International, Military, Politics, Society

Grace Under Pressure: Colette of the Congo

By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger

Author’s Note: Grace Under Pressure is an on-going series of posts honoring everyday people who courageously and honorably make positive differences in their own lives and the lives of others. It is my own personal affirmation that unexpected heroes reside among us and serve as  quiet but unshakable proof that virtue really is its own reward  — and ours too.

Congo-rape-victim-shields-007Imagine a day where you are confronted by ten women who have been beaten and raped and are desperately seeking your help. Imagine those women have done nothing more than venture out to feed their families knowing full well that armed gangs are hunting them for sport. Then imagine you are confronted by ten more women the next day and then the next and so on in a horrific circulating daily struggle to survive. That is the world of Colette. Colette cannot give her last name for fear of reprisal from the same thugs who torment her fellow refugees at a camp just north of one of the Congo’s provincial capitals at Goma. Fifty thousand displaced men, women, and children are crowded in the camp which lies adjacent to the Virunga National Park.  They are just a fraction of the estimated 250,000 people displaced in East Congo by the civil war despite the presence of the largest U.N. peacekeeping force in the world.

Virunga was Africa’s first national park and established to protect one of the rarest species of animals on the planet — the mountain gorillas of the Virunga Range. The 3000 square mile preserve is a spectacular melange of thousands of other species too, from the velvet-skinned, living fossil known as the Okapi to indigenous elephant, chimpanzee, and giraffe populations. The Park is also home to a particularly murderous species known as the FDLR or the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda. This remnant of the Hutu Power rebel front are engaged in a ruthless civil war against Congo’s ruling party. Many of the FDLR leadership have been linked to the genocidal putsch against the Rwandan Tutsi’s in 1994 as well as international terrorist organizations. Estimates of the Rwandan genocide vary, but conservative figures put the number of Tutsis and their Hutu sympathizers slaughtered between April and June of 1994 at 500,000 to 800,000.
In the Rwandan genocide, rape and sexual mutilation of women and children was an orchestrated tactic of control by Hutu Power to intimidate the civilian population. Thus the rebels of FDLR cannot return to Rwanda without being held to account for their actions in courts, nor could they easily be accepted by a third country. According to the U.S. National Counter-terrorism Center, the FDLR is believed to be responsible for about a dozen terrorist attacks committed in 2009. These acts of terrorism have killed hundreds of civilians in Eastern Congo. Pariahs in most every sense, the FDLR patrol Virunga hunting  wild game for food and humans for sport. They are not the only predators in Virunga; there are many more gangs, factions, and displaced men all hunting women.

The women of the Goma camp receive some humanitarian aid to feed their families but is rarely enough to meet the daily dietary requirements. The only other source of food and fuel lies in Virunga where even Congolese policeman are afraid to venture in the daytime. Thus the women are forced into the Faustian choice between starvation and rape. The women must enter the park under cover of darkness to gather what firewood they can carry to cook their food and to sell in Goma’s  marketplace. They are easy targets for gangs of armed men who rape on average at least ten women a day. Nationwide, the estimates are that 48 women are raped every hour in the Congo. One of the victims was Colette.

Colette occupies a tiny, dark corner of the Goma camp where she runs a counseling center for the rape victims. If emergency medical services are required, she accompanies the victim to the camp medical tent. Colette also intervenes with victims’ spouses to help them understand and accept what has happened. In this patriarchal society, this is no simple task. But mostly, Colette just listens to the stories of these victims. She provides a comforting ear and empathetic touch to counter the uncivilized brutality suffered by these women and young girls.  Colette hopes a long-term solution can be reached to help permanently relocate the refugees even  as the Congolese civil war continues to rage despite UN intervention. For now, all she can do it listen and hope. In a place as dire as Congo, that is still remarkable.

Source:  UN Dispatch

~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger

42 thoughts on “Grace Under Pressure: Colette of the Congo”

  1. So AFRICOM backed the wrong side. Who could do such a harebrained scheme? I mean if Rumsfeld did it with Sadam, that is no excuse.
    What were our real motives for backing them? Ahah,we wanted them to develop into a cause for war against terrorism. Did they get their training in Fort Bragg, NC?

    Does the secret Pentagon cabal decide? Or is there an input as to where oil, rare earth minerial, or commercial profits made or be had?
    Let us not forget the rule of commercialism established. A worthy goal in our ruters eyes.

    JSOC is just a front (as well as being an operative cente)r. The demon lies elswhere.

  2. Dredd,
    How is the halo sitting. (Snark?)

    “Dredd1, February 16, 2013 at 7:53 am
    Daring, mysterious topic Mark.
    “the largest U.N. peacekeeping force in the world”
    Peace does not come through force, it comes from peace within shared outwardls as love toward others.
    For the most part, ours is a love-starved planet.
    Even our own nation is adrift from the harbor of peace.
    ===========================================

    Difficult loving those who are raping you, killing you, etc.
    Ever tried it+

    But thanks for the Africom quote.

  4. Sorry, pushed wrong button.

    Such homilies were OK 300 years ago.
    Now we have a big foot in every country wearing a combat or a alligator-shoed shoe, or both are there. Let’s stop playing lady Bountiful and get our force for good in there. That is why we have police, as often mentioned.
    UN peacekeeping has failed so many peoples in so many countries. Not Mark’s fault of course. But proposes a series which will encourage us and distract us from true needs for action here and everywhere. I know, don’t read it. That is the line I am pushing.

