Why "Invisible" Geno-Rape in Africa Is Everyone's Disaster

Now that the world is mostly connected by internet, satellite, air travel and more - now that the economy's meltdown means the global economy's meltdown - now that drought in, say, China, is a concern to people in, say, Kansas - and party affiliation is irrelevant - now when doing what's "good" for America has to also be somehow "good" for the rest of the planet - now we look at the "Invisible War", the unreported war, the conflict in the Congo where mass atrocities are a way of life, in a manner so unspeakable that it defies language.

The object of these atrocities are women. Women on a scale of sheer totality. The Democratic Republic of Congo's roving militias have essentially declared war against the Female in her totality. Any and all women are fair game. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to it, except unabashed, drug-fueled, abuse and poverty-driven, depravity and cruelty. In Bob Herbert's NYT op-ed, he describes some of these horrors:

This sustained campaign of mind-bending atrocities, mostly in the eastern part of the country, has been one of the strategic tools in a wider war that has continued, with varying degrees of intensity, since the 1990s. Millions have been killed.

Women and girls of all ages, from old women to very young children, have been gang-raped, and in many cases their sexual organs have been mutilated. The victims number in the hundreds of thousands. But the world, for the most part, has remained indifferent to their suffering.

How much coverage has this gotten in the media? How much outrage? A few articles last January, overwhelmed by economic and election news, not to mention the ugly Israeli massacre of Gazan civilians. These women have no spokespeople, no connections to us. When you read a title displaying the word "Congo" or "Congolese", do you seriously jump on the link, or, riveted, read the article? It's on the planet, but not particularly significant to most people's worlds. It's time for that to change. This is not just a war. It's a holocaust.

The war itself, between many groups, is over control of the country's wealth, and has been going on since the '90's. It is also directly linked to the famously genocidal war in Rwanda. In fact, news surfaced awhile back of its child soldiers, and at this moment war trials are being held in the Hague over previously reported atrocities. But the extent to which the war has brutalized women and families has just been released in a report by two humanitarians.

The report, "Women's Rights Violations During the Conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo," was written by Lisette Banza Mbombo and Christian Hemedi Bayolo of the Association for the Rebirth of Human Rights in Congo, based in Kinshasa, the capital. It might have gone unnoticed outside the country had it not come to the attention of the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development in Montreal, an independent body created by the Canadian Parliament.

Women almost never get redress for rapes, and the devastating effect on children and families cannot be quantified, let alone remedied, avenged, or somehow alleviated.

The Congo report describes graphically the horrific abuses of a war fought out of sight, where the number of international peacekeepers is impossibly small. Mass rapes, often to demoralize enemies, seem to take place everywhere, the authors found. In the eastern region of South Kivu, the report said, a Congolese rebel army allied to Rwanda had buried women alive after ramming sticks into their vaginas, to terrorize the local population.

International organizations estimate that 2 million people may have died in the Congo war; this report speculates that women account for many of the victims.

The goal of the perpetrators was to humiliate and torture their victims, but also, apparently, to annihilate their humanity. And in that sense, their humanity's annihilation is ours - if we ignore it. The brutalizers cannot be left to gain power or get away with such atrocities. This goes beyond what most people think of as criminal behavior. It is the unspeakable - about which we should, in all conscience, be compelled to speak. Or as Bob Herbert reported,

“These women are raped in front of their husbands, in front of their children, in front of their parents, in front of their neighbors,” said Dr. Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist who runs a hospital in Bukavu that treats only the women who have sustained the most severe injuries.

In some cases, the rapists have violated their victims with loaded guns and pulled the triggers. Other women have had their organs deliberately destroyed by knives or other weapons. Sons have been forced at gunpoint to rape their mothers. Many women and girls have been abducted and sexually enslaved.

It is as if, in these particular instances, some window to what we think of as our common humanity had been closed.

It not only destroys the women's sense of their own humanity or worth as beings, but it does the same for everyone around them.

“The second consequence is that the whole family and the entire neighborhood is traumatized by what they have seen. The ordinary sense of family and community is lost after a man has been forced to watch his wife being raped, or parents are forced to watch the rape of their daughters, or children see their mothers raped.

“Neighbors are witnesses to this. Many flee. Families are dislocated. Social relationships are lost. There is no more social network, village network. Not only the victims have been destroyed; the whole village is destroyed.”

As we read this report, we too become witnesses to an unspeakable crime, about which we must speak. Our very humanity, our bond with eachother and with the earth, has been hainously violated. It must not pass without consequence to the guilty.

All this horror for wealth and power? Is this not the "profit motive" gone awry? Is this not the anarchy at the end of extreme anti-government ideology? With the world's resources vanishing under a prolifirating horde of humanity, we need to get honest about values, what is sacred and what is ridiculous. Or we too, may be fighting a war against ourselves, our families, against women, against children, against anything that has real meaning or purpose.

