.png)
1 month ago
2
The pair of tiny blue teddy bear Crocs outside the operating theatre door is a heartbreaking insight into the worst rape crisis in the world.
Inside, on the operating table, sedated after watching a Peppa Pig video, is five-year-old Deborah, raped earlier this year. So brutal was the attack that she was left incontinent. Now she is being delicately repaired by Congo’s most famous doctor, Nobel peace prize laureate Dr Denis Mukwege. Watching in blue scrubs and green hairnet as he stitches and various monitors beep, is Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh.
Even for someone who has previously travelled to South Sudan, Chad, Bosnia and Ukraine to meet survivors of war rape and raise awareness, this is horrifying. “She was so brave,” she says of Deborah. “It’s not okay that this is happening to a five-year-old girl.”
Sophie in the operating theatre as Dr Mukege works on young victims left injured after being raped AARON CHOWN/PA For Dr Mukwege this is all too familiar. “Sadly I’ve done hundreds of these and it never gets easier,” he says. “When we started 25 years ago we were treating adults. But now we’re seeing more and more children. About 30 per cent of the rapes we treat are children, many of whom go on to be child mothers. These children are our future and we are destroying them. “I don’t know how to get the world to understand this can’t go on.” It’s a fear shared by Sophie. “The amount of rape round the world is increasing because sadly there are more conflicts and we need to do all we can to encourage the world to sit up and take notice,” she told the Sunday Times on Friday at the end of a top-secret, high-risk trip to the DRC. “I worry that because of the difficulty of talking about this issue, it is being swept aside.” Yet the surgery on Deborah is also a story of hope. Alongside Dr Mukwege at the operating table in Kinshasa was Professor Iain Whitaker, chair of plastic surgery at Swansea University, and among those assisting was Dr Claire-Louise Ware, a consultant anaesthetist at Swansea Bay University. The collaboration is the fulfilment of a promise made by Sophie, 60, after her first visit to the DRC in 2022, when she visited Dr Mukwege’s Panzi Hospital, a place that has treated more rape victims than anywhere on earth — about 80,000 at the last count. He has received numerous death threats because of his work. The duchess is greeted by MONUSCO forces in Beni AARON CHOWN/PA “Dr Mukwege is a magician,” she smiled. “And when he told me so many people come and see what we do and then go home and do nothing, I really took that to heart.” The duchess is patron of the UK charity Scar Free Foundation, which carries out reconstructive work on people with disfigurements from burns and other injuries and has a pioneering research centre in Swansea University, and she realised they might be able to help. She said: “I am doing all I can working together with doctors from Swansea university to create a programme that will not only help Dr Mukwege and his colleagues to perfect existing techniques, but train more people in how to use them and create a central hub here in DRC that will have wider impact in other countries.” Last Sunday saw a team of four NHS doctors from Swansea arrive for five days. Professor Whitaker, who was on his second trip, said he saw 55 rape victims on the first day, including a 20-month-old baby, and carried out 15 operations over the next three days, the most he could do given the clinic’s limited facilities. “Operating on a five-year-old who has been raped is really traumatic even for the most hardened surgeon,” he said. The duchess watches one of the many operations taking taking place amid the rape crisis AARON CHOWN/PA Nor were the conditions ideal. In the midst of Deborah’s operation there was a power cut, common in the DRC, and the anaesthetist had to ventilate manually. The hour-long surgery was successful and as Dr Mukwege snipped the final suture and sat back, everyone clapped. The duchess was clearly moved and delighted to see in action the collaboration she had initiated. The interchange of surgeons between Wales and the DRC will see Dr Mukwege’s son-in-law, Gloire, a surgeon who is expected to eventually succeed the 70-year-old, spend time in Swansea on a fellowship. “It’s just the beginning I hope,” Sophie said. The operation in the Panzi Clinic on Wednesday was one of the most emotional points in her four-day trip, which for security reasons could not be reported by the media until she had left the country on Thursday night. The visit included a day and a half in the conflict-torn mineral-rich east, much of which has been recently annexed by a rebel militia. So dangerous was it that she had a 14-member high-risk close protection team who later revealed that at one point the duchess was less than 20 miles from the fighting. • The African war brewing over ‘blood minerals’ in phones On her quest to highlight the scourge of war rape, few areas need more attention. Eastern Congo is described by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) as “one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman or girl” and recent fighting has seen already astronomical numbers soar even higher. In the first two months of this year, 10,000 rape cases were reported but this is “the tip of the iceberg”, says Noemi Dalmonte, deputy representative of the UNFPA. Almost half of the victims were children, meaning one child was raped every half hour. At first sight Beni, which Sophie flew into on Monday on a flight of MONUSCO, the UN peacekeeping force, appears to be a bustling town, with scores of motorcycles weaving through traffic bearing everything from stacks of firewood to families of six, in the shadow of the densely forested Rwenzori mountains. But locals are nervous, with many militias operating in the area, including a government-aligned one called the Patriots, and the ADF, an Islamic state affiliate, which in recent weeks has carried out gun and machete massacres including at a church and a funeral. The duchess and Dr Denis Mukwege at the Panzi Clinic in Kinshasa AARON CHOWN/PA WIRE So many families are hosting people who have fled other parts of the North Kivu province that some told us they are living 20 people to a room. Many brothels have sprung up, with women forced into “survivor sex” to feed their children. When Sophie initially travelled to the country three years ago, she was the first member of the royal family to visit the DRC, where an estimated