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The Brutal Truth
A Filmmaker Confronts the Rapists of the Congo and Finds No Remorse

By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 8, 2008; C01




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.
"Ask him to tell me what he did," says Lisa F. Jackson, whose chilling documentary, "The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo," debuts tonight on HBO. In a 10-year-old conflict that has left some 5 million people dead, the tens of thousands of women and girls who have been systematically raped and mutilated by an array of combatants are the silent victims among the living, Jackson tells us. What makes her documentary more stunning: She goes into the forest and confronts the rapists.
"I slept with some women," says the rapist, a gray sweater wrapping his head, the sleeves tied around his neck.
[HIGHLIGHT=#d99694]"Did they want you to sleep with them?" Jackson inquires, her voice incisive, a bit on edge. A translator repeats her words in Swahili. Is it about control? Sex? Why violate a woman, leave her to bleed in her village, while her husband watches, tied to a tree? Why would 20 men line up and take turns, one after the other, raping a girl until she passes out and separates herself from a pain too evil to imagine?[/HIGHLIGHT]
Why insert a machete into a woman, leaving her organs so torn and dysfunctional that she flees her village and hides her shame and her stench in the bush, another victim of war?
[HIGHLIGHT=#ccc1d9]"After we've been raped, our men don't want us anymore. We are considered half-human beings," a lonely woman confides to Jackson and her camera.[/HIGHLIGHT]
In another scene, the gray-sweatered rapist doesn't flinch at Jackson's question: "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."
The war started in 1998 when Congolese rebels and Rwandan troops tried to oust the country's president, Laurent Kabila.

[HIGHLIGHT=#92cddc]But the fighting metastasized into a conflict over land, ethnicity and natural resources and lasted long after Kabila's 2001 assassination and well beyond a 2003 peace accord. Eastern Congo, the flashpoint of the conflict, degenerated into a state of near constant violence, with regular troops, rebels and regional militias routinely looting villages and routinely raping women and girls.[/HIGHLIGHT]


* * *

Rain pours outside. Jackson's camera takes us inside the shadow of an abandoned building, pointing at another rapist. His gun is slung across his back. He wears a green beret and talks of the "magic" that makes him rape.
"Well, we were just abiding by the conditions of our magic potion. We had to rape women in order to make it work, and beat the enemy."

[HIGHLIGHT=#d7e3bc]Another rapist, wearing a black skullcap, is sitting in a corner. "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."[/HIGHLIGHT]
[HIGHLIGHT=#d7e3bc]Here is where the film shows the twisted layers of damage from war, twisted until the soldiers believe they must rape to win. Twisted until the viewer becomes engulfed in the twisted message of magic and enemy control and devastation. And you shout at the screen. Because the film shows you the pain of women raped in front of their husbands and children. Rammed with sticks until the uterus ruptures. And they bleed. And urine seeps forever. And they are cast away. And children are born of the rapes. And their mothers must carry them because they are obliged. One mother, raped at age 15, says in the film that she named her daughter Lumiere, which means light. She will tell her daughter she did not know the girl's father.[/HIGHLIGHT]

How many such children will be born of rape? One cannot say. But the number of rapes, as told by the film's collection of rapists, is staggering.
"Well, those that I remember, I could number them to 18." It's green beret again, touting his rape tally.
Camouflage hat says he has raped seven women. Green hood says five. Red T-shirt admits to two. Black sunglasses: about 20.
Black skullcap says, like an accountant: "It's hard to keep record of the number of women that I've raped. The thing to keep in mind is the fact that we have stayed too long in the bush, and that induced us to rape. You know how things are in combat zones. We raped as we advance from village to village."

The rapists melt back into the bush. But their chilling words now are caught forever in this film that takes us deep into the horrors of a silent war waged by Congolese government forces, by rebels, and sometimes even by United Nations peacekeepers.
"He who rapes a woman rapes an entire nation," a policewoman says in the film.
Says Jackson, "They are forgotten women in a forgotten war."
She is both witness and survivor. The viewer learns that Jackson herself was gang-raped -- assaulted here in the District in 1976 as she was leaving her office late one night. "The three men who attacked me that night in Georgetown were never found," she says in the film.
She shared her story with the women in Congo. "They all asked about the war that was happening in my country. I explained to them that even in peacetime, women are not safe. . . . The idea to them that women, and white women, could be raped in peacetime," she said in an interview, "they could not imagine such things could happen."

