Decoupling Seattle Family Law and Divorce Blog

Part I: Darker Than The Heart Of Darkness

This is a story from a beautiful place, mostly without laws of any sort, where vast human rights abuses against women defy description.  Among other things, it’s a story of why, seventeen years after law school, I finally joined the American  Bar Association.

You may not know that the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II is in a war in Africa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (f.k.a. Zaire), where more than 5 million people have died since 1998.  The treaty was signed in 2003.  But a war goes on. About 45,000 people a month still die from violence, or from disease and famine indirectly caused by the violence.  It’s a level of horror remarkable even for the land where Joseph Conrad’s classic Heart of Darkness is set.

Eastern Congo is a vast, scenic, fabulously mineral-rich region that has been bereft of any real government for years, and is mostly ruled by violent gangs. It is also home to one of the world’s worst epidemics – an epidemic of rape, astonishingly brutal, sometimes even lethal, perpetuated on a surreal, unimaginable scale.  It is estimated that 70% of all women in one town, Shabunda, were sexually brutalized.

Central African Wars 101 (Cliffs Notes Version)

Why is there a rape epidemic in the Congo? Why now?  There’s an old African proverb that goes “When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.”  It all starts with a genocide in next door Rwanda….

Here’s the skinny in 20 easy points (and here’s a more detailed reference map than the one below):

1. Rwanda is a country the size of Massachusetts.  It has about ten million people, 85% of which are ethnic Hutu and 15% of whom are ethnic Tutsi.
2. For centuries, the  wealthy Tutsis ruled over the poorer Hutus in Rwanda, even in colonial times when Belgian soldiers occupied the country.
3. In April 1994, the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi (the neighboring country to its south), were assassinated while traveling together.  They were both Hutu.
4. Over the next 100 days, Hutu militias killed about 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda. But the Tutsis fought back, and by August, they controlled the country.
5. Rwanda sits on the eastern border of the Kivu region of the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
6. The DRC (not to be confused with the Congo Republic next door) is the 12th largest country in the world, almost as big as Alaska and Texas combined, and home to 62 million people.
7. In what is known as the Great Lakes Refugee Crisis, after the Tutsis gained control of Rwanda, more than 2 million Hutu refugees fled, many of them to eastern Congo, where they had the support of Congolese dictator Mobuto Sese Seko.
   

   Mobuto

8. Unfortunately, many of the “refugees” were actually Hutu leaders who had helped to implement the genocide. They used the refugee camps to regroup, and the aid groups saw that their aid was actually assisting these killers to re-arm.
9. One aid leader remarked philosophically “Sometimes we just shouldn’t show up for a disaster.” Most of the aid groups  – including Oxfam, Save the Children, CARE and Doctors Without Borders – soon abandoned the camps, in what has been called the “greatest humanitarian quagmire” in history.  Then the world simply forgot about this troubled corner of the world.
   
10. In this vacuum, largely funded by lucrative illegal mining operations,  the Hutu former “genocidaires” began military raids against both Rwanda and a Tutsi-esque tribe in eastern Congo.
11. In 1996, the Tutsi-led Rwandan government backed Marxist/Maoist rebel Laurent-Desire Kabila against both the Hutus and the dictator Mobuto.
12. Mobuto fled, Kabila became President, and promised a new era of African leadership based on both capitalism and collectivism.  Turns out he was repressive, and possibly corrupt too.


Kabila

13. Rwanda backed another rebellion, this time against Kabila. This  Second Congo War, a.k.a. Africa’s World War, included eight nations and about 25 organized armed groups. Millions more died.
14. Laurent Kabila was assasinated in 2001. After the coup was put down, his 29-year old son Joseph Kabila became president of Congo, where he still rules – well, sort of.
15. The war formally ended in 2003.  It continues today in Kivu under its quaint new branding, “The Kivu Conflict.”
16. There is no real government there. There are lots of young men with guns, many of whom have committed atrocities for years.
17. The armed groups have ready access to billions of dollars of cobalt, copper, diamonds and tin.  Enough to fill the pockets of local governments and some multi-national corporations, keeping them content with the status quo.
18. With all this wealth, however, this vast country the size of Western Europe still only has about 3,000 miles of paved road (the state of Virginia alone has 70,000).
19. In this endless conflict, rape is used as “an organized campaign of sexual terrorism.”
20. Rape victims are often ostracized from their communities – and there is a strong taboo against victims talking about rape.  But that is changing.  And some of the perpetrators are now being brought to justice.

See part two of this article next week for details about how lawyers are bringing a modicum of justice to Kivu.