A roundtable with Human Rights Defender Tulip Award winner Justine Masika Bihamba

I can say I was astonished to receive this award. It is very encouraging. When he heard about it, the Governor [of North Kivu province, ed.] said. ‘Oh, Justine, I thought you only made noise here in Goma, now I see your noise is heard even outside!’ It was a very strong signal, and very powerful and encouraging to get this award. And we hope some positive changes can be made as a result.

Helen Hintjens: Could you tell us how your organization started up?

Well, about six years ago we began to realize fully how huge a problem sexual violence against women had become. We formed an organization out of 36 separate groups and were able to deal with different aspects of the sexual violence problem. Each group focused on what it did best and the overall result was that we could start to pursue the three main goals we set ourselves:

• To arrange help and treatment, including psychosocial assistance, for the victims of rape;
• To raise awareness of the problem of sexual violence in Eastern DRC ;
• To make those responsible for tackling the issue take their duties more seriously and to ensure those who committed crimes are brought to justice through the courts.

On the first two goals we have made some progress. It has been difficult, but we are achieving results. With justice, however, there is a problem. There are three Tribunals in the Kivu region. But the judicial process is very slow and is corrupt. There can be reprisals and cultural traditions weigh heavily against achieving justice, especially relating to sexual violence. Even so, over 200 organizations now work in North Kivu on this issue. In our own organization we have worked with 8,133 women who have experienced rape or other forms of sexual violence. Translating this work into legal cases has been difficult; of the more than 8000 women, only 280 women have brought any charges against those who attacked them. And of these 280, only 68 have had their cases completed, with prison sentences of between 5 and 20 years. On the other hand, women should be receiving some kind of compensation, as victims of sexual violence, but so far this has proven impossible. Victims have to pay 15 per cent of the total sum awarded to them to the Public Treasury. Since this is asked for in advance, and most women do not have this amount of money, they cannot receive compensation.

We observed that rape was a social problem. Women have been raped in front of children, husbands and relatives. This means everyone in the community comes to be affected. So we went out to a number of villages (we currently work in five) and started to speak to the leaders. These included teachers, nurses, youth and women leaders and also elders and chiefs. We first asked them if they felt there was a problem of sexual violence in their village. We already knew that raped women were rejected by many communities and we wanted to tackle this problem. There was a lot of work to do, but we had to move slowly; and this took time. By working with local leaders, we felt we could achieve something longer-lasting in terms of prevention and attitude changes. We hoped leaders might set a good example in terms of behaviour and attitudes towards rape and other forms of sexual violence.

Ed Maan (Hague Academic Coalition staff): In your acceptance speech yesterday [i.e. at the award ceremony] you referred to the role of the outside world. Do you feel our Dutch political leaders took your demands seriously? Also, how can we, as academics, play our part? Helen Hintjens: Yesterday you were addressing several hundred people, including the Minister for Development Cooperation. What were the main points you wanted decision-makers in the Netherlands to hear?

Yesterday the Ministers told me that they had taken note of what I said. I spoke with them again after the larger meeting, over dinner, and they reassured me that they would take my points into consideration. I made four basic points yesterday when I was at the ceremony and reiterated these when I spoke personally with the Ministers after the event:

• We want a reinforced and ‘time-bound’ MONUC [UN Mission in the DRC, ed.] with a clear mandate to disarm. There is a weak state in DRC and this creates a problem of human rights violations with impunity. Since 28 August 2008, fighting has returned to Kivu and the region of Eastern DRC. We ask for a sustainable peace, a lasting peace. MONUC, instead of protecting civilians, has watched them being killed in the most horrible ways. MONUC has witnessed, rather than prevented, war crimes in Eastern DRC. We need an additional armed force. We want something like the force sent to Ituri in 2002-3, which was able to disarm the various groups fighting at that time. We want MONUC reinforced and with a clear mandate to disarm and the force to be in place for a finite period.
• We want the extraction of minerals and the import of arms to be more effectively controlled. The wealth of the Congo has not been a blessing but a curse. It has brought pillage and perpetuation of the small arms trade, linked to the protection of illegal routes of mineral extraction. We do not make weapons in Africa. Weapons are made in the West. So if there are weapons, they come from outside. We want certification of exports to be inspected and reinforced, in line with international agreements, for example on blood diamonds.
• Third, we want mixed tribunals in Eastern DRC to try cases, including cases of sexual violence. There have been many crimes. Waiting for the ICC is not an option: it will take too long and very few cases will ever come to trial. Mixed tribunals, which could be supported by the ICC and the information that they have gathered but take place in Kivu, would be the best way forward for justice. We need to overcome impunity.

• Women human rights defenders need special protection. Even compared with male human rights defenders, who are themselves vulnerable to attack, women are more so. Women are considered inferior and when they are attacked, they find little or no support from their male colleagues, even human rights defenders themselves. There is no defence for women defenders and this needs to be addressed.

The Minister of Cooperation went into concrete details on some of the proposals I had made. I proposed a programme of restorative justice in the East of Congo (DRC). At the moment one programme already in existence is being supported by the Dutch and is known as REJUSCO. The Minister wanted to know if this was helping at all. Mostly it operates only in Kinshasa, so I suggested that working through Kinshasa might mean that the effects are not felt that much in Kivu. Perhaps this work needs to move outside Kinshasa and I suggested a pilot project in Eastern DRC might be a good idea.

