wounds that never heal

We live in sad times, violent times, times when even the gentlest hearts are hardened by continuous exposure to crimes so chilling, we forget what it means to be shocked. Every now and again though, something comes up in the news to shock even the most obdurate hearts.

This is a tale of inhumanity. The inhumanity of men. In the endless war in the Congo, where prying television cameras don’t venture, and news headlines are not made, away from the conscience of the world; mass rapes are taking place on a scale unprecedented in all of history. Even worse, the mass-rapes are accompanied by the most brutal, gratuitous and deliberate wounding, often with guns, clubs, sticks and other crude implements, being stuffed into the victims causing fistula damage and further increasing the pain and humiliation. So deliberate and calculated is this violence that care is taken not to murder the victims but to leave them alive to endure lives of total bowel and urinary incontinence and extreme ostracization. I would not advise that anyone easily upset by accounts of gore click here. Newsweek's expostition of the violence.

"...But once fighting died down, victims began coming out of the jungles and forests and their condition was worse than anyone had imagined. Thousands of women had been raped so brutally that they had fistulas. They wandered into hospitals soaked in their own urine and feces, rendered incontinent by their injuries. "Pastors would say to me, 'Jo, I can't preach because the church is too smelly," says Dr. Jo Lusi, a gynecologist and medical director at HEAL. (He and Lyn Lusi are husband and wife.) "No one wanted to be around them. These women were outcasts even more than rape victims usually are. They would say to me, 'Dr. Jo, am I just a thing to throw away when I smell bad?' ""

The atrocities are not committed by any one group, although every group is said to have its specific signature style. The Interahamwe of Rwanda's genocide and the Congolese army itself are among the most brutal groups. The common thread is the enduring cry of anguish from the fistulas as the walls of the women‘s internal organs are torn apart. Afraid of losing their lives in open warfare against each other, the warring groups have decided instead to take it out on the women and children left in the villages of the Congo.

"....But more often the damage is caused by the deliberate introduction of objects into the victim's vagina when the rape itself is over. The objects might be sticks or pipes. Or gun barrels. In many cases the attackers shoot the victim in the vagina at point-blank range after they have finished raping her. "Often they'll do this carefully to make sure the woman does not die," says Dr. Denis Mukwege, medical director of Panzi Hospital. "The perpetrators are trying to make the damage as bad as they can, to use it as a kind of weapon of war, a kind of terrorism." Instead of just killing the woman, she goes back to her village permanently and obviously marked. "I think it's a strategy put in place by these groups to disrupt society, to make husbands flee, to terrorize.""

The questions linger on, even as tears of rage and sadness take over. Why this cruelty? What is it about men that turns them against women in this way, in Darfur, in Northern Uganda and in the Congo.

“All the armed men rape,” says Dr. Mukwege.