Mr. BROWNBACK. Madam President, I rise to speak on a situation now developing to which I hope my colleagues will pay some attention. If we get involved at an early phase, it may be something we can head off rather than have it develop full scale. And I will have some pictures. I am talking about the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo .
We have seen a situation there where thousands of people have been dying on a monthly basis. It had been stabilizing some with the U.N. policing force that was in the area, the largest in the world. Now it is escalating again. It had stabilized. It is something we have to get after right now and, if we can, it might be such that we can stop it from spreading. But we have to pay some attention to it and look at it now.
Not even 12 months after their first free elections in 40 years, the fragile stability of the entire country is at stake. Senator Durbin and I visited there about a year and a half ago. It was starting to achieve some stability. They hadn’t voted yet for the election. Now we are seeing the present situation in eastern Congo , specifically in an area called North Kivu, gravely deteriorating. According to the U.N. relief agencies, we have seen nearly 40,000 people displaced this month. We saw another 100,000 displaced in June, in addition to the 100,000 displaced in January, all from this year. So nearly a quarter million people have been displaced in this one region.
These displacements come from rising tensions between the renegade General Nkunda and those loyal to the Congolese Government. Nkunda says he is protecting the Tutsi-Congolese minority from the Congolese Government and from the Hutu militias. These are militias that fled Rwanda after committing genocide there in 1994. So this has a connection to Rwanda. That is what is so deadly about it. We have seen it activated before, and it is deadly.
Neither General Nkunda nor the Hutu militias have ever been disarmed, raging havoc on the civilian population for years. The fighting between Nkunda’s rebels and Congolese forces has spilled into the Virunga Mountains where the mountain gorillas reside, the sole place where this endangered species lives, a species so close to extinction already, yet nine were killed this year in fighting.
President Kagame of Rwanda said Monday that Nkunda has legitimate political grievances against the Congolese Government. We have to call him on that. President Kagame stated Nkunda was simply protecting a section of the Congolese from extermination, but there are no reported actions against the Tutsi-Congolese.
This can be kind of convoluted on names, but this is how it started the first time around, a rebel general saying: I am protecting the people in the minority. Then they started attacking the people. People fled into refugee camps, and more died. When you flee for your life in these areas of the Congo , there is not always another town or village to go into. One area where there was fighting over the weekend took place in a settlement village–a refugee camp from a conflict 10 years earlier. It burned the village simply because the people could not return to their previous homes. Now, due to fighting, they are homeless and fleeing once again.
I want to show a few pictures because it always seems we talk about numbers when we talk about distant places. People say: Well, I am sure that goes on all the time. It doesn’t. It doesn’t need to go on at all. It helps people to see that there are real people who suffer.
Here is a picture of a mother who brought her child into a therapeutic feeding camp because the child was dying of starvation due to constant movement of the family from village to village. The child became sick when they had no other place to go but the jungle to seek refuge. That happens when there is no stabilized place; children die in particular. Others do too.
Here is a 2-year-old who caught malaria due to the family hiding for so long in the bush after having fled their home. Malnourishment was quick to follow, as the family could find no food in the bush. So we have a 2-year-old with malaria, malnourished, on the verge of death.
This room is where about 75 to 90 women and children stay when they are receiving medical treatment and food supplements from a village clinic in the village of Kitchanga in North Kivu Province of Congo . This shows the crowded conditions into which people are forced.
Here is a 3-year-old who was diagnosed with malaria, tuberculosis, and malnourishment from hiding in the jungle with his family. Every breath he took was preceded by a raspy cough due to the stage of tuberculosis. His mother wanted to get him to a health clinic earlier but had to hide the family in the bush for several weeks because the road into town had been blocked by a militia.
These are real people suffering, dying because of this situation.
This is a 3-year-old diagnosed with malaria. They began treatment for the malaria, and his body rejected the treatment. They found that while he had been eating about once a day, he was anemic due to lack of nutrition in the food his family had been able to find in the jungle as they hid from militia groups that had burned their village and home to the ground. His body began to shut down. He rejected the oral and IV treatments. This 3-year-old passed away within 6 hours of rejecting the IV treatments, 15 minutes after this photo was taken.
These are real lives and real people. I have shown a few of them from this raging war that goes on while we have a blind eye to it.
Sexual violence and rape is also on the rise in Congo . The Washington Post reported the intensity and frequency of the rape is worse in the DRC than anywhere else in the world. The U.N. emergency relief agencies report that 4,500 cases of sexual violence have been reported since January of 2007 in this one province alone. We are looking at, in less than 9 months, 4,500 cases of sexual violence in one province. Women are brutally raped in front of crowds, families, husbands, resulting in serious physical and emotional trauma. I visited a hospital with Senator Durbin in the eastern city of Goma where women could be treated for ailments due to brutal rapes. Because of their condition, many women are outcasts from their community and families, and the pain goes on.
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