Democratic Republic of Congo - The Forgotten War

When the Unacceptable Becomes Normal

In August of 2004, I found myself in a small, quiet village in North Kivu talking to a group of Congolese women. Thousands of people, little by little, had been fleeing from this area of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in recent weeks, and I was part of a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) team sent to try and find out why. As we huddled in the dark room of a tin roof shack, the women told me how armed men frequently sexually assaulted them in their fields and plundered their crops. How the health center had been looted. How they didn't want to abandon their homes, but would if only they had some money and could get past the soldiers at the checkpoint. Then suddenly, they each said goodbye and slipped off into the forest, hoping to find safety from the nighttime raids, as they had been doing for the past several months.

What struck me most about this conversation was that the unbearable situation of these women was virtually invisible to the outside world. To be sure, their plight was not a massive emergency characterized by large-scale massacres, hundreds of thousands of displaced, or catastrophic epidemic outbreaks, all of which have occurred in the Great Lakes region in the past decade. Instead it was the grim reality of life that has become commonplace in many areas of the DRC, a kind of normalization of the unacceptable.

As a medical humanitarian organization, MSF seeks to help people most in need, and for years the DRC has been at, or near, the top of our list. The longstanding war and the collapse of the public health system have resulted in widespread acute medical needs. MSF teams, composed of international and Congolese aid workers, are active in all corners of this huge country striving to reach those most at risk. There are few places where the immediate impact of MSF's medical work is more visible, whether teams are treating victims of sexual violence in Bunia, responding to a cholera outbreak in a remote area like Walikale, rehabilitating malnourished children in Kayna or providing anti-retroviral therapy to people with HIV/AIDS in Bukavu.

Yet there are also few places where the limits of humanitarian work are clearer. There is so much need that it is a struggle to do anything other than respond to the most serious emergencies. The complex and diverse nature of the violence, neglect, and discrimination in the DRC challenges any notion of simple, blanket solutions to redress even the immediate causes of so much death and suffering. While MSF does not purport to provide a solution, we want to draw attention to what the Congolese people are enduring and the obstacles we face in trying to assist them.

In this struggle against indifference, where only the gravest of crises receives superficial and short-lived media coverage, pictures can help, and, thanks to the skill of the photographers at VII, the pictures in this book do. Their essential quality is to go behind the headlines and to offer glimpses of ordinary people's lives – reminding us, and the world at large, that we must refuse to let the unacceptable become normal.

Nicolas de Torrenté
Executive Director
Doctors Without Borders//Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) USA
New York, July 2005