AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Pioneering doctor Denis Mukwege has called for zero tolerance of rape in his native Democratic Republic of the Congo, where tens of thousands of women have been brutally attacked by the army and militia members.
“I think we have drawn a red line [for some war crimes] but when it comes to using rape as a weapon of war, we equivocate,” he said in November 2013.
Mukwege, who was in Stockholm to receive the Right Livelihood Award, has set up a hospital and foundation to treat rape victims.
Women are frequent targets in conflict-torn eastern DRC, and the doctor told harrowing stories of women who had been raped in public in front of their husbands and children and arrived at the clinic with catastrophic injuries. Mukwege said rape as a weapon of war had dramatic consequences for women and for the country.
Every year, his hospital’s main program for victims of sexual violence takes in more than 3,500 women and provides them with reconstructive surgery.
“The inability of DR Congo to sort out its problems, followed by the silence of the international community, is a major drama of our time,” the doctor said. “We are in the 20th year of atrocities, and I think that the more the years go by, the more we see the groups, the militias improve their tool of torture.”
Mukwege pointed to a United Nations resolution adopted in 2000 as an example of good intentions. “But there is not a solid red line yet which says: This limit cannot be passed,” he said.
U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325 calls on all member states to take specific measures to protect women and young girls, especially against rape.
Mukwege has been targeted for his outspoken stance on this issue. In October 2012, he narrowly escaped being murdered after a group of armed men broke into his home in Bukavu. He was forced into exile in Belgium and returned to his hospital in January 2013.
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