six to eight million people have died in fighting over the last 20 years. This year the fighting has intensified, plunging the country into its fifth war since 1996. It is a war fuelled by resources. North and South Kivu have lucrative gold seams and some of the world’s biggest coltan deposits, which contain the valuable metal tantalum, needed for smartphones and laptops. • Inside the mines fuelling Congo’s brutal war — and the world’s tech The M23 militia, backed by forces from neighbouring Rwanda, controls vast swathes of the eastern provinces of North and South Kivu, following its shock seizure in January of the provincial capitals of Goma and Bukavu. Congolese armed forces mostly fled, some removing their uniforms and seeking sanctuary in the headquarters of UN peacekeepers, 3,000 of whom remain under siege. What was once a ragtag militia has set up a parallel administration, even issuing visas and charging taxes, installing traffic police and conscripting thousands of young men. An estimated 7,000 people have been killed and so many forced from their homes that according to UN figures, there are now 5.3 million internally displaced people in the east. M23 destroyed all the displacement camps. A report last month by UN investigators detailed gross human rights violations and possible war crimes, including summary executions and rampant sexual violence in the two provinces. These it said were being carried out by all sides, including M23, the Congolese military and its affiliated militias such as the Wazalendo, also known as the Patriots. The Congo war is one of seven that President Trump claims to have resolved, describing a deal signed in the Oval Office on June 27 (after mediation by Qatar) as a “glorious triumph.” It was, however, little more than a statement of intent and only included the DRC and Rwanda, not M23, and fighting has resumed. M23’s political chief Corneille Nangaa, former head of the DRC Electoral Commission, told CNN last week that they will not stop until they reach Kinshasa. “We need to liberate our country,” he said. Although the Congolese authorities, as well as the commander of the UN peacekeepers, have retreated to Beni, few believe it would be safe for M23 to further expand its territory. “I’ve never seen such a well-armed militia,” said a senior MONUSCO officer. “They have drones, jammers, missiles.” • DR Congo: how we fled Goma’s rebel takeover The shattering impact on local women was etched on the faces of a small group we met at Beni hospital. Sitting on mats in a tent, though colourfully dressed the women look haunted, one remaining side on and never speaking as others shared their stories. One woman in a long crimson dress wept as she spoke of being raped the previous week. She had fled Goma with her 10 children when M23 took power and killed her husband, and managed to get work on a small plot of land. “I saw armed men passing through every day,” she said, “but I needed to farm to feed my children.” Another, just 16, told of being taken by a policeman and raped in a cell. Some had walked seven days to reach the small hospital, which is now the only functioning health service for hundreds of miles and struggling to meet the demand. Pregnancies have doubled, according to the director. As needs have risen so services have been slashed with the shutdown of USAID by the Trump administration in January. The UN operation in the DRC was the most dependent on US assistance on earth, with it providing $920 million of the $1.25 billion raised last year, according to Bruno Lemarquis, UN deputy representative and coordinator of humanitarian assistance. The suspension has left them with just 15 per cent of what they need this year. Already the UN refugee agency has laid off half its staff and UNICEF a third. Many clinics have run out of rape kits, which included emergency contraception and medications to prevent HIV and STDs, following the US cancellation of a contract for 100,000 kits. A vital income support project which the duchess visited on Thursday at a one-stop centre for rape victims at Kintambo hospital will not exist next year, according to Noella Epie, from the UN development programme that runs it. Sophie met survivors who had been cast out by their families and now making a living making beaded bags, waffles and growing vegetables through the project. “It’s a lifesaver,” said one who had stayed up all night to make a beaded Union Jack as a gift. Sophie also examined the conservation work of the Virunga Foundation which runs a national park in the face of the conflict. She was given a toy gorilla during her visit AARON CHOWN/PA “It’s the perfect storm of massive cuts and increased needs,” said Cynthia Jones, head of the World Food Programme. “We have one of the largest hunger crises in the world with 28 million people in crisis and one of the largest number of displaced.” Many displaced women were among those gathered in a cheerfully painted safe space on a hillside in Beni, set up by the Danish Refugee Council, where women can gather to share their stories and sew clothes or weave baskets to sell as well as, they said, escape overcrowded homes and violent partners. One woman mentioned in passing the likelihood of being raped when fetching water or firewood, showing a shocking normalisation of the crime. “If someone is saying that just as a throwaway line, so matter of fact, we have to ask ourselves how have we reached the point where rape is just accepted as part of daily life?” said Sophie. In Kinshasa she had high-level meetings to raise her concerns with the foreign minister, prime minister and president, Felix Tshisekedi, who kept her waiting for two hours before receiving her at one of his lavish palaces on a hill. The trip has, she said, strengthened her resolve to keep raising the issue. Sophie joins a basket-weaving class where she met women affected by conflict and displacement in eastern DRC AARON CHOWN/PA “The women who come forward to tell their stories are so courageous, now we need to have the same courage to address the root cause of the horrors they have experienced in whatever ways we can — and put an end to this sort of suffering. “It’s horrible to hear the stories,” she admitted, “but each one deserves to be told and I just wish we didn’t have to hear them but we do. “It is not what I feel that matters, it’s how we can all encourage the world to sit up and take notice and bring about change. If I can play some small part in that, then that is a privilege and a duty.”
