On her ten day trip through Africa, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will make two stops in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) – capital Kinshasa and Goma in the east.
Estimates state that conflict in the DRC (a country the size of the US east of the Mississippi) has resulted in 3.5 million to 7.8 million deaths since 1998, and hundreds of thousands of rapes. Thus international human rights organizations have called on Clinton to urge the prosecution of those military personnel responsible for human rights abuses – in particular ongoing crimes of sexual violence.
In fact, the stated purpose of the Secretary’s visit to Goma is to put a ‘great deal of focus on the issue of sexual- and gender-based violence which is occurring in the eastern Congo’ and she ‘intends to encourage and push the Congolese Government as well as MONUC, the UN peacekeeping force there, to take a much more aggressive stance against gender-based violence.’
Following UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s report on the systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon as recognized in Security Council Resolution 1820, this trip needs to be a step towards general recognition of the issue’s importance in conflict situations – not just in the DRC, but across the globe.