A LARGE crowd gathered around the open sides of the makeshift courtroom in the village of Kamanyola in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in early March to watch the culmination of a trial of 15 military officers for the rape of minors.
They watched in silence, some craning to see better, as a soldier stripped the epaulettes off a colonel whom a judge had just ordered be dishonourably discharged from the army and sentenced to seven years in prison for raping a local 14-year-old girl last September.
“The fact that a very high-ranking officer has been sentenced is a very eloquent message that no one is above the law,” said Judge Innocent Mayembe, who found 12 of the soldiers guilty.
The trial, from February 27 to March 9, by a mobile military court offered a rare chance of justice for rape in conflict-hit eastern DRC, where an estimated half of the women have experienced sexual violence in some form.
During the trial, held in an open-air wooden structure, several victims and one victim’s father offered their testimonies in specially designed hoods that obscured their faces – an indicator of the fear of stigma that stops many from coming forward.
“I don’t have any friends any more,” one victim said.
Holding the hearings in the local community helps “show people the need to speak up about cases of sexual violence”, said lawyer Armand Muhima, whose organisation funded the trial. “The goal … is to educate the people so they know that the law is there for everyone.”
Muhima works for the Panzi Foundation, an organisation set up by Nobel Prize-winning gynaecologist Denis Mukwege, who campaigns to help the hundreds of thousands of women raped in eastern DRC since the region plunged into conflict in the 1990s.
The Second Congo War, which killed millions of people, formally ended in 2002, but Congolese forces are still battling multiple armed groups in eastern regions, fuelling the long-running sexual violence crisis.
