* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
International initiatives aimed at ending impunity for perpetrators of sexual violence in conflict-torn countries are a step in the right direction - but much more needs to be done
International attention is fickle. The spotlight effect, where the full glare of publicity suddenly turns on to a particular country for a while, then switches away, leaving where it was in complete darkness again, is a striking feature of today’s political and media culture. However some places almost never get the attention they deserve.
One is the Democratic Republic of Congo, a vast country of some 80 million people at the heart of Africa. DRC has long struggled with a poor colonial legacy, cold war manipulations, venal and incompetent governments, and a succession of wars. Its people are mostly very poor indeed, but the country is not – it has natural resources of all kinds, and its tropical forests are also a vital carbon sink. The problem is that virtually none of this wealth reaches the people, either directly or in the form of taxation on production.
I visited the DRC several times as UN Emergency Relief Coordinator because of the vast humanitarian needs there, particularly in the east. It was hard not to come away pessimistic. This was not because the country was an irretrievable basket case, but because the chances of rescuing it from a combination of poor governance and cynical exploitation of its underground wealth by an alphabet soup of armed groups, including its own awful armed forces, still seemed remote.
The east was where the problems came together most toxically: the Hutu groups responsible for the Rwanda genocide of 1994 fled there, continued to terrorise the local population, and invited constant interference from Rwanda and Tutsi groups on both sides of the border. To cap the misery, the remnants of the Lord’s Resistance Army, pushed out of Northern Uganda some years ago, had resumed their reign of terror in the northeast, with their trademark atrocities, sexual slavery, and child abductions.
I remain depressed about the DRC. The fighting continues, with the so-called M23 group the latest militia to assert their military muscle, amid more accusations of interference from Rwanda. As usual, the civilian population is the main victim. The UN continues to struggle to establish some kind of stability through the MONUSCO peacekeeping force there, apparently large in number but still pitifully small compared to the territory they patrol.
INTERNATIONAL PRESSURE
The Security Council recently voted to establish a new, more robust intervention force, in addition to the normal peacekeepers. M23 leader Bosco Ntaganda, indicted some years ago by the International Criminal Court, also decided to hand himself in to the authorities in The Hague – not I suspect because of a sudden rush of penitence, but because he had lost out in a leadership struggle. But it is not clear that either development will change anything fundamentally.
Most of all, and worst of all, the sexual violence which has been the scourge of this area for decades also continues – not just rapes, but systematic attacks so inhuman as to defy description or belief. They are not the inevitable by-product of conflict but a deliberate attempt to humiliate, intimidate and terrorise the civilian population.
My point is that if this was happening in some other parts of the world, the international community would surely have found have a way to do more about it by now. Awareness has been raised. Money for treatment of the victims has been found. UN strategies have been drawn up. But the atrocities have continued. This is intolerable.
The good news is that a new effort spearheaded by the British government, called the Prevention of Sexual Violence Initiative, was endorsed on 11 April by the G8 foreign ministers. It aims above all at ending impunity for the perpetrators of this violence. It is not only about DRC. Somalia and other places where sexual violence is a tragic part of the scene are also on the agenda. Most recently many Syrian women have become victims of sexual violence used as a weapon of war.
G8 action alone will not stop any of this, but it does put the issue on the international agenda in a new way. British Foreign Secretary William Hague has called the fight against sexual violence the equivalent of the struggle against slavery in previous centuries. Resources and diplomatic muscle are promised to back it up. The initiative deserves all our support. If it were accompanied by a renewed effort to solve some of DRC’s wider problems, that would be even better. Joseph Kony, the leader of the LRA, has killed and terrorised far more people than Osama bin Laden ever managed. They just weren’t considered important in the same way. That too is intolerable.
Sir John Holmes is director of the UK-based Ditchley Foundation, which hosts conferences on international policy, and co-chair of the board of trustees for International Rescue Committee UK. He was the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator from 2007 to 2010, and has recently published a book on his experiences in that role, "The Politics of Humanity: The Reality of Relief Aid". Before that, he worked in the British Foreign Office for 34 years, finishing as UK ambassador in Paris.