    Or will it become a new Afganistan says Obama fearfully.

    Put a bounty on their heads. Let the Congolese do it.

    Train gorillas to use M-14s with sniper scope. and to post guards out of their numbers. Not likely to happen.

  5. When there is a chorus of approvals, who pops up.
    Actually, I was irritated by what was posted, not the comments that followed it.

    First of all: solutions, some real and others facetious (are they?)

    Move the camp to where it wlll be safe.
    Provide them sufficient food so foraging is not necessary.
    Put up an Obama style border around the park. 50 by 60 miles ain’t much.
    Call them Al Quaeda Congo, and drone them from a nearby base. They may not have huts or groups, but believe they do. Surely we have a suitable base. If not, make one.(Mali?)
    Offer an amnesty program for Hutus.
    I rest.

    Why the sourness?

    “It is my own personal affirmation that unexpected heroes reside among us and serve as quiet but unshakable proof that virtue really is its own reward – and ours too.”

  6. Thanks, Mark. This series is a great public service. When we compare people like these unsung heroes with the pomp and pageantry of large organized religious groups and their leaders, we know where the real teachings of Jesus are.

  7. Examples of human behavior like this sometimes make me wonder about the futility of dealing with the inherent duality of human nature. “You start a question, and it’s like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others…” Robert Louis Stevenson said that. What evil lurks in the heart’s of men.

  8. Thank you, Mark, for giving us the opportunity to bear witness to the courage of those who exhibit grace under pressure. I treasure anyone’s willingness to “look unflinchingly.”

  10. Mark, is this also one of the areas where the 9 year old males are trained and exploited by these rebels.
    Here’s your gun Johnny Congo, see that woman over there go rape her and if she doesn’t let you kill her.!!
    This is one of those stories where imagination invites more horror than human beings are capable of grasping. Myself included.

    Exposing the politics, greed, and those that benefit from it is a start. Thank you.

  11. Mark indicated roaming armed gangs, RWL indicated American companies raping the Congo.

    Here is what makes it possible:

    General Carter Ham, the AFRICOM commander for the Pentagon, admitted last week that the US had helped trained the Mali rebels, including Captain Amadou Sanogo, who led the military coup which overthrew Mali’s constitutionally-elected government.

    In describing the statement Ham made at the Ralph Bunche center, Veterans Today editor Gordon Duff is highly critical of Ham’s support for widening US military involvement in the region, including the recent establishment of drone bases in Niger.

    Duff is extremely concerned that the US lacks the intelligence resources in Africa to prevent the horrendous “collateral damage” nightmares drones have caused in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.

    He goes on to describe Mali as a “domino” in a misguided and poorly thought out destabilization effort aimed at creating a generation of warfare.

    (Journalism: Facts vs Fantasy). The world is divided in a manner most sophisticated, educated, and proud Americans are not aware of:

    The graphic to the left shows the world wide command structure of MOMCOM.

    That is, USNORTHCOM, USSOUTHCOM, USCENTCOM, USEUCOM, USAFRICOM, and USPACOM (which are all part of the size of government).
    …
    Somewhere on this planet an American commando is carrying out a mission. Now, say that 70 times and you’re done … for the day. Without the knowledge of the American public, a secret force within the U.S. military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world’s countries. This new Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has never been revealed, until now … One of its key components is the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, a clandestine sub-command whose primary mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. Reporting to the president and acting under his authority, JSOC maintains a global hit list that includes American citizens. It has been operating an extra-legal “kill/capture” campaign that John Nagl, a past counterinsurgency adviser to four-star general and soon-to-be CIA Director David Petraeus, calls “an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine.”

    (The Virgin MOMCOM – 4). One of these daze we are going to realize, if we haven’t already, that the fundamental reality of our time is The POGO Principle.

    Our part in it is to believe myth, to live mythology, to believe that The Force is there to help those people.

  13. Daring, mysterious topic Mark.

    “the largest U.N. peacekeeping force in the world”

    Peace does not come through force, it comes from peace within shared outwardls as love toward others.

    For the most part, ours is a love-starved planet.

    Even our own nation is adrift from the harbor of peace.

  15. This is a good choice. This area in & around the Congo must be the most dangerous place in the world to live; even worse than Syria & going on for a longer time; the men too are mutilated by the rapists. I was brought up as a kid in Kampala, Uganda. We went to the Congo a couple of times; saw the pigmys (tiny people) with their bows & poison arrows, the monkeys & the hot springs. Now I live in the USA, though I’m visiting my girlfriend in the Philippines right now. Lets not let America slowly degenerate to the level of dangerous third world countries. Our president has been trying very hard to speed such a process up with at least 3 draconian edicts in the past 14 months from the NDA Act of 30 Dec 2011 to the drone-targets-in-usa law to the ‘no one can demonstrate against me while I’m in town’ act, passed last March, as he goes in competition with Robert Mugabe of Zambia.There’s more stuff on this. including the real cause of the white male terrorist shootings in the USA, on Turley’s 10 Reasons the USA Is No Longer the Home of the Free.

  16. Mark,

    Thank you for a wonderful and yet depressing post. The way some of us treat other humans is so sad and the horror of this greatest genocide of this era barely gets a mention in our media.

  18. Very sad situation. It would be good of someone stepped up over there to put an end to this nightmare. Sadly, priorities are not what they should be.

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