I think researchers and research institutes are there to do the important job of explaining how things are so that leaders understand the key issues. The job of academics is surely to do the analysis for the leaders and help them see more clearly what matters. REJUSCO is interesting as it is not linked with the DRC government – it was run for some time by a Belgian staff member alongside Congolese staff recruited locally. Our proposal is to create mixed tribunals. The Minister was concerned that these initiatives should not run on parallel tracks, and wanted to see an overview of the justice sector in Kivu and DRC. The Minister asked me, what should we do, meaning the Netherlands government. If the justice system worked well, then the UN soldiers would not need to come to DRC to try and stop the fighting.

Dubravka Zarkov (ISS staff): You mentioned your work with local leaders. Can you explain what means you use to work with these leaders? I imagine it may not always be easy.

Yes, we work in five villages and our strategy has been to first ask the leaders whether there are any rapes in their village that they are aware of. Then we ask them what they think of the situation, what they feel they can do; they often give their own response to the situation. We ask them, do they think that the woman consented? It took us more than a year to start being able to work constructively on questions of prevention and getting them to appreciate that rape and sexual violence are a problem for the society and not the fault of the woman.

Harry Hummel (Tulip Award staff): We have heard quite a lot about what is expected or wanted from the European countries; a fighting force, help with mixed tribunals and economic controls. I am wondering; this seems almost like a recolonization proposal for the Congo? Can you comment on that?

You have to remember that we in DRC, Zaire before, had thirty five years of dictatorship, and there have followed ten years of civil war. Before that we had colonialism of a very brutal kind. To get out of this situation we are in, a very bad situation, we do need some help, this is quite true. We recognize our weaknesses and need support to enable us to pick ourselves up off the ground again. Even after the so-called democratic elections, there is neither peace nor democracy. The East remains trapped in cycles of fighting and violence, including rising sexual violence. At the elections only those in Kinshasa and the West got peace. We did not. We don’t get peace because our neighbours continue to pillage resources from Congo. For Congolese people to start to reconstruct DRC, will definitely need a helping hand till we get back on our feet.

Dubravka Zarkov: You spoke of mixed tribunals. Some kind of mixed justice system has been tried in Rwanda, combining traditional and modern elements, in the form of gacaca. The experience there suggests it is not easy to get sexual crimes judged along with other war crimes. The results are mixed. Why are you so hopeful a mixed tribunal in Kivu can do better?

There have been crimes, including sexual crimes and rapes against women. These crimes have taken place and they need to be judged and justice needs to be done, because these are crimes. I followed gacaca from a distance and I know that there has been corruption of the process. For instance, I know somebody personally who has been accused and judged falsely because somebody else wanted their job. This person, who was falsely accused, has been freed now, but he is now unemployed. Mixed tribunals would have to arrest rape perpetrators (suspects) in the context of a wider task of achieving transitional post-conflict justice, adapted to the special situation in Eastern DRC. We need the Tribunal to operate rapidly and efficiently and be well adapted to the context. Of course mixed tribunals would not hear only rape cases, but all war crimes, including massacres, torture and other abuses. In response to your question, perhaps we’d propose that sessions on sexual violence and rape could be held as closed, rather than open, court sessions.

Helen Hintjens: How does getting this award help in your work? Does it create any problems as a human right defender? Or does it help?

It definitely helps. The situation for women human rights defenders like myself is extremely difficult. I myself have been attacked. I really do not have the words, words fail me, when I try to explain to you how people involved in the defence of human rights continue with our work every day, day in and day out, in the context that you find in Eastern DRC. When I was attacked, I put in a complaint, but nothing was done. So I asked to see the Governor of the Province, and he intervened on my behalf, and this was positive, because since then the complaint, which had been lodged with the military, was acted on. What human rights defenders in Eastern DRC face in their daily work is very serious. As Christians we get up every morning and pray for strength. We place our faith in God. Every day people are arrested, put in prison – and we live in the midst of miracles, since we live right next to those who violate the most basic human rights and do not want us to denounce them. They can threaten us or even come to kill us at any time.

We also draw power and energy from contacts with international organizations, contacts which are almost daily. These contacts help put pressure on the authorities – even when these authorities pretend not to listen to what the international community says. It is absolutely vital to us, especially to women human rights defenders, that we have these contacts on the outside who can help in case we are threatened. How else would we ever be able to escape the threats we get? Sometimes people’s lives are threatened and they need help for example to be able to move, say, either to Kinshasa, Kampala or further afield. Otherwise they would be attacked and could be killed just to silence them. People have been killed in just this way. Despite all the difficulties in Kinshasa, human rights defenders are safer there than in Goma or the Kivus. Yes, we need this international recognition.

Eno Ufot Ekuere (ISS student): I am interested in your suggestion of an international, reinforced intervention force, and I know that problems of resource pillage are severe; we are also familiar with those problems in West Africa. But how can an armed force effectively hope to control the exploitation of mineral resources?

Well it worked in Ituri, with the Artemis force. The good thing was, that force was finite and their job was to disarm. They did the job of disarming the armed groups that were fighting in Ituri and now the same is needed for the Kivus. There needs to be a mandate for demilitarization of the armed groups and militias so that the force stationed there for disarming these groups is not on the ground for too long, and does not itself become involved in mineral trading and dealing activities.

Translated from French and transcribed by Helen Hintjens

This roundtable was held on 11 December 2008 at ISS between Justine Masika Bihamba (winner of the first ever Dutch Human Rights Defender Tulip Award) and staff and students of ISS. Ms Masika Bihamba’s NGO, Women’s Synergy for the Victims of Sexual Violence, is based in Goma, Eastern DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo). Thanks to Harry Hummel for helping set up this event at ISS, which also acted as host for the Award Secretariat. For more details see: http://www.humanrightstulip.org/eng/content/view/full/140