It was not her aim to put herself, her story into the film. But once she told her story, women opened up. "It became clear the connection I had with the women resulted in incredibly honest interviews," Jackson said. "It also made the film less voyeuristic. It helped the audience understand."
To gather the women's stories, Jackson, 57, visited hospitals, sat in mud-floored huts and churches, putting names and faces and grief on camera until the viewer is moved to feel, turn away, do something. People are always asking Jackson, "But what can I do?"
"People have to find their own thing to do," she says. "There is so much you can do. I made a film."
Jackson, who calls herself a "Foreign Service brat," went to Holton-Arms, a private girls' school in Bethesda. She attended Sarah Lawrence College, then studied film at MIT with the documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock.

After college, she returned to the District to work at WETA television. For about two years, she worked as a film editor with legendary documentary filmmaker Charles Guggenheim. She eventually started her own production company and, over the next 30 years, made documentaries in Siberia and Guatemala. She won three Emmy Awards.
For her next film, she wanted to document the fate of women and girls in conflicts around the world. In 2006, she went to South Kivu, a province in the eastern Congo.
"I ended up going to the worst place first," Jackson said in the interview. "I had good friends working for the U.N. peacekeepers there. I cashed in frequent flier miles and went where the conflict was raging. After two days, I realized this was not a segment in a larger film. This was the story nobody was telling."

She "found many dozens of raped women, women of all ages, too many women, who at times would line up for hours, waiting until after the light disappeared and my camera could no longer record an image, waiting to talk to me, waiting to tell their stories to someone who would listen to them without judgment, hoping that I would relay their stories to a world that seemed indifferent to their horrific plight."

[HIGHLIGHT=#31859b]One woman told of being kidnapped and held with other women in the forest as sex slaves. "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."[/HIGHLIGHT]

To find the rapists, she asked her guide to find men willing to be interviewed. "In work with the U.N., he knew a lot of Congolese army officers. He went to a commanding officer and said there is an American journalist who wants to interview your men about raping women. He said okay and put the word out among the soldiers."
She ended up deep in the forest, led by a dozen men.
"For a moment, going into the bush, I was completely panic-stricken," Jackson said in the interview. "Then I realized they wanted their moment on videotape. If anything happened to me and my camera, they wouldn't have that. My camera was as good as a gun. They wanted to be memorialized, bragging about what they did to women."


* * *

[HIGHLIGHT=#fac08f]"This type of sexual terrorism is done in a methodical manner by armed groups."[/HIGHLIGHT]
That is Denis Mukwege, director of the Panzi General Referral Hospital in the Congolese town of Bukavu, testifying last week before the Senate subcommittee on human rights and the law. "The rapists are not seeking to satisfy some kind of sexual desire but to destroy the woman, destroy her family and destroy her community."
Jackson, who appeared with him as well as several other human rights activists, asked the senators: "Why is it that rape in conflict is so infrequently prosecuted in the world's courts? Where is the outrage?"
Rape has been used systemically in several war-torn countries to humiliate, demoralize and destroy, Physicians for Human Rights said in a report it released at the hearing.

[HIGHLIGHT=#fac08f]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 [/HIGHLIGHT][HIGHLIGHT=#fac08f]Sierra Leone[/HIGHLIGHT][HIGHLIGHT=#fac08f], the [/HIGHLIGHT][HIGHLIGHT=#fac08f]Central African Republic[/HIGHLIGHT][HIGHLIGHT=#fac08f], [/HIGHLIGHT][HIGHLIGHT=#fac08f]Chad[/HIGHLIGHT][HIGHLIGHT=#fac08f], the former [/HIGHLIGHT][HIGHLIGHT=#fac08f]Yugoslavia[/HIGHLIGHT][HIGHLIGHT=#fac08f] and [/HIGHLIGHT][HIGHLIGHT=#fac08f]Liberia[/HIGHLIGHT][HIGHLIGHT=#fac08f], as well as during the ongoing conflict in [/HIGHLIGHT][HIGHLIGHT=#fac08f]Darfur[/HIGHLIGHT][HIGHLIGHT=#fac08f].[/HIGHLIGHT]
[HIGHLIGHT=#fac08f]"Mass rape in war is frequently not the random act of individual soldiers but a determined strategy to destroy populations," said Sen. [/HIGHLIGHT][HIGHLIGHT=#fac08f]Dick Durbin[/HIGHLIGHT][HIGHLIGHT=#fac08f] (D-Ill.). "The perpetrators are not held accountable and turn to mass rape because it is cheaper than using bullets."[/HIGHLIGHT]

Jackson explained that armies and factions in Congo were killing civilians in order to loot the country of its riches: most recently, tin, cobalt and coltan, used in electronics.