This is your world without "liberal" compassion, without functioning government, all guns, guts, and "glory".... all dysfunctional holocaust.

Thanks to US Invasion, Iraqi Women Lose Rights, Gain Abuse

One of the unintended consequences of the US Invasion of Iraq is the entrenchment of powerful Islamist forces that have permeated Iraqi society and turned it inside out, gutting advances in women's rights that were achieved during Saddam Hussein's secular regime. As usual, bumbling US interventionist, blind, and ultimately anti-democratic international policies have struck again. And as usual, women and children, and of course, civilians, bear the brunt of the resulting debacle.

According to this report by Dahr Jamail, the results are devastating. Whereas under Saddam, women had a higher level of education than in most of the Arab world, and could obtain well-compensated and respected jobs in medicine, law, government, and universities, and of course, there was no dress code, now women are turning up in garbage dumps, after having been raped, tortured and murdered ... accused of having been "bad" for not adhering to strict so-called "Islamic" dress codes and other restrictions.

The militias dominated by the Shia Badr Organisation and the Mehdi Army are leading imposition of strict Islamist rules. The Shia-dominated Iraqi government
is seen as providing tacit and sometimes direct support to them.

Women are being harrassed, threatened, kidnapped, tortured and killed for "offenses" ranging from lack of hijab (in this case, stricter head-to-toe covering) and wearing makeup to having respectable jobs outside the home or even attending a university or school. This situation extends to all major cities in Iraq, from Basra to Baghdad to Baquba and beyond. It is beyond unimaginable, beyond horrifying. Women are being reduced, along with the whole of Iraq generally, to rubble. They are often out of fear forced to live confined like prisoners in their own homes.

And Iraq itself suffers from the lack of their valuable input as doctors, government employees, lawyers and teachers/professors. Not to mention the fact that many of them are widows with children, thanks to the war, and therefore, under this horrific siege of so-called "Islamic" - what I consider the absolute antithesis of "Islamic" - militias enforcing their own weird, right-wing agenda that totally undermines the very thing they profess to be defending: the family, the social structure, even religion. How can these women feed their own children if they cannot work outside the so-called "home", which consists of God only knows what bombed-out shelter or lack thereof?

If these so-called "Muslims" are so allegedly religous, why do they forcibly prevent their own children's mothers to struggle to survive, even though this affects their children's survival? Who are they to label these wives, mothers, and daughters "bad" when they spend much of their own time marauding, raping, killing and threatening others?

It's gotten so bad that all the achievements in women's education are basically bombed out.

In early 2007 Iraq's Ministry of Education found that more than 70 percent of girls and young women no longer attend school or college.

It's not lack of desire for knowledge. It's only the pervasive atmosphere of fear, caused by the abductions and killings that have become prevalent. In Basra where red graffiti warns women to cover from head to toe, at least 40 women have been abducted in the last five months alone, according to the police chief. And in Baghdad,

Several women victims have been accused of being "bad" before they were
abducted, residents have told IPS in Baghdad. Most women who are abducted are
later found dead.
The bodies of several have been found in garbage dumps, showing signs of rape and torture. Many bodies had a note attached saying the woman was "bad", according to residents who did not give their names to IPS.
Similar problems exist for women in Baquba, the capital city of Diyala province, 40 km northeast of Baghdad.
"My neighbour was killed because she was accused of working in the directorate-general of police of Diyala," resident Um Haider told IPS in January. "This woman worked as a receptionist in the governor's office, and not in the police. She was in charge of checking women who work in the governor's office."
Killings like this have led countless women to quit jobs, or to change them.

Thus the Iraqi women must spend their time virtually imprisoned at home, never daring to venture out unless escorted, into streets which by themselves are extremely dangerous war zones.

"Women bear great pain and risks when militants control the streets," Um Basim, a mother of three, told IPS in Baquba recently. "No man can move here or there. When a man is killed, the body is taken to the morgue. The body has to be received by the family, so women often go alone to the morgue to escort the body home. Some are targeted by militants when they do this."

As if this is not bad enough, women are also being detained in US and Iraqi prisons, and their situation is unknown.

According to Nadira Habib, deputy head of the parliamentary committee, there are around 200 women detained in the Iraqi run al-Adala prison in Baghdad. Habibi says there are presumably women in U.S.-run prisons too. "But no one knows how
many female detainees are now in prisons run by U.S. forces as they always
refuse requests from our committee to visit them."

On top of this are the so-called "honor killings", especially common in the Kurdish north, where women are slaughtered on suspicion of having affairs or even contact with someone, often false allegations. So where is the US and where are the so-called Western democracies? Busy "fighting terrorists" - read "planting them" - all over the world.

