Democratic Republic of Congo

Americans are accustomed to dealing with natural disasters.

California has its earthquakes. Florida has its hurricanes. Kansas has its tornadoes. Arizona has its wildfires.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the most common type of natural disaster is the “rape crisis” caused by AK-47 toting Black Undertow militias.

The Eastern Congo is “the rape capital of the world.” It has been named “the worst place on earth” to be a woman. There are 48 rapes every hour, 1,252 rapes a day, over 400,000 rapes a year.

To put this in perspective, 29 out of 1,000 Congolese women are raped every year. In the United States, 0.5 out of 1,000 American women are raped annually. Thus, a Congolese woman is 58x more likely to be raped than an American woman.

In North Kivu and South Kivu, which are the epicenter of the Congolese “rape crisis,” 67 out of 1,000 women have been raped at least once – 7 percent of the female population. Children and teenagers are the most popular targets. The intense scrutiny of the issue by women’s rights groups has revealed that the rape of men and boys is almost as widespread.

The “rape crisis” in the Congo isn’t just an unusual spike in the total number of rapes: it is rape as a weapon of war, rape as a type of torture and sadism, rape combined with sex slavery, and the “mainstreaming” of rape as a lifestyle in the social context of the collapse of the state.

Recent studies have shown a more complex picture of rape in the Congo. In 2008, 38 percent of rapes in the Congo were committed by civilians. In 2004, less than 1 percent of rapes in the Congo were committed by civilians. There were also more total rapes in Équateur which is 1,500 miles from the Kivus.

From 1996 until 2003, a staggering 5.4 million people were killed in the First Congo War and Second Congo War. The violence between the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda spilled over the eastern border into North Kivu and South Kivu and culminated in the toppling of Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997.

The Congo Wars were the most destructive conflict since the Second World War. In terms of the pure savagery of the fighting, there is nothing in Europe quite comparable to it. Even the Red Army’s sweep across Germany and Hungary wasn’t as bad. The callousness and brutality of those years has become so deeply embedded into Congolese culture that the atrocities have continued for years after the war.

From 1874 to 1877, Henry Morton Stanley led the first White expedition from Zanzibar on the Pacific through what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo to the Atlantic. In his “first contact” travels through the Eastern Congo, Stanley found a region inhabited by cannibal tribes that had been devastated by the Arab slave trade.

Thousands of Congolese girls and boys were being sold as sex slaves to the pedophiles in Zanzibar by Arab slave traders like Tippu Tip. Entire villages had been wiped out. The strong preyed upon the weak. The “law of the jungle” prevailed throughout the region.

135 years later, the Eastern Congo is reverting to its African roots. As the last traces of European civilization are overwhelmed by the primeval jungle, it increasingly resembles the world of Mr. Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

OD celebrates Black History Month 2012 by drawing attention to the “rape crisis” in the Democratic Republic of Congo which represents a reversion to the indigenous culture of barbarism that has been nurtured back to life by anti-colonialist Western liberals since the 1960s.