[HIGHLIGHT=#c0504d]"Perhaps another hearing might more thoroughly explore the causes and ruinous consequences of this illegal plundering," she said. But everyone in this room should consider the fact that there is the blood of Congolese women on their laptop computers and on their cellphones."[/HIGHLIGHT]

After 90 minutes, the gavel sounded. The hearing adjourned. Senators filed out. Reporters tapped out stories. People pulled out cellphones. The paneled room emptied into the marbled halls of power.
But the question remained: What would be done to help the women?
[HIGHLIGHT=#92cddc]In the film, a 70-year-old rape survivor says: "Women are suffering. We have forgotten what happiness is."[/HIGHLIGHT]

The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo airs at 10 tonight on HBO.

with all these children being brainshashed since they'r babies, i'm not surprised this shit is happening. africa is crazy. they'v been fighting for so long.

did anyone see blood diamond? there was this one line in the movie that i really liked.
"if we had oil on our land, then we'd REALLY have some problems"

sad.

Ниасилил, многа букаффффффф

chyabi korova muchala - you are the king of многа букаффффффф!!!

It is a terrible situation. Where is UN in all of this? What exactly are they planning to do about it? It has been going on for years now and they still think that you can negotiate with these people? Please don't tell me that this is their way of life and we have no buisness pushing our believes and ethics on them. I'm convinced that America is one of the few nations today that not only has a position of caring about what's going on in the world but is also not afraid to do something about it. So let's hurry up and finish in Iraq so we can once again tell UN to shut their faces, go to Africa and straighten it out. Iran after that.

UN sucks. They only see what they want to see... where there is something for them. Thre's nothign in those countries, so UN simply ignores them.

uhm...rape camps were wide spread in kosovo as well...and are usually the by product of war and invasion...rape has been considered a rape crime only recently tho. altho a lot of activist groups have spoken up about it in the 90's ....its very similar to the status of women in afghanistan or the wide spread sex traffickin of women and kids...

read between the lines: women's rights....

and as usual...when the big dogs are beefin over oil,land, or power...who bears the burden? women and children.

That's terrible and disgusting. I don't understand what goes through the mind of a rapist...but there's a morality glitch somewhere.

I hope that you are not referring to Iraq with your comment about oil, land and power. Saddam Hussain gassed over 300,000 women and children and his sons as well as members of his cabinet raped left and right. Amongst many other reasons, US is in Iraq to bring those people freedom and serve justice for the crimes that were commited.

Here are some pictures of gassed Kurds for reference.






Would you support US invasion of Congo? Or will you join the rest of the US haters who will dispise this country no matter what it does? Will there be thousands of people once again complaining that we are waisitn too much money on the foreign wars and not minding our own buisness?

If you just talk about the problems and fail to do anything about it in practical terms than you become nothing more than another person with a position. That does not accomplish anything.

1 John 3:18
"Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth."

i wasnt refering to iraq...i was refering to common factors that start wars and conflicts...which is, once again, power, land, resources etc...

oh please, nobody goes to war to "liberate" people ! we all know that...maybe liberation and improvements happen along the way...maybe....

i wonder what Iraq is gonna look like after the US invasion...actually, recent investigations and some INDEPENDENTLY made studies/docummentaries have already shown that 1)number ofchildren has drastically increased in orphanages 2) child abuse and exploitation has also increased 3) substance abuse problemsin orphans and kids asyoung as 7...which is what has been seen in some parts of eastern europe.

and one major point pple fail to realize: invasion and droppin bombs do not slove all problems. its like when u have a cavity and instead of fisxing the cavity gently, u goin there and tear up the whole mouth

there are plenty of PEACEFUL organizations out there who are diligently fighting to improve conditions of life and civil rights....i would even applaud religious groups who go and try to change the world.

10 improvements in the lives of Iraqi citizens.

1. A "back to school" campaign delivered 1,500 kits with book bags, notebooks, pens and pencils that helped 120,000 students in Baghdad return to their classrooms in May 2003. In preparation for the new school year, 1.2 million kits for secondary school students and 4,000 kits for their schools including desks, chairs, blackboards, and bookshelves are arriving in Iraq.
2. Malnutrition contributed to high mortality rates in Iraq during Saddam's rule. The food aid for Iraq has continued to supply the public distribution system and has allowed the majority of Iraqis access to food rations. On July 15, the World Food Program reported that nearly 1.5 million metric tons of food, or more than the three months supply required to keep the distribution system operating, have been dispatched to Iraq. An additional 2.2 million metric tons of food will arrive by the end of October. These steps will contribute to reversing malnutrition.
3. To date, 22.3 million doses of measles, tuberculosis, hepatitis B, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, and polio vaccines have been provided, enough to vaccinate 4.2 million children.
4. Nearly all Iraqi children have finished their exams from last year and are ready to start a new school year in the fall. All universities are reopened.
5. A $53 million program to rehabilitate more than 100 schools and clinics is underway. In the southern region, more than 50 schools are in various stages of rehabilitation. More than 600 schools will be in "like new" condition in time for the beginning of classes.
6. Five million revised math and science textbooks will be ready before the start of the school year.
7. Saddam Hussein's rhetoric is being removed from Iraqi schoolchildren's textbooks. In the words of Dunia Nabel, a teacher in Baghdad: "We want flowers and springtime in the texts, not rifles and tanks." (The Chicago Tribune, July 31, 2003).
8. Ten delivery rooms in hospitals and primary healthcare centers in Basra have been rehabilitated and stocked with essential drugs and medical supplies.
9. The juvenile institution for children that was the subject of reports of abuse and appalling conditions under Saddam Hussein has been replaced by a project run by UNICEF and NGOs. Seven orphanages have undergone major building renovations and training for staff.
10. Nearly 3,000 soccer balls were shipped on May 30 and another 60,000 balls on their way to Iraq through a private/public partnership and the U.S. soccer community.

