I share Eamonn’s utter distaste for Victoria Brittain’s bracketing of DR Congo with Gaza. I can understand why the article left Petra “dizzy with nausea.” I want, however, to take a brief moment to spell out why.

In the two sentences she devotes to the current carnage in DR Congo, she mentions “pillage” and “rape.” It’s the latter issue I want to highlight here. My main point in doing so is not to remind you all that Israel’s armed forces have never used rape as a weapon of war, in marked contrast to nearly every conflict of the last century (think of, among a very long list, German troops in Poland, Soviet troops in Germany, Pakistani troops in Bangladesh, Serb paramilitaries in Bosnia, Indonesian army regulars and paramilitaries in East Timor, the janjaweed in Darfur.)

My main point is to highlight the repulsiveness of the rape tactic. To say that we need to distinguish between those conflicts where rape is a factor and where it isn’t. To say that we must never elide that distinction, as Victoria Brittain has done, because challenging rape in wartime has to be at the front and center of our human rights concerns, and not an afterthought.

As this recent harrowing report from CBS makes clear, the rape tactic is deployed with stomach-churning regularity in Congo:

In the last ten years in Congo, hundreds of thousands of women have been raped, most of them gang raped. Panzi Hospital is full of them.

“All these women have been raped?” Cooper asked Dr. Mukwege, standing near a very large group of women waiting.

All the women, the doctor says, have been patients of his.

Within a week, Dr. Mukwege says this room will be filled with new faces, new victims.

“You know, they’re in deep pain. But it’s not just physical pain. It’s psychological pain that you can see. Here at the hospital, we’ve seen women who’ve stopped living,” Dr. Mukwege explains.

And not all the people the hospital treats are adults. “There are children. I think the youngest was three years old,” Mukwege says. “And the oldest was 75.”

To understand what is happening here, you have to go back more than a decade, when the genocide that claimed nearly a million lives in neighboring Rwanda spilled over into Congo. Since then, the Congolese army, foreign-backed rebels, and home-grown militias have been fighting each other over power and this land, which has some of the world’s biggest deposits of gold, copper, diamonds, and tin. The United Nations was called in and today their mission is the largest peacekeeping operation in history.

Since 2005, some 17,000 UN troops and personnel have cobbled together a fragile peace. Last year they oversaw the first democratic election in this country in 40 years. But now all they have accomplished is at risk. Fighting has broken out once again in eastern Congo and the region threatens to slip into all-out war.
Each new battle is followed by pillaging and rape; entire communities are terrorized. Forced to flee their homes, people take whatever they can, and walk for miles in the desperate hope of finding food and shelter. Over the last year, more than 500,000 people have been uprooted. A fraction of them make it to cramped camps, where they depend on UN aid to survive.

Let’s reiterate that: “hundreds of thousands of women have been raped, most of them gang raped.”

Learn more here.

Let’s steer clear of stupid and offensive analogies - whether from the past, in the shape of the Holocaust, or from the terrible present in central Africa.