1 post tagged “rape in the congo”
When Lisa F. Jackson was 25
and living in Washington, D.C., she was gang-raped after leaving work
in the upscale Georgetown district. Her story was front-page news, but
the three perpetrators were never caught. Jackson, a documentary filmmaker, kept recalling that trauma last
year, when she visited Congo to interview victims of sexual violence.
Tens of thousands of women and girls are raped each year by armed
militiamen who often mutilate the genitals of their victim with guns
and sticks. Why, Jackson wanted to know, if her rape was considered news, does
the huge wave of Congolese atrocities go unreported and unacknowledged?
In her devastating 75-minute film, "The Greatest Silence: Rape in the
Congo," Jackson searches for the answer by speaking to the victims; to
physicians and aid workers; to U.N. peacekeepers whose numbers are
inadequate to the problem; and, finally, to the rapists themselves. Jackson, 57, calls the crisis "a holocaust in slow motion." Her film
premieres 10 p.m. Tuesday on HBO, with several repeat broadcasts
throughout the month. Go to www.hbo.com/docs or www.thegreatestsilence.org for more information. Speaking by phone from her home in Manhattan, Jackson said she tried
for two years without success to raise funds for "The Greatest
Silence." The subject made people uncomfortable, she found; it was
easier for them to look the other way. Finally, she went last May to
Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, and then to the eastern city of Bukavu.
Jackson went alone, equipped with a camera and no crew - something
she'd never done in 30 years of filmmaking - and found Bernard Kalume,
a Congolese translator who helped her make contact with victims,
rapists and aid workers. In the past decade, an estimated 250,000 women and girls, some as
young as 4 or 5, have been raped by soldiers. In some cases, their
genitals are mutilated and they become incontinent. The shame of rape
is so pervasive that their husbands, and often their families, reject
them. The children of rape are also shunned. The rape epidemic isn't entirely senseless, Jackson found. "This is
a resource war, pure and simple." Congo is rich in diamonds, gold and
coltan, or columbite-tantalite, a metal used in cell phones, DVD
players and computers. The 10-year civil war, which has claimed 4
million lives, is a fight for access to those minerals, and the sexual
violence is part of that fight. By raping and terrorizing women, the
military maintains a heightened climate of instability and fear.
