Denis Mukwege: Doctor dedicated to helping rape victims

The epidemic of sexual violence in Democratic Republic of Congo visits most of us in the form of statistics, like the 27,000 rapes reported in a single year in a single province, or the 70 per cent of the women of one town who had been brutally assaulted.

The crisis visits Dr Denis Mukwege in a different way. It's there every day in the waiting room of his surgery in Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu, the province where the first statistic was recorded.

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An average of 10 women come every day, sometimes from hundreds of miles away, having been subjected to some of the worst acts of sadism imaginable. "It is important to point out that this sexual terrorism is done in a methodical manner," the 53-year-old told the US Senate last year. "Generally the victims are raped by several men at a time, one after another; in public, in front of parents, husbands, children or neighbours. Rape is followed by mutilations or other corporal torture."

In a country where sexual violence has reached levels never seen before and that no one can fully explain, Dr Mukwege is the man who has devoted his life to trying to repair the damage done to women often left for dead.

He was, for a long time, the only gynaecologist treating rape wounds in Congo. At the Panzi hospital in Bukavu, he performs as many as half a dozen surgeries a day; so far he has treated 21,000 women. His pioneering work has helped thousands of these women reclaim something of their physical selves and begin to heal some of the psychological wounds.

A pastor's son who saw at first hand the suffering of women in rural areas who would have to travel bleeding on the backs of donkeys when pregnancies went wrong, he decided to become a doctor. After studying obstetrics and gynaecology in Angers, France, he returned to Lemera, Kivu, to set up a clinic.

This effort was burned to the ground in 1996 during the first civil war. After settling in Bukavu to try again, he found that the maternity ward at Panzi was overrun by women who had been raped and that the numbers were growing. Dr Mukwege's response was to set up a ward for victims of sexual violence, and his work was recognised with the Olof Palme Prize last year, when he was also named African of the Year and given the UN human rights prize.

The doctor has repeatedly been asked to explain why the horrors are occurring in Congo but he limits himself to explaining what is happening.

"Here it is not rape because you have desire for a woman, it's rape because you want to destroy that person through her private parts," he said recently. "There is no appropriate expression, because if these were men, were shot by a gun, we would call it genocide. But it is another type of genocide."

Daniel Howden

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