I am going to use the word Congo as a shorthand for the presentation because as Senator Norris has pointed out, it is a complete misnomer to represent it as the Democratic Republic of Congo. There is very little democracy and whether it is a republic begs the question. I went to the Congo for the first time in March 2012. I was looking forward to going there because the Congo has a real resonance for Irish people not least because in November 1960 the first Irish peacekeepers lost their lives there. While there I met some of the MONUSCO forces and told them the first casualties that Ireland experienced were in the Congo. I was also speaking with a general within the force who is from India and he said that the first casualties that India encountered were also in the Congo, in the same month and in the same region as the Irish forces lost their lives.
Another reason the Congo has a resonance for me is that I used to teach English. One of the novels on the course was Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, which has become a metaphor for the whole of the country. Students found it trying. It is a compelling novel, dense and difficult, but the core the seemingly intractable problem at the heart of Africa was accessible to students. A whole range of other books have come on stream recently which give good insights into Africa. The reality from my experience in March is that nothing prepares one for what one encounters in the Congo. As the Chairman has said, we have filmed in more than 30 countries in the six series of "What in the World". It is not that there is some kind of macabre competition between countries for the worst atrocities that is not what it is but equally it is the case that what we experienced and encountered in the Congo was dispiriting and it gripped us in terms of what appeared to be the hopelessness of the situation. When I returned I was determined not just to make the film and to get it on air, in collaboration with RTE, but to try to engage with the public in raising issues.
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke to a number of Senators and Deputies at an informal gathering in Leinster House. Some of the members present at this meeting attended our launch in the Irish Aid centre.
I am not trying to set up one country against another. In other countries we have visited, we have heard terrible stories. Two in particular stand out. I interviewed a woman in Burma. We had entered the country illegally. She described with extraordinary grief the death of her children during her flight from the Burmese military. She was forced to bury them in the forest of the Burmese highlands, then abandon them. One could not but be moved by that. In the recent documentary on Timor-Leste, Mr. Nelson Belo discussed the torture that he experienced at the hands of the Indonesians during the almost 25-year occupation of that country.
Throughout our time making this, we have heard horrific and gripping testimonies of the kinds of inhumanity to which people are subjected. However, the Congo touched me and others working with me in a way that made us determined to try to raise it as an issue. We are grateful, therefore, to have this opportunity to discuss the experience of the Congolese with the committee. It has been some experience.
Some of the critical issues have been highlighted. In one decade, 5.4 million people - this extraordinary figure bears repeating - have been killed in a country that has not seemed to feature in broader international discourse, at least until recently. In July 2011, I watched the news and read the newspapers. At the meeting at which I spoke a number of weeks ago, I referred to an air crash in the Congo in which 45 people were killed in July 2011. The story was covered by all Western media. I do not want to understate the sadness and trauma suffered by the families of those 45 people, but neither should we underestimate the sadness and trauma suffered by the families of the 5.4 million people whose lives have been lost. I was trying to make sense out of why 45 people's lives were spoken about and recorded across the Western media while 5.4 million other people's lives were not. I reached a speculative conclusion - namely, that people who travel in aeroplanes are people like us. We can identify with them. It is difficult for us to identify with people who are killed in the bush and rural areas - the poor, the dispossessed and the disfavoured - and, therefore, we do not respond to their deaths. I do not want to get involved in self-congratulations, but RTE is prepared to find a space within its broadcasting schedule to make available programmes such as ours.
In addition to highlighting the scale of the killings in the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, and the humanitarian crisis, I want to put the situation in context. The Congo is unique in Africa in that it was once the personal fiefdom of King Leopold II. Oireachtas Members are used to travelling back and forth to Brussels for their work. The reality is that the splendour of the administrative capital of the EU is built on the exploitation of the Congo. There is another reality, in that one of the justifications for the First World War was the defence of small nations, yet that small nation was plundering and pillaging a large nation in central Africa. This reality seemingly never registered at the time.
We are discussing a legacy issue from the colonial period and it is important to see the conflict in this light. The conflict in the Congo has been ongoing since the 1870s. It is not a conflict that arose following independence or the recent upsurge in violence.
The crisis has deepened in recent weeks. When we made the film, we based ourselves in Goma. On Tuesday, the M23 militia, which is really an offshoot of the National Congress for the Defence of the People, CNDP, walked into Goma - abandoned by the army and overseen by the UN forces there - and took it over. It is extraordinary that, in the 21st century, a militia can simply walk into a city of 1 million people in the presence of UN peacekeepers with little international outcry against it. There has been some outcry, and I do not want to underestimate what occurred at the European Council of Ministers on Monday. The Tánaiste will attend this committee to discuss that meeting. However, the Chairman alluded to the reality, namely, 50,000 people have fled Goma in recent days in search of personal security.
