Americans are taking note of a recent study on massive rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but most fail to connect the horror with U.S. policy in Africa. Mass rape is one aspect of a genocide that has taken six million lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo. American proxies carried out Washington’s aims of creating chaos for the benefit of multinational corporations.
What should be the human response to a new study that estimates two million women have been raped in the Democratic Republic of Congo? The natural reaction is horror, anger, and to demand that somebody do something. But of course, one cannot do anything effectively, unless one has some understanding of why this atrocity against womankind occurs at such horrific levels in this particular country.
The study has gotten a fair amount of media coverage since the American Journal of Public Health announced the findings, last week. I suspect that much of the American public reaction has been: Oh, those Africans are incapable of behaving like civilized human beings. It would not occur to these Americans that their own country is the principal perpetrator in the crimes that have made parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo such a hellish place for women and girls. The United States is mainly responsible for the even larger crime of which mass rape is just one aspect: the death of six million people, the largest loss of life in any conflict since World War Two, and the second genocide of Congolese in the space of a century.
Glen Ford, radio broadcaster and analyst for nearly four decades, co-founder in 1977 of America’s Black Forum and later the Black Agenda Report.