The Sundance Award winning documentary "The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo" debuted on HBO last night. I did not watch it, nor will I when it re-airs. It would only make me go all fetal. The documentary is described in chilling detail in the Washington Post.
Six rapists in the lush forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo: One in a green hood, another in a red baseball cap, another in military fatigues and a camouflage hat, another in black sunglasses. Their guns are pointed down. Smoking cigarettes, they swagger. They hold up their fingers, counting the number of women they have raped, violated, damned. Sexual terror as a weapon of war, perpetrated sometimes with sticks, knives, tree limbs.
The men seem unafraid to confess. They are bragging to an American filmmaker who holds a camera, recording their words.
. . .
Millions of women and girls have been tortured, mutilated, impregnated as a form of ethnic cleansing. It happened during the Rwandan genocide, the civil wars in Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic, Chad, the former Yugoslavia and Liberia, as well as during the ongoing conflict in Darfur.
What follows are selected quotes from the surivors, their rapists, the filmmaker, and others.
"He who rapes a woman rapes an entire nation."
"This type of sexual terrorism is done in a methodical manner by armed groups."
"We were raped by 20 men at the same time. Our bodies are suffering. They have taken their guns and put them inside us. They kill our children and then they tell us to eat those children. If a woman is pregnant, they make your children stand on your belly so that you will abort. Then they take the blood from your womb and put it in a bowl and tell you to drink it."
"If she says no, I must take her by force. If she is strong, I'll call some of my friends to help me. All this is happening because of the war. We would live a normal life and treat women naturally if there was no war."
"After we've been raped, our men don't want us anymore. We are considered half-human beings."
"Women are suffering. We have forgotten what happiness is."
"Well, those women were not taken by force. The thing is they were in a combat zone where most of the fighters relied on magic power. This magic potion worked in such a way that you've got to rape women in order to overcome the enemies who've invaded our country, the Congo. That is why all those things have happened."
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"They are forgotten women in a forgotten war."
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