UN REPORT ON
CRIMES IN THE
D.R. CONGO.


Femicide Shirt


BECAUSE EVERY MAN, HOWEVER POWERFUL, CAME FROM A WOMAN, EVERY WOMAN SHOULD BE RESPECTED AND PROTECTED !

TESTIMONIES

The following are all true stories from local doctors, activists and population.
Please do not read on if you have a sensitive heart.


Doctor's testimony.

The girl was from Shabunda; she was about 14 years old. She was gang-raped since she was 12 years old.
She was brought to the hospital with damages to her internal genital organs due to gang-rape by people of Rwanda that got her pregnant. She had a fistula from the multiple rapes and giving birth at her young age.
The Doctor performed a reconstruction surgery on her and repaired her organs.
During her recovery time, she became used to the Doctor and was now calling him Dad. She would some mornings arrange her hair and face well, look at herself in the mirror and ask the Doctor “Daddy, am I not beautiful ?”
The Doctor was amazed and relieved to see and feel the moral recovery of the girl.
But then came the time of healing and parting. The poor girl did not want to leave “her Dad”. But there was no place to keep her. “Her Dad” had to convince her to go back to her village anyway. She feared facing the same monsters that got her in that hurtful situation in the first place. But the Doctor promised her that God would protect her. She accepted to return home, following “her Dad’s” words.
Three years later, she was brought back to the doctor in a coma. She had been massively gang-raped again and infection developed in her genitals.
She was re-animated but the damage that those monsters did to her this time was much more extensive. Her fistula could not be repaired this time. She was forced to live the rest of her life in incontinence.
Above all, this time she was HIV-positive.
What should the Doctor, “her Dad”, tell her now ?


Victim's testimony.

The woman was carrying a plastic bag. She begged activist Christine Deschryver to listen to her story.
Christine was in a rush but accepted to listen to her. The woman opened the bag and showed two skulls.
Christine, horrified, asked what that was.
The woman explained that for weeks she was taken by the terrorists as their sex-slave. She managed to make the kidnappers accept that she takes her children with her while serving them.
Some day she did not see her children and was worried. She looked for them and thought that something happened to them. After a lot of hesitation, she went on to ask the chief of the camp if he could ask his "soldiers" to fetch for the children.
The Man laughed and told her that lately she was happy eating meat that she cooked for all of them. That was the meat of her children. The man showed her where he threw the rest of their body parts near the village.
She dug the location and found the heads of her children.


Doctor's testimony.

This time the victim had something that the doctor had not seen before.
Apart from the destruction of her genitals, her both hands were numb.
The doctor wondered why the victim's hands had lost their sensitivity.
In fact this victim had been tied by her wrists to two poles in the middle of the village for days.
Anybody wanting to rape her had her at his disposal right in the middle of the village on everybody's sight.
It's only after she once lost conscience that she was detached from the poles and taken to the medical center.


Testimony of a Social worker at the hospital.

A new patient was telling others about what the Rwandans militias did to her. She had been raped by about 10 of them.
Another who was seated closeby intervened asking : "That's what you call being raped ? That's what you call suffering ?
They took me while I was in the field with my baby on my back. There were other women that they took too. They took us in the forest to their camp but the walk was long. My baby on my back began to cry. They asked me to shut him up. I told them that I had to breastfeed him but they wouldn't let me. I told them that I needed rest myself and I was thirsty too. They stopped, knelt me down asking me to open my mouth. They urinated in my mouth and forced us back on the way. I cried but was forced to obey or else be killed.
As we continued the walk, my baby kept on crying. They stopped and told me that they knew of some way to stop the baby from crying. I couldn't see what they were doing behind my back to the baby but he was still crying.
Then they asked me to walk again. I began to walk but felt retained. I couldn't see my baby and was beaten to keep walking. I tried to walk and my child stopped crying. I didn't know they had tied a rope around my baby's neck and my effort to walk forward was actually strangling him."
And I am not telling how many raped me . . ."


© Femicide 2008