The March/April issue of Foreign Policy magazine features an opinion piece by Laura Heaton titled "What Happened in Luvungi? On rape and truth in Congo." The article questions accounts of an attack on villages around Luvungi, a town in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), that occurred during four days in late July and early August of 2010, and questions the attention that sexual violence in the DRC receives in the wider international community.
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In the article, Heaton alludes to a conspiracy among the U.N., international humanitarian organizations, researchers, and Congolese community leaders to fabricate or inflate stories of rape in DRC. What might motivate this range of actors to collectively lie about sexual violence is left unclear, and Heaton's allegations of distortion are largely based on "wildly disparate reports" of rape during the Luvungi attacks. But these simply do not exist. Every humanitarian organization reporting on the Luvungi response, and multiple human rights investigations all found that hundreds of women and girls reported being raped during those four days. In July 2011, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights released a Final Report of U.N. Fact-Finding Missions into both the Luvungi incidents and the widely criticized U.N. peacekeeping response to the incidents. The U.N. confirmed that at least 387 civilians were raped, many by multiple perpetrators, and a great number in front of multiple witnesses.
This weight of evidence is not counterbalanced by the suspicions of one anonymous health worker whom Heaton interviewed, nor by her own inexpert and offensive suggestion that a "psychological element seemed to be missing" in the three survivors she encountered. Sadly, the author missed an opportunity to really explore what happened in Luvungi -- and the truth about rape in Congo -- when she chose to disregard available information (including information provided by both of us) that wasn't compatible with a premise she was determined to pursue.
In early August 2010, at the request of the Walikale Health Zone authorities and civil society leaders, we sent a joint Ministry of Public Health-International Medical Corps team to respond to the Luvungi incidents. On August 6, three days after the attacks ended, we began transporting people to the nearest health center, roughly 8 kilometers from Luvungi. While sexual violence is a too-common feature of conflict in DRC, we did not expect to receive such large numbers of patients reporting rape. As days and weeks passed, more and more women came forward. For survivors who arrived at the health center there was never any financial or material incentive provided. Far from encouraging increased reports, we were concerned about our ability to provide adequate treatment to those who needed it, as our supplies of emergency contraception and antibiotics were limited and we struggled to restock.
There are undoubtedly many important lessons to learn from the Luvungi incidents. For us, the priority has been determining how to better prepare response teams to meet the needs of survivors. We have since conducted numerous trainings on appropriate care and have pre-positioned emergency stocks of essential drugs in several health zones in North and South Kivu.
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