Congo's Dr Denis Mukwege Calls For 100% New Recruits In Army & With No History of Sexual Violence

One of the most prominent voices for Congo rape victims is Dr Denis Mukwege, awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought 2014, which he received in Strasbourg In November 2014.

Rape is used as a weapon of war in many armed conflicts around the world, with few regions of the world being more deadly for women than the Congo. The 59-year-old gynaecologist Mukwege founded the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu in 1998, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where today he still treats victims of sexual violence even after narrowly escaping a serious death attempt in October 2012.

Read: Charlize Theron Meets Dr Denis Mukwege @ Congo’s Panzi Hospital

Women in eastern Dr Congo continue to be raped in front of their husbands and children to ‘dehumanise’ them and ‘destroy’ families, explained Dr Mukwege in paying tribute to the more than 30,000 (reported in May 2015 40,000) rape survivors treated at Panzi Hospital.

A recent article in Think Progress reports that girls as young as 18 months are being abducted from their homes, rapes and then returned.

‘Women and girls have been attacked throughout the 20 year conflict in Congo, but what is particularly disturbing and new about this is that it’s a pattern of children specifically being attacked from a specific community,” Naama Haviv said in a phone interview with ThinkProgress.

Haviv, who heads the Panzi Foundation, a Los Angeles-based charity organization that supports the work of the Panzi Hospital, said that what makes this spate of rapes so alarming is that the children appear to have been singled out. Before, she said, some children were raped along with their mothers, or after they were caught in the crossfire.’

Fiona Lloyd-Davies at TEDxWarwickSalon | ‘Seeds of Hope’

Dr Denis Mukwege Calls For All New Troops In Congo

Last week Dr Mukwege described the Congolese army as being mired in a culture of violence and as being ‘completely sick’, so sick that it should be disarmed and replaced with new recruits who have never committed sexual violence or fought for a violent militia, reports The Guardian.

The UN estimates that one-third of the rapes that occur in the eastern part of the country are committed by members of the army. Dr Mukwege’s questioning the wisdom of the international community spending large sums of money to support an army that is the greatest perpetrator of violence against women and sometimes men, too, is timely. 

In reality, rapes of women appear to have increased based on reports of women’s crisis center, and prosecutions of perpetrators of rape are down, according to the American Bar Association office in the Congolese city of Goma.

Dr Denis Mukwege: The Reasoned Voice

Dr Mukwege shared another interview with The Guardian in May 2015, speaking from his unique perspective as a prime witness to rape used as a weapon of war.

‘It is a method of torture. It is a way to terrorise the population. When I see some of the injuries on the women and children, I realise this type of violence has little to do with sex and much more with power through a sort of terrorism,’ says Mukwege.

It seems that no one may be better qualified to speak on the subject of violence against women than this remarkable man. He calls to replace the army with new recruits who haven’t committed sexual violence makes much sense and should be considered. Mukwege says he has little doubt that rape is the ‘monstrosity of the century.’ ~ Anne