The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (review)

Guerilla rape: The leading surgeon in the documentary The Greatest Silence: Rape in Congo (2007) calls it the "the monstrosity of this century." The Minister of Women's Affairs in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Faida Mwamgila, explains that "Congolese women find themselves in the middle of a battlefield." They are used as "weapons of war." Four million people have already been killed during the past ten years of civil war in the Congo, formerly called Zaire. In addition, over 200,000 women are the victims of rape. The mutilation inflicted by rifles and sticks to these women's genitalia and reproductive organs results in disfigurement, painful lesions, and "fistulas," or holes, that no doctor can repair, with damaged internal organs leading to urinary incontinence and sterility. These mothers, grandmothers and female children are alive, but struggle with wounds that require repeated surgery and take years to heal.

"Why use sex in order to mutilate and defeat someone?" Dr. Denis Mukwege asks. He oversees the hospital of Panzi in a small rural community, a lengthy plane and car ride away from the capital of DRC. Rows of beds in close proximity visualize the despair of thousands of women who have been gang raped during the Civil War by men who emerged in their villages, pillaged their belongings, killed the men and raped the women and children. Minister Mwamgila does not place blame on one single group but on various rebel organizations of neighboring countries, along with the brutal Rwandan paramilitary. Some women lost their spouses; others are shunned in their own communities by husbands and relatives alike. One 34 year old woman, Marie Jeanne, explains on camera that her husband fled when the soldiers came to their house, but then told her eight children that their mother had asked for the soldiers' abuse and consented to her rape. "My heart is broken," Marie Jeanne concludes, because she is now stigmatized and rejected as a rape victim.

Filmmaker Lisa F. Jackson provides a grim picture of the situation of these rape survivors and uses her film to create a sense of alliance between American and African women. She wants to break the "greatest silence" and tell the women's stories so they do not remain invisible to the global community.

Jackson tells the story of The Greatest Silence from a subjective point of view and recounts her impressions in personalized voice-overs. The middle-aged, white director from New York had herself been gang-raped as a 25-year-old, when she left her office late at night in Georgetown. Jackson explains that she can empathize with the Congolese women, not only in terms of their pain but also their feelings of guilt and rejection—her own short marriage having ended because her husband treated her as "damaged goods." In an emotional scene, visualized by a hand-held camera and the resounding footsteps of a woman walking along a badly lit street, she recounts her memories and shares her trauma with the women from the Congo who have been victimized. After interviewing a set of five men in the jungle who explain candidly why they "take" women to feel more "manly," or when they are in need of sex, Jackson remarks that she had insomnia for several days and experienced nightmares thinking back on the "men with guns."

This scene is one of the key moments of the documentary, as the filmmaker elicits the perspectives of predators that now wear sunglasses and drape themselves in garments to conceal their identities. Through these interviews, the men confirm the loss of humanity that accompanies war, relating how their sexual violence uses women as objects in exchange for brief contentment, with no regard for human dignity. Some of the men interviewed on camera are married, several of them educated, all of them have careers in their civilian lives that should prevent them from committing atrocities. Jackson illustrates, through both image and narration, how the "men melted back...