Now as I write, I imagine the members of the UN peace mission sitting down with a notebook and, pen in hand, taking notes while they’re explaining what they understand to be sexual exploitation. It appears as though it’s not such an obvious thing that someone working to defend peace knows what pedophilia is, just to give an example. On several occasions the video ponderously enunciates the rules, such as “payment with money, jobs, goods, or services in exchange for sex is prohibited.” The video also describes a few real-life cases as practical illustrations for the theory. And so it tells the case of a sixteen-year-old girl who was brought to Liberia as a prostitute and who was confined there in a place called the Sugar Club. When the girl sees a UN vehicle at the door of the establishment, she thinks she’s saved and, relieved, runs to the car to ask for help. The driver rapes her and later informs the owner of the club that the girl had tried to escape. It’s like what happens in those popular tales when a princess gets lost in a forest and thinks she’s safe when she sees a little house with the lights on. She doesn’t realize that it’s in the house and not in the forest where the greatest threat lies, or maybe she comes to understand it only when the soldier pulls up his zipper. Another illustrative story on the video: A UN worker gave some cookies to a young girl in exchange for sex: he got her pregnant and subsequently skipped town. The mother got by selling bananas to care for her boy, at less than a dollar a day. The boy was called mzungu tali tali, an insult that means “not black or white”; an out-of-the-ordinary child who was denied treatment even by the Congolese doctors, who alleged they couldn’t understand the mystery of difference, this mixed body.
There’s a sequence in the video that I find particularly disturbing. The sanctimonious voice-over says (I wrote it down word for word in my notebook): “Victims face other consequences besides possible discrimination, the threat of AIDS, or unwanted pregnancies, because the worst of all possible damages is perhaps that of robbing a person of their dignity.” It would seem the United Nations also attributes supernatural abilities to itself: it thinks it can take a woman’s dignity from her. Those nasty little pieces of work in uniform think dignity is located in a woman’s cunt and with their phalluses they wield the power to strip it out.
Should anyone forget or not have caught the message clearly enough, there’s a recap at the end, kind of like at the end of a recipe where the cook enumerates the ingredients again. So they insist:
REMEMBER:
No sex in exchange for money, work, goods, or services.
No sex with children.
You have the obligation to denounce sexual abuse or exploitation.
MONUSCO. That’s the name of the peacekeeping mission specific to the Congo, an acronym for United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But I think it should be called mollusk in English, mollusque in French, that slimy creature that recoils and hides when approached. What name do they give your mandate? Oh yes, it’s a “monitoring” mandate, meaning they’re there to do nothing, maybe play some cards. These missions send soldiers to the Congo for counting the dead and observing. Yes, a big bunch of Peeping Toms, or voyeurs of death in the best-case scenario and, in the worst, perverts.
MONUSCO has airplanes, state-of-the-art technology, and the very best in trucks. In the Congo, people say the mission is there to do nothing, and though the group is flush with resources, they’re only good for transporting minerals and doing business with the companies that later sell it on the international market. It’s also said that the members of MONUSCO sell arms to rebel factions or exchange them for gold or other precious metals, which means they are the ones financing the armed conflict. They call coltan blue gold; I don’t know if it’s for the color, which is more like black, but knowing what I’ve come to know, I think it’s in honor of the blue helmets the UN soldiers wear. UN Security Council Resolution 1857 grants this organization the responsibility of overseeing and controlling the gold and coltan routes. And behold its undoing. The demise happened the moment they named as judge of the criminals the very criminal himself, the instant United Nations personnel were authorized internationally to control the routes that form part of its own corruption. Sir, you can tell me a thousand and one times that the UN soldiers didn’t do anything. I could tell you the same thing: you’re absolutely right, they did nothing. But that would be only—how can I put it?—the best-case scenario, when they dedicate themselves to this monitoring work that though useless and entirely cynical is idyllic when compared with other actions.
You can tell me that I’m an old woman, that I’m not as sharp or as quick as a young person. And I would answer that you’re right, that today, a day when I’m writing my testimony, I’m very old, but since my mind had stopped for so many years and took a nice long nap, slept in its madness, it’s not as worn out as the minds of other people of my same age. Yours surely has never taken a nap in restorative insanity, because the crazy ones, when they do stop reasoning, also stop producing and fall away from the corrupt social mechanisms. I bet you’ve never wanted to allow your madness to snatch away your ambition. You are very sane. Oh, no doubt about it. You are very sane today, but when you reach my age you’ll wipe your drool with a hundred-dollar bill thinking it’s a rag.
Now tell me, how can it be that after so many years, European citizens, North American citizens, or citizens of any other country who grant themselves the right to defend human rights—with all their attendant sense of superiority when waving their flags—are able to watch the rebels or soldiers of the regular Congolese army, day in and day out, systematically massacre their girls and women? As you already know, sir, in Africa generally and in the Congo in particular, the family economy is built on women. Men don’t work. Women do everything. They are charged with fetching water, washing clothes in the river, finding food. The more fortunate are able to sell a few products gleaned from the earth, and whatever else the rebels allow. Four- and five-year-old girls prepare food for their brothers. When I arrived, I was surprised to find the men so idle, playing cards or sitting on the porches of their homes. So one day it occurred to me to ask one of these men why only women worked. He responded that men are warriors and they can’t work because they have to be ready for war at all times. I thought about it again when I heard an intelligent and very good woman say something, a woman I’ll call V for valiant to cloak her identity. In the Congo, V said, women have become a weapon of war. The rebels know everything depends on women, so they destroy them; they rape them so they can’t work for days. Some suffer so much they end up taking their own lives. They don’t have to bother killing the women themselves. Systematic rape is enough to ruin this country. So V then told a story to everyone who had come to that informative meeting to address the situation of Congolese women. There were twenty of us. Most were European. You already know the things I’ve seen and lived through. Well, believe me when I tell you that while listening to V tell her story, I confronted the truth about absolute cruelty for the first time. I felt the same shock, the same sense of disgust, the same impotence, the same desire to scream or to run nowhere and everywhere all at the same time. V told us the following story:
V had a friend, Jeanette, from her same hometown. The rebels kidnapped her together with her five children. They raped and tortured her for a week. At the end of the week, they gave her a room and nursed her back to health. They gave her water; they cured her wounds to the extent possible. They even fed her meat for several days. It had been a long time since Jeanette had eaten meat. Jeanette asked the soldiers why they were taking care of her after having hurt her and wanted to know if they would please let her see her five children. One of the rebels answered: “Now you say you want to see your five children? Now, after we’ve taken care of you for seven days? Now, after finally eating meat?”