This article in the Washington Times is a hard read, but it is important: Congo’s shame: Rape used as tool of war
Although no one knows for sure how many in this country of 67 million are rape victims, the United Nations estimates that 200,000 women have been raped in the past decade and that 40 women a day are raped in South Kivu alone.
This is tragic and reprehensible, and I hope these poor women and their families receive significant attention. They certainly have my prayers. I wish there were more I could do immediately for them, but I do believe in a God who answers prayers and who sees human suffering without the slightest disinterest. While He has delegated self-government to humanity, He is not indifferent or uninvolved when we allow oppression and tyranny to march forward in the world. On the contrary, He has a plan of redemption that will truly wipe away every tear, and that culminates in what Paul in Ephesians 1 calls “God’s plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth.”
But given that self-government is our delegated lot in this world, and given that we as Americans have been given so many freedoms and protections from tyranny, I do believe there is a burden we share as fellow human beings to vocalize our concerns to our representatives in government and take a lead role in defining ways to assist these battered women.
This leads me to something of a gripe with our mainstream media. I wonder if the coverage of this issue will take on the conscientious fervor of genocide in Darfur? This is not to compare the two atrocities themselves, but the coverage of them. As a DC native, I admit I am rather jaded here and expect there to be less of a national outcry about these events in Congo at present. For whatever reason, it seems that our liberal friends are often first to raise their voices against such atrocities, as well they should. But my concern is that coverage of this will be muted, given the liberal leanings of most major news outlets, and any attention on what President Obama is not doing in this area could hurt him politically.
Now that is jaded, isn’t it?! Please know that I am not a reflexive anti-liberal, and I disagree greatly with Jerry Falwell’s statement that the blame for America’s cultural ills fall at the feet of the liberals in this country. That is a very silly thing to say, and even sillier is the movement that he foisted on America with that belief as its ethos. Here is something of my counterpoint to that.
That said, I am still interested in seeing if my hypothesis proves true–if these sad events in Congo are not widely reported. (Of course, if I were a committed lefty liberal and ran a newspaper, I’d be all over this story to distract people from the popular uprising over Health Care Reform. By the way, I do consider myself a liberal in many ways that I won’t get into here–you’ll have to come back for more.)
I find it interesting to recall how little of President Bush’s interest and investment in Africa has been covered by the mainstream media, though Jon Ward of the Washington Times was all over it. Even liberal activist Bob Geldof had the intellectual honesty to acknowledge Bush’s unparalleled contributions, amid his worthwhile observations about Bush’s difficulties getting his message out to the American people.
I wonder if our liberal friends are as interested in truly overturning unjust social structures such as those in Congo, or if, as a general rule, their movement is more interested in using guilt about a perceived lack of response by conservative leaders like Bush to those oppressive structures, all as an attempt to overturn their popularity (remember the popular GWB circa 2001-2003?).
Here is what me and many other average citizens want to know: On issues like genocide, rape, and the other atrocities that take place in Africa, can we find some common ground in which to agree about these terrible injustices, and then use what power we do have in our representative government and seek to overturn them in all the means we have at our disposal?
We all have suspicions and concerns about our current lot of elected officials in Washington, but are we the people so lustful of power in government that we cannot see the need to come together in response to such clear evils in this world?
This is why I strongly advocate for citizen-driven government, as opposed to State-driven government. For doesn’t your everyday citizen’s political viewpoint respect the sanctity of life along these lines? I don’t think passion for honoring human dignity is applicable only to those who advocate for the rights of the unborn. I don’t mean to minimize our passion to overturn the unjust social structures of abortion, of course, but can we not also come together to petition our government to do all it can to overturn the unjust social structures of rape in Congo, and, indeed of sexual violence anywhere it is occurring in the world?
