“We all have the power to change the course of History.”
Denis Mukwege
1Special thanks is given here to Professor Dr. Denis Mukwege for his exceptional mission and unflagging combat and for his vibrant and inspiring intervention in our work reflexions on War Memories.
2Studying wars is a vast subject which allows a cross-fertilization of observations and points of view, theories and methodologies. It also entails making choices of angles of analysis, selection of themes and corpuses and creation of archives, critical distance and revisiting history with the presence of new testimonies, all conditioned by the particular context of an on-going conflict, whose reality/ies may be low-intensity warfare, terrorist action or total war.
3The compilation of archives is a long process and reflects a necessarily progressive construction of a memorial edifice buffeted by what can become a cacophony of testimonies, those from enemies, attackers, military corps at all hierarchical levels, but also those from the civilian population, the victims, and all this with or without the benefit of hindsight. In order to apprehend this enormous task, one needs to gradually highlight specific situations so as to complete the various components of a broad panorama of barbarity and evil destruction and devastation.
4In 2022, wars, aggressions, genocides and politicides, ethnic cleansing and organized tortures are still a shameful reality. The spectrum in this respect is wide: it is planetary. No place is safe from upheavals and their infinitely deleterious and cruel deviances. Civil wars, displacement and exile, totalitarian regimes’ atrocities, sometimes unknown or too discreetly mediatized, distant or not so distant but extremely severe massacres and oppressions (the mass murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, barbarity in the sprawling North Korean prison camps, the slaughters by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, the rapes and murders of Burma’s Rohingya population in Rakhine State, the atrocities committed against men, women and children during the genocide in Rwanda, etc.), wars of colonisation and liberation (Angola, India, Algeria, Kenya…), long-lasting wars with catastrophic human and material devastation (Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan… and most recently Ukraine) bring with them a heavy and unbearable toll of victims, of all horizons, regardless of sex or age.
5The status of victims needs clarification as it underpins several perceptions, nuanced by the acts involved and their consequences: segregation, discrimination, humiliation, terror, torture and systematic (verbal, psychological or physical) violence which can be epitomized in words and expressions, that are now commonplace in the understanding of wars and conflicts: sexual slavery, collective rape, sexual mutilation… and resulting contamination of all kinds (STIs, AIDS, etc.).
6Amassing evidence, giving a voice to victims, collecting and elaborating living archives are needed for the constitution of a memorial edifice to counter oblivion, the absence of proof and a blatant lack of visual or oral testimonies. It is a must to empower women, provide them with support and give them a voice so they can find their true and rightful place in international history, mainly written by men.
7Though men can also suffer the throes of (sexual) violence and the profound trauma of rape, the writing of (a) war history still tends to avoid some questions, in this case the rape of women as a weapon of war. In all their abject and abominable dimensions, these “weapons” are cheap. Bodies are easily “consumable” and horribly dismembered by men who have lost all self-respect, dignity and conscience. Torturers, some of them teenagers, others mature men, relentlessly delight in their bloody manoeuvres. They are animated by highly depraved instincts in the pursuit of an endless destructive mission that totally deprives them of any vestige of human respect and civilised goodness.
8All witnesses, whether observers, aggressed human beings, or even perpetuators, have a story to deliver, a story which needs time to unfold and requires adaptation to the various stages to be faced and attained from individual trauma to repair and reconstruction before finding a place in the social and community fabric. This phenomenon can be likened to collective reconstruction after a collective trauma.
- 1 Denis Mukwege’s word of choice in La force des femmes (Paris: Gallimard, 2021) / The Power of Women (...)
- 2 One can also view the testimony of Congolese refugee and survivor Esther Mayiza Kimpavita filmed by (...)
- 3 Tatiana Mukanire Bandalire, Au-delà de nos larmes, Paris : des femmes-Antoinette Fouque, 2021.
9Survivors1 are encouraged by Denis Mukwege, his teams and an impressive network of “strong and leading women” to rebuild their self-esteem and occupy a non-humiliating, dignified place in their family, community and, more broadly, their country. Many projects have emerged like those of V-Day and the City of Joy (Cité de la Joie) to find ways to reintegrate women who have been severely molested. Many Congolese women have found the stamina and extreme courage to participate in documentaries (like SEMA)2 and to break the silence surrounding their survival. Some have opted for the publication of their stories, in order to go beyond self-censorship, stigmatisation and rejection of themselves, and others as a means to overcome their traumas, as witnessed by the poignant monograph by Tatiana Mukanire Bandalire, Beyond our Tears3.
- 4 See Denis Peschanski and Brigitte Sion (eds.), La Vérité du Témoin, Mémoire et mémorialisation, vol (...)
10These examples of living anthologies and primary sources bring together testimonies which contribute to the composition of collective war memory and foreground deliberately concealed atrocities, dissembled traces and secretly endured humiliations. Now is the time for healing, for reconstruction, for the building of a durable peace based on the solid pillars of women’s resilience, strength and united power. These survivors are not only resilient women: in revealing their Truths4, they have reached the phenomenal status of being actresses in the construction of their individual stories and fundamental to the understanding of their national and collective histories.
11These exemplary women, who have been the targets of rape and mutilation indelibly engraved in their bodies and souls, are facing the future with bravery but also with hope for justice to be done and hope for a durable peace.
12Discordance in the perception and interpretation of their war experiences should give way to a harmonious and serene polyphony of intertwined survivors’ testimonies to counteract the dissonant notes of male aggressors and to rehabilitate a tangible truth and promote free expression and transitional justice.
13In this spirit, the following speech delivered by Professor Dr. Denis Mukwege conveys a personal testimony of what his life has become as an obstetrician-gynaecologist in South Kivu Province. After briefly recalling the general context over the last 25 years or so in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Professor Dr. Denis Mukwege explains in his plenary lecture, transcribed here, the “phenomenon of rape as a strategy of war” and the holistic responses that have been devised to help survivors, from health-care to transitional justice.