THE LEGACY OF RAPE
Bampa herself was raped on the road to the bridge by Rwandan soldiers. The Red Cross worker she had taken along as protection was killed. She was pregnant and lost her baby. Nyalya, the wife of Kiliki the fisherman, was so badly injured she had to be taken to Bukavu for treatment for a fistula, an injury found here only when girls fall pregnant when very young.
In Europe the context of the Rwandan genocide has long been settled. Films like Hotel Rwanda and books such as Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families have laid out the story. The reprisals at the bridge and subsequent rape of Shabunda are epilogues.
Yet the genocide keeps on. It poisoned the nations around Rwanda, and led to a continental war - about resources, about revenge - but always about Rwanda's desire to be secure, to avoid a repeat of 1994. That is the reason, not a hangover of imperialism, nor the greed of western corporations, that the women of the eastern Congo were raped.
Peace of a sort has finally come to Shabunda. Elections were held last year in Congo, which the 36-year-old Joseph Kabila won.
Of Habraham and the other orphans I had met 10 years ago, there was no sign. Leon Kekwa, an assistant at the hospital, was there when I visited last. "When the Rwandan troops arrived, the children heard about it and the next day the three rooms were empty. They had fled in the night." Nobody knows their fate.
13 years of conflict
April 1994
Juvenal Habyarimana, Rwanda's Hutu president, is killed when his plane is shot down over Kigali airport.
April-June 1994
Following decades of hatred and sporadic massacres, the Hutu population tries to destroy the Tutsi hold over Rwanda, killing at least 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis.
July 1994
Forces commanded by Paul Kagame, a Tutsi, take the capital, Kigali. A cease-fire is declared and two million Hutus flee into Zaire, then stagnating under the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko.
1996
Forces commanded by Zairean rebel Laurent Kabila cross the border to attack Mobutu's army. His troops are backed by Rwanda and Uganda.
1997
Kabila takes Zaire's capital, Kinshasa, and Mobutu falls. His exile in Portugal ends shortly after his arrival when he dies of prostate cancer. Zaire is renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo.
1998
Kabila falls out with his backers in Rwanda and Uganda, who attack again, but he retains control of the country with the aid of Angola, Chad, Namibia, Sudan and Zimbabwe.
Jan. 2001
Kabila is assassinated and he is replaced by his son Joseph. He tries to negotiate the exit of Rwandan troops from the eastern edges fringes of the country, with limited success.
July 2002
The Pretoria Accord paves the way for a transitional government in Kinshasa.
July 2006 to present
Multiparty elections are held and Kabila wins the presidency with 58 percent of the vote. There is still fighting between forces of the new 'integrated' Congolese army and Rwandan Hutu rebel groups hiding in the forests of the east. The UN is trying to keep the peace. Source: the guardian
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