A Thousand Sisters_ My Journey Into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman - Lisa Shannon [4]
The result? As of January 2008, more than 5.4 million people had died due to the conflict, making it the deadliest war since World War II. Forty-five thousand continue to die every month. Sexual violence is rampant. Congo has been widely termed “the worst place on earth to be a woman.”
Journalist Lisa Ling has termed Eastern Congo, “The worst place on earth. And the most ignored.”
CHAPTER ONE
Congo Rushes
THE CALLS COME during the remote, panic-inducing hours of morning. I scramble for my cell phone; a number beginning 011-243-99 appears on my caller ID. Congo calling. Sometimes it’s the United Nations, a Sergeant Something-I-Can’t-Make-Out, with a heavy South Asian lilt, who requests my immediate reply but is never again reachable. The president of a militia calls for a job reference after being fired for “political affiliations incompatible with humanitarian work.” Or it’s the distant voice of my Congolese driver, Serge, who says, “Some f——ing job.” He is using his precious phone minutes to prank call me. We both giggle until he hangs up.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo—otherwise known as the worst place on earth. Home to Africa’s First World War, the deadliest war on the planet since World War II. I’ve spent months trying to shake that place, but it keeps knocking at my door, like a bill collector or an old lover anxious to wrap up unfinished business.
This morning is different, though.
“Do you remember there?”
Yes, Eric. I remember there.
It’s news from the village of Kaniola. One Sunday, many months ago, I walked through its far-flung settlements, which are scattered along the ridgeline, butted up against vast stretches of forest. Since the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the forests, thirty miles inland from the Rwandan border, have been ruled by Hutu militias known as Interahamwe, a Rwandan word meaning “those who kill together.” The group is also known as the Forces Democratiques de Liberation du Rwanda, or FDLR.
I thought about Kaniola just the other day while strolling past the Old Portland houses and walnut trees that line my street, sipping my takeout tea. I’m not religious, so Biblical passages almost never cross my mind, but that psalm flashed in my head: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . . I realized that if there is anywhere on earth that qualifies as the valley of the shadow of death, it’s Kaniola. In the five and a half weeks I spent in Congo, the most horrific stories I heard came from that valley. I walked through it and I felt no fear. I’ve done that, literally.
I chuckled to myself.
This morning, sitting in front of my laptop with another cup of tea, staring at my email in-box, it is not amusing in the least.
My friend Eric, a Congolese conservationist with whom I maintain regular contact, writes, “I am forwarding you an article about seventeen persons who were killed by knives in Kaniola. Do you remember there?”
Of course I remember.
The international news report outlines the attack. “It was a reprisal. They targeted houses. They silently entered the house. They started by strangling some victims before stabbing them to stop them raising the alarm. . . . The assailants left a letter saying they would return in force.”
Twenty injured. Eighteen kidnapped. Seventeen killed.
On my second read of the article, I stop cold at a line I initially missed: “The victims included the father of a girl kidnapped by the FDLR and recently freed by the army.”
From the hundreds of people I interviewed in Congo’s war-ravaged
South Kivu province, I heard plenty of stories of abductions and countless reports of the army running away from the Interahamwe. But I heard only one account of the army protecting civilians, a shocking story because these kinds of heroics are so rare. In Kaniola, I met three girls who’d been abducted by the Interahamwe and rescued by