Source: http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/part5.html


Just because you do not hear anything positive on the news about the situation there, does not mean it isn't so. When things in Iraq turn for the better, all of a sudden O.J. Simpson is more important to report about.

Leo Wrote:It is a terrible situation. Where is UN in all of this? What exactly are they planning to do about it? It has been going on for years now and they still think that you can negotiate with these people? Please don't tell me that this is their way of life and we have no buisness pushing our believes and ethics on them. I'm convinced that America is one of the few nations today that not only has a position of caring about what's going on in the world but is also not afraid to do something about it. So let's hurry up and finish in Iraq so we can once again tell UN to shut their faces, go to Africa and straighten it out. Iran after that.

As Kostya said in his post about UN, the same goes for US. US will not step in unless there is a benefit for them out of the whole situation. Africa has nothing that US can take advantage of by helping out.

From what I understand, Marik, you served this country as a member of United States Marine Corps. So I'm really curious to hear your opinion, as a former military personnel, as to when it is acceptable to step in? When there are innocent people being taken advantage off and abused while at the same time achieving personal benefit for your nation, or when there is no benefit to be gained what so ever from the situation? Or maybe both are acceptable?

My frustration comes from hearing at least half the people that I get a chance to speak with make a claim that they do not support US involvement in foreign affairs on any level and the only acceptable reason to go to war is for self defense purposes if US is under attack. At the same time, those are the same people who say that they are compassionate about what is going on in the world and still the same people who blame United States for not taking any action.

Can we please make up our mind already about what is ethical and what is not, so that we can move forward with our foreign policy?

Lyona, I was a reservist who never been deployed overseas and I served before the whole Iraq thing. Back than the opinion of US foreign policies was different. So I cant tell you from first hand experience.

I think its easier said than done about "making up minds about what is ethical and what is not" when it comes to involvement of US overseas. Most of the time US involvement leads to more chaos and more casualties, even for US. So before going in and shooting shit up they need to see the possible outcome of it all. Did anything change in Somalia when US went in? nope! Kosovo? nope! Is anything really changing in Iraq? nope!

To be honest I am not too into politics so I might not make too much sense. But its just my opinion :-)

leo, i didnt have time to read your post on iraqi reform in depth....but your source speaks for itself, my friend

however, i HAVE been seriously thinkin about what you told me via phone a few days ago....i might have a plan!!! TTYL ))

bol'she drug govoryat v sluh!

lubopitnoy varvare na bazare nos otorvali !!!

It should be understood that the UN is limited by the power allotted in the Charter, to which the US is a signatory. Also, they are limited by funding, to which the US owes over 2.6 billion in back dues for peacekeeping alone. Thirdly, peacekeeping missions in the case of the Congo have already proven ineffective (see MONUC) as several of the most publicized peacekeeper violations of human rights originated in this area.

As to whether the US would do better upon an invasion of the Congo, see Viet-nam and Korea. US forces do not understand how to fight guerilla warfare, and it would be another unnecessary slaughter of US troops. After all, the Israeli Army had to teach US troops how to fight terrorism.

Leo may be interested to know that they are in the minority as to their opinion of the UN and UN peacekeeping, though. In a May 2007 article, Fox News reported that 72 percent of Americans support the idea of a standing UN peacekeeping force. The survey they reported on was done by WorldPublicOpinion.org and went on to say that sixty percent of Americans thought the US should be more willing to make decisions within the UN system, as opposed to acting UNILATERALLY.

At some point, it needs to be understood by all observers that there are things in the world that cannot be fixed via the interference of outside influences. As hard as that is to wrap ones brain around, revolutions do not succeed because another state demands it. They succeed when the people stand up and say that they have had enough, when the people are done enduring the fighting, the death, the rape. Revolutions don't happen overnight, they happen after long planning, when there is a strong leader who steps up to take their people forward, to fix the things that are wrong. That's why Iraq is such a mess still. There was no one to fill the vacuum of power created by Husain’s removal.