees that women will lead the movement, but he believes that Mukwege has failed to mention one of the key leaders: "Mukwege personifies a social movement that is taking place on the ground," he says. "He's far too humble to admit it or to take credit for it, but he is leading this social movement."
Eve Ensler goes further. "Dr. Mukwege is modeling an absolutely different way to be a man," she says. "That's why he's the symbol of the V-Men's movement and that's why he was the first man to receive our award, in front of 18,000 people. He epitomizes what a true man looks like. He lives in service to women. He joins women, heals women, honors women, cherishes women, fights with them. If just 10 percent of men were like him, this world would change overnight."
Complicating the problem in the Congo is the fact that some women are being victimized by Rwandan Tutsis, who have been integrated into the Congolese Army. The Tutsis were themselves catastrophic victims of international indifference during the genocide of 1994 committed by the Hutus. As genocide victims, the Rwandans are the darling of the aid community. Few want to acknowledge that the Rwandans could also be committing a genocide, or femicide, of their own.
Internationally, the taboo about talking about Rwanda's role needs to be broken.
To Mukwege, stopping the war can only be done from the United States.
"The Rwandan military does not produce its own arms," he says. "If the U.S. told Rwanda to stop, it would have to stop." Following the publication of a U.N. Group of Experts report in 2008 implicating Rwanda in the Congo's war, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands all cut aid to the Rwandan government. Mukwege believes that the United States following suit would be decisive in ending the war.
"People need to see this," he says, referring to the rape victims. "That is the only reason I do these interviews is to let people know. I don't want the U.S. or Canadian governments to say they don't know. We appreciate the supplies and aid, because there are shortages of everything here. The blankets, the food, the medicine, are all helpful. But what we really need is to stop the war."
The interview ended in the late afternoon. In Bukavu, the failing infrastructure means even short trips are complicated. To get back to where we were staying would have meant walking a ways to find a cab to a central location, and from there, a second cab ride in the dark. Many Congolese die in auto accidents, and our taxi had been hit by another car the night before. So we were grateful when Dr. Mukwege insisted that he would drive us back to where we were staying in his Toyota Land Cruiser, one of the few models that can handle the Congo's run-down roads. As we bumped along from the hospital, people of all ages, children and adults, came running to the car, yelling, "Mukwege!"
Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer. He visited Bukavu in July.