Amnesty: Dozens of women raped in the Democratic Republic of Congo by M23 rebels

Horror scenes appear in the Amnesty International (AI) report after collecting the testimony of 35 victims and health personnel in the Kishishe region, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). For a week, the M23 guerrillas raped women between the ages of 17 and 58 and murdered about twenty men.

“The number of victims could be higher because many women, for various reasons of security, social, sociological, fear, etc. they do not report cases of rape to health facilities or even to the community,” says Jean Mober Senga, a researcher for the NGO for the Democratic Republic of Congo, adding that “during this attack, the M23 fighters also killed in cold blood to at least 20 men who, for the most part, were the husbands of the raped women or their children.”

RFI: According to the report, the perpetrators singled out their civilian victims as a brutal act of retaliation against the civilian population.

JMS: Our investigation reveals that the rapes and murders were a kind of punishment for people apparently having family ties or supporting rival local armed groups of the M23. And what it is about is civilian casualties, including women and girls, who are not combatants.

What is even more unbearable for us is the almost total absence of care for the victims. The health structures did not have medicines or qualified personnel. They do not have a mental and psychological health assistance program. So these women have barely received pregnancy tests or tranquilizers, drugs to cure pain in a superficial way. The M-23 prevents humanitarian access to the area. They cannot go to the fields or to buy groceries because the roads are blocked. That is, they are in total helplessness.

R.F.I.: How to repair the social fabric of a community that keeps in its memory events that exceeded the limits of horror, pain and ignominy, that is, irreparable violence?

JMS: As you say, what has happened and is happening for too long in the Congo cannot be undone. But the least that the international community and the Congolese government owe their victims and their community is justice. It is to ensure that the executioners are identified and that they are prosecuted in order to criminally answer for their acts. But also that these women and the communities can receive some kind of physical, economic, symbolic reparation. Because the crimes we are talking about, including the rape of women, have been taking place almost daily in the Congo for more than 25 years. They have left several million victims and in total impunity.

What is the M23?

The predominantly Tutsi M23 rebellion took up arms again at the end of 2021, after nearly a decade of exile in neighboring Rwanda and Uganda, with among its main demands the elimination of the FDLR, a group founded in Congo by former genocidal leaders. Tutsis in 1994 in Rwanda. The DRC accuses its neighbor Rwanda of supporting these rebels, which is corroborated by experts from the UN, the United States and other Western countries, although Kigali denies it.