An apathetic, greedy west has abandoned war-torn Congo

In 1996, I was sitting with 20,000 grieving women in a stadium in Tuzla, Bosnia. The women were holding photographs of husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and boyfriends who had been ­disappeared a year earlier in a place called Srebrenica, a UN enclave where Bosnian refugees had turned over their protection to UN peacekeepers who stood passively by as 10,000 men were marched off to be slaughtered.

For nearly 12 years an invisible war has ravaged this beloved, beleaguered country. Over five million dead, hundreds of thousands of women and girls raped and sexually tortured in the most unimaginable ways, 800,000 internally displaced since January 2009 and close to 350,000 forced to flee to neighbouring countries.

...

Since the [military] operation began, a thousand women and children have been raped each month in North Kivu, massacres have ravaged villages, displacing entire communities, and new, even more horrific tortures of women have surfaced (including the lighting of fuel in women's vaginas). There has been no accountability for these horrific crimes, no justice, hardly a mention in the world press.

So the war continues because the western world is hungry for Congo's minerals. It pushes for a military "solution", knowing full well that these are doomed. Despite a powerful emerging women's movement, despite the work of brave doctors giving their lives to perform day-long operations on raped women, despite local activists and survivors of rape working with their hearts to change the situation and wake up the world to a war that has destroyed their country, Congo still doesn't register in our consciousness.