---

Democratic Republic of Congo

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk (Mr. Joyce) and the hon. Member for South-West Surrey (Mr. Hunt) for their valuable contributions and for the good humour with which they conducted themselves during our trip, which was very testing at times. I was grateful for their good humour and good nature throughout. I add my thanks to the UK ambassador Andy Sparkes and to Jo Gauld, who accompanied us and helped arrange our trip, and I pay tribute to the DFID team in Kinshasa and to our ambassador in Rwanda. I echo the comments made about my friend and former colleague Oona King, who founded our group seven years ago. At 7 pm tonight, ““Sky News”” will feature some of the people whom we visited, particularly those at Panzi hospital. Hon. Members need no explanation of the situation in the DRC. During the past eight years, the wars and actions of armed groups have brought people there to their knees. Access for humanitarian groups is restricted by a lack of security outside the main cities. In a recent report, the International Crisis Group estimated that 4 million people had died in the previous eight years of conflict. That means that about 1,200 have died every day in their villages, in the tea plantations and the bush—out of the range of the lenses of the UK and general western media. We have seen a war waged through arms in the DRC, but now a second war is taking place, waged through HIV/AIDS. There is war also waged through the disruption of basic services and, as has been said, a culture of corruption at all levels, which means that soldiers who should be demilitarised are not paid. So they go back, take up arms and start the cycle of violence again. I should like to touch on the Panzi hospital, which my hon. Friend and the hon. Gentleman mentioned. I shall give some numbers that reflect what is happening in South Kivu province. Last year, the hospital treated 3,500 rape victims, 1,000 more than in 2004 and 50 per cent. up on the numbers treated the previous year. There is evidence from South Kivu that after the explosion and violence of 2004, things calmed and tailed off. However, things are escalating again. An estimated 10 women are raped there every day. As we heard, the rapes are carried out with violence—with the use of knives, bayonets or bullets. The victims are sent back to their communities as cripples and outcasts. We received a report entitled ““Women's Bodies as Battlefields”” from one of the non-governmental organisations in the DRC. It sums up better than any of us could how women are used in the ongoing war. The militias' aim is to degrade society by degrading women and its values. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that 45,000 women and girls have been victims of sexual violence in the DRC. The international community needs to ensure that each individual, hidden, private sexual tragedy becomes a collective and public human responsibility. One NGO worker told us, ““We do not want homes for raped women or orphanages for children born of rape. We want those women to go back to their villages and be reunited with their husbands and for their villages to take collective responsibility for them. We want those children to have the right to grow up and go to school like any other child and not to bear for the rest of their lives the stigma of the unfortunate way in which they were conceived.”” The women at Panzi have often been carried over non-existent roads—sometimes by their grandmothers, on piggyback—to seek treatment. My hon. Friend mentioned the incredible work done by Dr. Denis Mukaweye, who runs the hospital on a shoestring. I am glad to be able to tell the Minister that DFID is constructing a new building there. That is wonderful. It will mean that the women who are in for continuous operations will have to wait less time before they go back to their villages. We heard the story of a woman aged 72 who had been raped in front of her sons-in-law. She refused all treatment and chose to die, rather than return home to the shame that she felt had been visited on her and her family. We heard stories of women abducted by the Interahamwe, gang raped every night, left pregnant with their rapists' babies. How can a mother be taught to love a baby from a man who has used such terrible violence on her? Many girls know that they and their babies will be rejected and even killed if they return to their villages, so they are left with no choice but to stay in the camps. In all the conversations about the programme to disarm, demobilise and reintegrate soldiers, scant attention was paid to the fact that few of those young women, while not formal combatants, have been successfully demobilised and reintegrated. It is difficult to talk about these terrible stories, but it is important that our group visited such people. We heard the stories and saw what was happening. It is important that things are put on the record. The children of the DRC have no social and legal protection. The social pathologies of the violence, abuse and rejection of children are generalised across its society and go unpunished. The sexual abuse and rape of children is widespread. We must be aware, and be wary of, just examining what hits the western papers and is trendy in the international aid community at any given point, whether that be children accused of witchcraft or child soldiers. Such problems are huge and endemic, but they also stem from the situation of children and their having no legal and social protection.