Sometimes, the numbers can be so great that they lose their impact in terms of what a situation means for individual families, neighbourhoods and so on. Since I circulated the paper to members, the number of people displaced in the Congo has been increasing daily from 2.2 million. This has triggered a blame game about who is responsible. The geopolitical issues are complicated, but there is no doubt about the pivotal role played by Rwanda in the upending and disruption of the Congo. This can go without challenge. Actually, that is probably not true, as every statement is subject to challenge, but Rwanda's role is beyond contestation, in my opinion at least. We must understand this involvement in the context of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The conflict in the eastern part of the Congo is a direct result of that.
It is a question of legacy issues. There is a reluctance to consider them. There is also a sense that, once a political agreement has been made, the problems are sorted as if the people involved in a conflict situation can automatically transform themselves and rebuild their lives without attending to the terrible traumas that they suffered. Rwanda and, in particular, its President, Paul Kagame, and Government need to be held accountable by the international community for their involvement in the disruption and fragmentation of society in the eastern Congo. Nor is Uganda blameless. It must also be held accountable.
I will move away from the questions of who is responsible and who are the main players and revert briefly to two issues. I hope I am not going over my time.
There were two issues in particular that really struck a chord with us. One of these is the use of rape as a weapon of war. It is quite extraordinary. Ms Margot Elisabeth Wallström, the former United Nations special representative on sexual violence, has called eastern Congo the rape capital of the world. Before we came before the committee, Mr. Clarken and I were discussing a centre in Bukavo which Ms Hillary Clinton visited in 2009 and to which the US gave $17 million. It has treated 30,000 women. We had planned to go there but for security reasons we could not travel. We were really hemmed in at Goma, although those who saw the film know we got to Katanga and Sake. Interestingly, Sake fell to the militia last evening.
The director of the rape centre in Bukavo, who has been nominated for a Nobel peace prize, was subject to an assassination attempt in the past three weeks. The possibilities of who was responsible for the assassination attempt are endless; it could have been the Congolese Government, which does not want the issue highlighted, or the Rwandan militia, etc. It is difficult for a man to discuss rape and its impact, although all rape is brutal. What the women and girls - and to a lesser extent, men and boys - are subjected to was described in the film as being treated "like wood". It was an extraordinary analogy from a worker at Heal Africa.
There is the scale and intensity of rape, as well as its appalling brutality and the normalisation of the act. A study by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative has described a 17-fold increase in rape in the past five years. It is argued that because it has become so normalised, it has spilled into the civilian population, and the dramatic increase in the incidence of rape is a by-product of the kind of lawlessness and chaos that characterises life in eastern Congo.
I will touch on a second area that we will return to, the use of child soldiers. Child soldiers are recruited across the board by the Congolese army and the various militia, and it is impossible to put numbers on them. There are approximately 30,000 children who are caught up in the conflict in eastern Congo, some as young as seven or eight. They are recruited and fed alcohol and drugs. We interviewed two such child soldiers, and it is interesting that they were brought back to the communities from where they came, and this is where they killed and committed all kinds of atrocities. This was not just in other communities but their own communities. It is known who is responsible for these actions, and they should be brought before the International Criminal Court. There is a big onus on the court to act on the matter.
I am sorry if I have exceeded my time. In making this presentation, there are three real outcomes that I personally would like to see resulting from the meeting. As the Chairman indicated, there is a meeting in March of the chairmen of all the foreign affairs committees which Baroness Catherine Ashton, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, will attend. It is critical that at the meeting, the conflict and humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo be on the agenda. That platform or vehicle should be used to highlight the appalling atrocities happening in Congo.
My colleagues also have preferred outcomes, including humanitarian relief, and we can come to those later. A second outcome should arise from Ireland's election to the UN Human Rights Council. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade describes the country's objectives in this regard, with three countries mentioned specifically. I would like to see Congo included. I know the position of women is mentioned specifically as an Irish objective, and under that heading the position of women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo can be addressed. As this is such a serious issue, there is a case for the Democratic Republic of the Congo to be included.
Once every ten years there is an opportunity in chairing the European Union - as will happen in the first six months of 2013 - and I would like to see the Congo on the agenda of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and discussed by Heads of State when they meet in Dublin Castle next year. I urge the committee, through its offices and debates in both Houses, as well as representations to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, to see that the issue be attended to as a matter of priority.