If instead of taking a militaristic approach, the US and West had taken the approach of dialogue and "detente" - oooh, radical! - maybe democracy would have had a chance. But when you go the military route, taking what the rest of the world views as an extreme interventionist position, what do you expect of the others, your supposed "enemies"? They will be militant, extremist, right-wing jerks. Islam is far away and unlike all that these so-called "Islamists" are doing, just as other hijacked religions are in their essence unlike what extremist zealots act out, from extremist Jews to extremist fundamentalist Christians to extremist (think USSR & Maoist China) atheists, all imposing their narrow views on societies by force. The invasion of Iraq is in essence an invasion, forcing a whole society to kowtow to our own needs, ideas, etc, by force of arms. It is a path doomed to failure and will drag down all that get caught in it.

Nightmare Rape Meets Saudi Y "Utopia"

The illustrious "blueblood" cum Citibank bigwig Alwaleed Al-Talal, once described his kingdom as "Utopia" - we'll footnote that For Royal Men ... if you want to find justice, wealth or even utopia in Saudi Arabia, you'd better show your y chromosomes - even if you're born there...


Someone at the top must be in a state of shock. Not about the brutal gang-rape of a 19-year-old by seven Saudi thugs, or the rape of the male who was driving her home. Not about a judge meting out the brutal "punishment" of 200 lashes on the victim, plus six months prison. Not about her brother attempting to kill her for "shaming" her family by being raped at knife-point. Not about the initial sentence in which one of her rapists was given fewer lashes than she was. Not about doubling her sentence only because she told her story to "the media". Not even that this punishment has no basis in the Shari'a or in the Qur'an or in Islam - except insofar as they impose a "false Shari'a" worse than anything David Horowitz could dream up.

No. Saudi royal sensibilities are shocked that the rest of the world doesn't think 200 lashes and six months in jail is a suitable punishment for being in a car with a man who is not her relative. So they came up with a solution. Now the Saudis changed their story, and it's not just about her being in a car with a relative. The "real story" now is that she is an "adulteress." So this is simply a different way of administering the Scarlet Letter.

Now the Saudi Ministry of Justice issued a statement in defense ofthe decision to punish the gang-rape victim with what could only be described as "cruel and unusual", to say the least - definitely draconian - by saying she "deserved" 200 lashes and 6 months in jail. For being what Greta van Susteren once termed "a floozy." The statement implied "that the woman had owned up to having an extramarital affair with the man in the car."

"She admitted to ... exchanging sinful relations," the statement said, adding
the woman was in state of undress with the man in the car before the attack took
place.

While her own testimony, both in court and to Human Rights Watch and the press, in an ABC News report, stated:

"I had a relationship with someone on the phone. We were both 16. I had never
seen him before. I just knew his voice. He started to threaten me, and I got
afraid. He threatened to tell my family about the relationship... "

She only went to meet the young man to retrieve a photo of herself to prevent him from blackmailing her. Because women by law can't drive in Saudi Arabia, he was her only way home. The 2 were kidnapped within minutes of reaching her home. As she describes,

"One of the men brought a knife to my throat. They told me not to speak. They
pushed us to the back of the car and started driving. We drove a lot, but I
didn't see anything since my head was forced down.
"They took us to an area
... with lots of palm trees. No one was there. If you kill someone there, no one
would know about it. They took out the man with me, and I stayed in the car. I
was so afraid. They forced me out of the car. They pushed me really hard ...
took me to a dark place. Then two men came in. They said, 'What are you going to
do? Take off your abaya.' They forced my clothes off. The first man with the
knife raped me. I was destroyed. If I tried to escape, I don't even know where I
would go. I tried to force them off but I couldn't."

The rest is even worse, as the whole world now knows. Yet the Saudi Ministry of Justice has the guts to claim that her testimony, from which the above is pretty much the same, admits "guilt" to "sinful relations", which the "official press" interprets as an extramarital affair. So again, the Saudi government wants to show that she "deserved" those 200 lashes, while they further smear her reputation.

I guess wearing a black cloak is no guarantee of protection from rape, or from being publicly humiliated with libelous statements. So what then is the point of the "abaya"? Why not ask a Saudi woman?

Hatoon al-Fassi, a history lecturer at King Saud university in Riyadh and
another women rights activist, agreed that women suffer from the lack of written
laws, which subjects rulings to the discretion of judges. "It all depends on the
reasoning of the judge," she told AFP. "It is good that the case has taken an
international dimension. It is shameful that such a case could have stayed
unspoken of... This is a ruling that has treated the victim as a culprit," she
said. "Such logic is so distant from Islam. It is the result of a
male-chauvinist reasoning," she charged.

