originally published in the Daily Nation
American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met Congolese President Joseph Kabila Tuesday in Goma, the lakeside city that has become of the icon of war, rape and disease that has plagued the central African country.
Clinton spent Tuesday in Goma, the war-torn provincial capital buffeted by volcanoes and gaseous lakes where a multitude of militia groups and Congo’s own army have feasted on women, small villages, and the bevy of minerals that lie beneath them.
“We believe there should be no impunity for the sexual and gender-based violence committed by so many — that there must be arrests and prosecutions and punishment,” she said in Goma during a press conference after a one-on-one meeting with President Joseph Kabila, who promised to do more to stop the escalating sexual violence that has turned the Congo into a cartoon of itself over the last half-year.
The thousands of women who have been raped in the region in the last six months have especially become symbols of the troubles in the Congo, and Clinton’s presence – who has grown to become a powerful example of feminism – is meant to address that issue above all else.
“I will be pressing very hard for, not just assistance to help those who are being abused and mistreated and particularly the women,” she said, “but also for ways to try to end this conflict.”
After meeting the president and the Congo’s foreign secretary, Clinton headed to a displaced-persons camp just outside the perimeter of Goma where 18,000 live.
The Congolese government, with logistical support from the United Nations and advice from Rwanda, are currently fighting ethnic extremist militias originally responsible for genocide in Rwanda in 1994, slaughtering nearly a million ethnic Tutsi people.
While the efforts were first heralded as a mighty blow to one of Africa’s worst rebel groups, gruesome tales of infant rape and villages held hostage quickly surfaced. The rebels are not the only ones committing the crimes. Most watchdog groups now put blame first on the national army.
Secretary Clinton kept an open-ear to President Kabila’s request for help with the army, saying that a “disciplined, paid army is a more effective fighting force.”
According to Human Rights Watch in a Tuesday press release, over 800,000 have fled their homes in eastern Congo alone since operations against the FDLR were launched in January.
“Sometimes entire villages, have been burned to the ground,” the group said in a public statement ahead of Clinton’s arrival. While 16,000 rapes were recorded in 2008, the group says that studies taken across east – specifically North and South Kivu provinces – those numbers have tripled so far in 2009. The youngest case was a 3-year old, raped with her three sisters, who died a couple days afterwards.
Last month the UN sent a team of investigators to the region to look into rumours of peacekeepers in the Congo committing rape. It would not be the first time.
Kabila, who has specifically asked the United States for help in training its national forces, met with Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame last week in Goma to show solidarity with their foe-turned-friend ahead of Clinton’s trip.
Good relations between Kinshasa and Kigali, Kabila and Kagame, are paramount to any success peace will have in the region.
For fifteen years, the two countries have been at odds since those who committed genocide fled across the border. Rwanda practices a drastic reconciliation at home that by some accounts has worked wonders; there is officially no Hutu and no Tutsi, just Rwandans.
But across the border in the Congo, the Kagame regime – originally cast from a Tutsi independence movement in the 1980s – has continued the war that sparked the genocide.
It’s a quest for justice that, by some accounts, has indirectly led – through famine, poverty, disease and the occasional bullet – to the deaths over five million Congolese.
Both Rwanda and Congo have agreed that the crisis in the region will not be solved until the rebel network in eastern Congo is dismantled. It’s up to Hillary to now get on board.
In Goma, Clinton also called attention to the Burmese human rights activist Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who was sentenced to a further three years under house arrest by Myanmar authorities. Clinton strongly criticized the move.
“We are concerned about the harsh punishment. The Burmese junta should immediately end its repression,” she said in Goma.
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