Women in the Congo

I just watched this documentary as part of the Hillary Clinton for the Congo Campaign. It's basically a campaign stop the state-sanctioned rape of women in the Congo and get it into U.S. foreign policy. I doesn't matter if you like Hillary or not (which I don't), it's a human rights issue that any function human can get behind. Basically, the military and the police, and anyone really in the Congo, especially if they have a gun can rape women without any type of recourse. There is a single tiny hut, containing one police officer, a typist, and two other employees to handle all cases of rape and crimes against children in the entire country.

These people are extraordinary, but four people can't do much on their own when the government and the law-makers are sanctioning the rape and abuse of women.

Guess where some of this comes from? Religious and spiritual ideology, big surprise. If there's a horror committed in the world, a religious ideology typically isn't too far away. The Roman Catholic church is big in the Congo. Because god made men to have power over women, they can do what they wish with them, according to one of the rapists. One rapist, a Hutu, believed (and he's not alone) that to win wars, and make the magical potion in which to win wars, men must rape women. Other rapist just said it was the male need to have sex that drove them to rape. None of these men were sorry. Several of them haven't even kept track of how many women they've raped. One estimated that he had raped 25.

The part of the movie that really choked me up was when the camera focused in on a four-year-old girl. She was gorgeous, the cutest little girl ever with a chubby round face and braids, wearing a bright green dress. She had been raped. Her mother too. One woman had been forced to lay on hot coals while men raped her and shoved things into her. One girl was only 10 years old. Some children had to watch helplessly as their mothers and sisters were raped. The victims range from old women to babies. Many have died due to the shame associated with going to the doctor, and the lack of resources. Some had been gang raped, sometimes over 20 men who's genitals are completely dismembered, sometimes so much so that they no longer have a bladder. Many of the women watched their husbands being killed. The ones that still have husbands largely have been sent away from them, the husbands saying they can't live with a raped woman.

There are thousands of raped women that have nothing and have to cope with both physical and psychological pain without any help at all. The campaign stipulates that if every state can get 10,000 postcards that were available from the campaign in the mail tomorrow then the legislation is automatically passed. It just really makes me sick. This atrocity has been going on for over 10 years. I'm still trying to get my head around that documentary. It's called The Greatest Silence. You need to watch it.

I wrote a poem about it because that's how I tend to deal with things that are too much to deal with. I have a really hard time believing in humanity after seeing things like this, especially men who think women are only here to be raped or to be used as sex objects. Not just these crooked cops and soldiers in the Congo, but the rapists and abusers in the U.S., male and female, people that do bad things to children, and, maybe above all, the people that are apathetic to all of it. Mi poema:

Women with faces too young
to be scarred by the lines of worry, fear
splashed in something the color of blood,
but more grotesque.

Guns ordered, rape!
Kids ordered, jump!
On pregnant bellies,
Abort what's growing in your mama's belly.

Men in olive greens,
men out in the trees,
men, but never on their knees.

Rape.
Rapping on every door,
ripping clothes, bright colored sacrilege,
gnashing, pushing
saying, I am here.
Rape, somewhere in the eyes of unwanted babies,
right between fear and hate,
in that tiny spot both visible and hidden.

I saw a four year old, tiny braids in her hair, lime-colored dress,
raped.

Ten, twenty, more;
How many is it going to take for
men in suits to pound their fists,
say, women matter.
Say, we don't want this for our daughters.