My notes from Chapter 4 “The Democratic Republic of Congo: Rape” of Ann Jones’ compelling book War is not over when it’s over: women speak out from the ruins of war
Excerpting, editing, comment by Carolyn Bennett
Business and War – RAPE
“… People not already removed to serve the soldiers are cleared off, leaving open fields for armies to go about the real business of war, which of course is business. In the Congo, that business is extracting natural resources and selling them. All of this is made possible by rape used as a tactic of war.” Violence privatized.
‘Privatization of violence’
“Observers of world conflicts use the term ‘privatization of violence’ to describe a new and increasingly popular form of war—that is, war waged by individual men who, in their drive for personal wealth and power, use private armies and paramilitary groups, or stir up ethnic militias to wreak private vengeance. …
“The privatization of violence also delivers the destruction of the public good. Driven by crazed personal greed and ambition, the privatized war has nothing whatsoever to do with the welfare of the people who happen to live in its path.”
Women take the brunt of endless violence unprosecuted and unpunished, Jones writes. Women’s enslavement by militia and national army includes sexual servitude amounting to endless torture, often ending in death.
Violence with impunity— war or “peace”
Men get away with endless terror against women
Raped women meet their rapists, combatants demobilized and reintegrated into civilian life, on the street. Often raped repeatedly, before entering and when returning from hospital—women’s experience of terror never ends.
Many men speak of the ‘culture of impunity’ not as a barbaric breakdown of justice; but as today’s way of life, a free pass that encourages civilians—teachers, pastors, fathers—to take up practices popularized by soldiers.
“The failure to punish anyone for rape or torture gives everyone permission (The number of men penalized for crimes against women in the DRC is almost nil). …Absence of punishment creates a ‘culture of impunity’ in which those responsible for punishing crime become complicit with criminals.” The consequences are boundless suffering.
Woman, culture, society, family, future BREAKDOWN
Woman target of men at war
“As direct targets of men at war, women and girls suffered terribly. One or another armed group might be singled out as the worst perpetrators of atrocities but every armed group— even the UN peacekeeping force— was guilty of rape.
“Men singly or in gangs raped women and girls of all ages…. They often tortured women during rape….
“They cut off women nipples or breasts; they mutilated or cut off the external genitalia. They [men] eviscerated living pregnant women to remove and kill fetuses. After rape, men commonly inserted foreign objects into the vagina: sticks, sand, rocks, knives, rifle barrels, bottles, broken glass, pestles covered in pepper, burning wood or charcoal, or molten plastic made by melting shopping bags. They inserted a handgun or rifle in the vagina and fired it.
Women, family breakdown
The whole of life [falls] apart. Rape makes that happen…
“In eastern Congo …husbands cast out raped wives to fend for themselves, with or without their children; or raped wives with no visible injuries conceal the fact of rape from their husbands and try to carry on. In either case, women are afraid to venture out to gather firewood, or fetch water, or cultivate their fields.
“For a time women band together to work the fields — until soldiers abduct a group en masse. Terrified, women begin to neglect their crops, or soldiers steal the produce, and families suffer malnourishment and hunger.
“With no surplus produce to sell at market, women have no money. They can’t pay school fees for their children. Girls are afraid to go to school; now boys drop out too. Some men leave the village, shamed by a wife’s rape. Some men leave to join a militia, voluntarily or by force. Some men leave to look for work and money in cities far away. Many men never come back. Some outcast women leave for cities or truck stops where they take up ‘survival sex,’ selling the only asset they have left, their already dirtied bodies.
Consequential rippling breakdowns
From woman, the female of the species including women and girls, reaching within woman; and from her wounds, farther, wider, deeper into society and culture and existence itself
“Cultural norms die when women are raped in the presence of their families; when boys and men are forced to rape their own sisters, mothers, or daughters, or are murdered on the spot for refusing; when boy soldiers are compelled to rape babies or grandmothers. …
“So divisive is rape, and the shame and terror that attend it, that even in the best case a family may fall apart…. The durability of extended family ties, the allegiance of kinfolk, the pleasant give-and-take of hospitality at the heart of Congolese life—all fade and fracture.
“Fragments of families pack up and move to places they believe to be safer, leaving empty houses in the village, soon looted by soldiers. In this way, the community falls apart.Humankind no Island
“Those who leave are desperate, penniless, often ill with sexually transmitted infections.
“Those who stay are old, ill, infirm.
“Those who return find their property ransacked, their tools stolen, their crops and livestock plundered, their friends and neighbors vanished.
“They move away again.”
We are no island unto ourselves; all are part of us, part of the whole. Another’s death diminishes me because I am involved in humankind. Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for me. [Licensed unlicensed variation on Donne]
Book source
Ann Jones’ The war is not over when it’s over: women speak out from the ruins of war (Metropolitan Books, 2010); Chapter 4 “The Democratic Republic of Congo: Rape,” pages 135-163
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Bennett's books available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; The Book Den, Ltd.: BookDenLtd@frontiernet.net [Danville, NY]; Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY]; LONGS’ Cards and Books: http://longscardsandbooks.com/ [Penn Yan, NY]
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