Doctors Without Borders Aids Women in the Congo

The World Pays Little Attention to Crisis in War-Torn Eastern Congo

Aug 4, 2009

For more than a decade a complex civil war has been raging in the Congo. Women are hit the hardest, because rape is a way for exploited soldiers to take out their fury.

Years of intermittent war in the Eastern Provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo have left its people trapped with little help from the international community. The war has shaped the lives of everyone in the region and millions have died.

Women and Girls Are Raped by Rebel Forces and Government Soldiers

Fiona Bass, a nurse with Doctors Without Borders in Masisi — a town located in the heart of the conflict — recounts the story of a patient who was violently attacked and raped by a group of armed soldiers in her home in February 2009. A 14 year-old girl, a pregnant woman, an older widow and a woman with gunshot wounds in her thighs — for resisting her attackers — find refuge in a health center run by Doctors Without Borders. The organization treats hundreds of women in several clinics in the North and South Kivu provinces. If rape victims receive anti-retroviral drug treatment within the first 72 hours, it can usually prevent HIV/AIDS infection.

"Condition: Critical", Voices From the War in Eastern Congo

Doctors Without Borders or Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is one of the few humanitarian organizations working in the most violent areas of the region. As the conflict intensified in August 2008, MSF started the international campaign Condition: Critical. It is a news website with eyewitness accounts, photos and videos from the people living through the crisis in eastern Congo. The campaign is an attempt to tell the story of their struggle to survive attacks of unthinkable violence.

Sexual Violence As A Weapon In Congo's Civil War

Rape is used as a weapon of war in Congo. Armed groups rape and terrorize women to humiliate families and communities. Women and girls face threats from armed militias, the military and even the police who are supposed to protect them. Adam Hochschild provides a compelling description of "more than a decade of a bewilderingly complex civil war" in eastern Congo in the New York Review of Books (8/13/2009). Where does such cruelty come from? Hochschild cites four problems. One is the antagonism between ethnic groups. Second is the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the two million people who fled into the Congo in its aftermath. The third is a wealth in natural resources — gold, diamonds, coltan and copper — that gives ethnic warlords plenty of reasons to fight and finally the fact that the country has hardly any functional national government.

Congo Conflict on List of "Top Ten" Underreported Humanitarian Crises

Massive forced civilian displacement, lack of medical care and brutal violence have kept the war in eastern Congo on the list of the "top ten" underreported humanitarian stories published annually by Doctors Without Borders. Many of the displaced people have been forced to flee multiple times and have little access to food, water and basic shelter. MSF also responds to outbreaks of cholera, meningitis and malaria in the country.

The copyright of the article Doctors Without Borders Aids Women in the Congo in War & Poverty is owned by Christine Welter. Permission to republish Doctors Without Borders Aids Women in the Congo in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.