The world just concluded the 16 days of activism against Gender-based violence, a campaign which unites people around raising awareness about gender-based violence, challenge discriminatory attitudes and call for improved laws and services to end violence against women. During this period that runs from November 25 and December 10, different feminist and human rights groups hold different activities during the annual campaign, and as always, this year, no one remembered to keep in their thoughts the Congolese Kinyarwanda speaking community, which has been subjected to systematic rape for decades. ALSO READ: New footage suggests FDLR fighting alongside DR Congo army Although everyone living in a conflict area is affected, women in particular face devastating forms of sexual violence, which are sometimes deployed systematically to achieve military or political objectives. Women and girls in the Kinyarwanda-speaking communities of DR Congo are no exception to this. In early May this year, the international medical humanitarian organization, Médecins Sans Frontières, reported that within just a fortnight, they had provided care to 674 victims of sexual violence in camps for displaced people around Goma, the capital of eastern DR Congo’s North Kivu province. ALSO READ: EU sanctions FDLR top commander over atrocities in DR Congo As if this is not enough of a red flag, human rights groups have chosen to side with perpetrators of this rape, who include FDLR—remnants of the perpetrators of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda. So how can we say we are fighting GBV, but when it comes to Congolese women, all of a sudden we shut our eyes? It is no secret that during the Genocide, the same happened in Rwanda. Women were brutally raped in the open as the world watched. The same people who benefit from the silence exported the violence and took thousands of sex slaves with them, and three decades later, the same story is told. Are there any victims of sexual violence that don’t matter? ALSO READ: DR Congo crisis: Understanding FDLR’s source of funding Closing our eyes from what is happening in DR Congo is a reward for the perpetrators whose sense of entitlement to the women there is evidently an issue, not only to their victims but also to their families and generations to come. Not speaking about the systematic rapes anywhere is only giving a trophy of war to its perpetrators, and it sends a message that they can rape women if they have power over them.