"The woman does not have the right to represent herself in a court. She enters the court covered entirely in black. Some judges do not even allow her to speak," she said.

The victim's husband describes her situation, and how the court railroaded her.

The events ended her pursuit of an education past high school, he said. "Her
situation keeps changing from bad to worse," he said. "You could say she's a
crushed human being." "The court proceedings were like a spectacle at times," he
said. "The criminals were allowed in the same room as my wife. They were allowed
to make all kinds of offensive gestures and give her dirty and threatening
looks." Of the three judges at the trial, one of them "was mean and from the
beginning dealt with my wife as guilty person who had done something wrong," he
said.

It's not even her word against theirs. It's their word against ... a standing, mute, black-cloaked object. The judge was actually on the rapists' side, saying that she "brought it on" by being in a car with a man not a member of her family. Even though she was kidnapped along with the young man with her. But now the Saudi Ministry of Justice one-ups the judge, accusing her, against her own sworn testimony, of not only adultery, but being in "a state of undress", while riding home in a car in Saudi Arabia, no less. And this is supposed to "defend" the Saudis' position. So of course the woman is supposed, in their view, to be "of ill repute" and hence, "fair game" for gang-rape.

But again, she couldn't actually tell her story. It's not even her word against theirs. It's their word against ... a standing, mute, black-cloaked object. Women in Saudi Arabia can't speak in a court of law. A lawyer, or another man, have to speak for them. So imagine what that means when the judge summarily removes her attorney from the case. She becomes a mute, standing object draped in black. So the only testimony that can be heard is not that of the victim, but of the perpetrator.

Along with the young woman's sentence, the General Court of Qatif confiscated
the license of her attorney, Abdul Rahman Al-Lahem, a lawyer known for taking on
controversial cases that push back against Saudi Arabia's strictly interpreted
system of sharia, or Islamic law.
"Asking me to appear in front of a
disciplinary committee at the Ministry of Justice ... is a punishment for taking
human rights cases against some institutions," Al-Lahem
told Arab News.

The ministry also stressed the Saudi judicial system was based on Islamic law derived from the holy Koran and that a court ruling in the kingdom was only made after both sides in a case are given a fair and balanced hearing.

And since there were "no confessions" and "no witnesses", there was not much of a case, according to the Saudi government. Right - the rapists conveniently withdrew their confessions when the thought of 100+ lashes began to sink in. And since their victim has no voice, their heads would remain safely on their necks.

On the other hand, a columnist in the Philadelphia Bulletin has opined:

The West has continuously failed to understand that the primary reason for the
Arab world's anti-Americanism is not because of our freedom, liberties and way
of life but because we are seen as meddling in the internal and sovereign
affairs of Arab countries.
Whether we like it or not, the Middle East, and
Saudi Arabia in particular, controls of much of the world's oil supply. Until
that situation changes, we would do well to heed the old adage "It's not what
you say; it's how you say it."

He's probably cool with Bush's original assessment: "astonishing." But until someone attacks and puts pressure on abusive governments, they will continue to act as they do without a care in the world. In the absence of conscience, what can human beings rely on if not social condemnation for abuse? The "Girl of Qatif", a Shi'a in a Sunni world, came before the court of the world because the Saudis do not hear. To remain silent on such abuse is to put oil before conscience, lucre before the soul.

It's not enough that Saudi Arabia has to smear a traumatized, innocent, and very young woman in a place where being smeared means being subhuman, "fair game" for brutality. They also smear Islam and the Qur'an, too, by claiming that this "justice system" is based on Islamic law. Since when did Saudi Arabia have anything to do with Islamic Law or the Qur'an, except in name only? Don't just blame David Horowitz...

200 lashes is not a punishment for any crime in the Qur'an. (And neither is stoning or beheading.) Being in the proximity of a man not a relative is also not a crime in the Qur'an. Nor does the Qur'an specifically require a woman to cover her face, or even her hair (except by interpretation of a word that means "ornaments"). But the Qur'an does mention the cutting off of hands for theft - which is also mentioned in the old Testament. But a greater law is "the rule of law must be by mutual agreement and discussion between you all." They call it "shura" and it's reduced under the Saudis to a few men lining up to politely ask for some favors from royals. What a farce!

Dictatorship is in fact against the Qur'an's guidance, if one were to take it seriously. But the Saudi royals wouldn't dare apply the real Shari'a. After all, they consider the country's resources as their pocket money. If the Shari'a were applied, imagine how many hands would fly... and considering the way judges lord it over their victims, they'd better watch their own necks .. or at least, backs.

As for the world's pressure on this case, at least it caused the Saudi delegation to the peace talks in Annapolis "embarrassment", according to sources. And judging by what "shame" means to a woman there, perhaps "embarrassment" on a public stage will have some impact on a man - or better yet, a few powerful men.