Symbol of Unhealed Congo: Male Rape Victims (211 hits)
GOMA, Congo — It was around 11 p.m. when armed men burst into Kazungu Ziwa’s hut, put a machete to his throat and yanked down his pants. Mr. Ziwa is a tiny man, about four feet, six inches tall. He tried to fight back, but said he was quickly beaten down. “Then they raped me,” he said. “It was horrible, physically. I was dizzy. My thoughts just left me.” For years, the thickly forested hills and clear, deep lakes of eastern Congo have been a reservoir of atrocities. Now, it seems, there is another growing problem: men raping men.
According to Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, United Nations officials and several Congolese aid organizations, the number of men who have been raped has risen sharply in recent months, a consequence of joint Congo-Rwanda military operations against rebels that have uncapped an appalling level of violence against civilians. Aid workers struggle to explain the sudden spike in male rape cases. The best answer, they say, is that the s*xual violence against men is yet another way for armed groups to humiliate and demoralize Congolese communities into submission. The United Nations already considers eastern Congo the rape capital of the world, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to hear from survivors on her visit to the country next week. Hundreds of thousands of women have been s*xually assaulted by the various warring militias haunting these hills, and right now this area is going through one of its bloodiest periods in years.
...The male rape cases span several hundred miles and possibly include hundreds of victims. The American Bar Association, which runs a s*xual violence legal clinic in Goma, said that more than 10 percent of its cases in June were men. Brandi Walker, an aid worker at Panzi hospital in nearby Bukavu, said, “Everywhere we go, people say men are getting raped, too.” But nobody knows the exact number. Men here, like anywhere, are reluctant to come forward. Several who did said they instantly became castaways in their villages, lonely, ridiculed figures, derisively referred to as “bush wives.” Since being raped several weeks ago, Mr. Ziwa, 53, has not shown much interest in practicing animal medicine, his trade for years. He limps around (his left leg was crushed in the attack) in a soiled white lab coat with “veterinaire” printed on it in red pen, carrying a few biscuit-size pills for dogs and sheep. “Just thinking about what happened to me makes me tired,” he said.
The same is true for Tupapo Mukuli, who said he was pinned down on his stomach and gang-raped in his cassava patch seven months ago. Mr. Mukuli is now the lone man in the rape ward at Panzi hospital, which is filled with hundreds of women recovering from rape-related injuries. Many knit clothes and weave baskets to make a little money while their bodies heal. But Mr. Mukuli is left out. “I don’t know how to make baskets,” he said. So he spends his days sitting on a bench, by himself. The male rape cases are still just a fraction of those against women. But for the men involved, aid workers say, it is even harder to bounce back. “Men’s identity is so connected to power and control,” Ms. Walker said. And in a place where homos*xuality is so taboo, the rapes carry an extra dose of shame. “I’m laughed at,” Mr. Mukuli said. “The people in my village say: ‘You’re no longer a man. Those men in the bush made you their wife.’ ”...
