Film captures rapists and their victims in Congo

When Lisa F. Jackson was 25 and living in Washington, D.C., she was gang-raped after leaving work in the upscale Georgetown district. Her story was front-page news, but the three perpetrators were never caught. Jackson, a documentary filmmaker, kept recalling that trauma last year, when she visited Congo to interview victims of sexual violence. Tens of thousands of women and girls are raped each year by armed militiamen who often mutilate the genitals of their victim with guns and sticks. Why, Jackson wanted to know, if her rape was considered news, does the huge wave of Congolese atrocities go unreported and unacknowledged? In her devastating 75-minute film, "The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo," Jackson searches for the answer by speaking to the victims; to physicians and aid workers; to U.N. peacekeepers whose numbers are inadequate to the problem; and, finally, to the rapists themselves. Jackson, 57, calls the crisis "a holocaust in slow motion." Her film premieres 10 p.m. Tuesday on HBO, with several repeat broadcasts throughout the month. Go to www.hbo.com/docs or www.thegreatestsilence.org for more information. Speaking by phone from her home in Manhattan, Jackson said she tried for two years without success to raise funds for "The Greatest Silence." The subject made people uncomfortable, she found; it was easier for them to look the other way. Finally, she went last May to Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, and then to the eastern city of Bukavu. Jackson went alone, equipped with a camera and no crew - something she'd never done in 30 years of filmmaking - and found Bernard Kalume, a Congolese translator who helped her make contact with victims, rapists and aid workers. In the past decade, an estimated 250,000 women and girls, some as young as 4 or 5, have been raped by soldiers. In some cases, their genitals are mutilated and they become incontinent. The shame of rape is so pervasive that their husbands, and often their families, reject them. The children of rape are also shunned. The rape epidemic isn't entirely senseless, Jackson found. "This is a resource war, pure and simple." Congo is rich in diamonds, gold and coltan, or columbite-tantalite, a metal used in cell phones, DVD players and computers. The 10-year civil war, which has claimed 4 million lives, is a fight for access to those minerals, and the sexual violence is part of that fight. By raping and terrorizing women, the military maintains a heightened climate of instability and fear. SOURCE OF THIS STORY