Remarks by Stephen Lewis, Co-Director of AIDS-Free World, delivered at the 10th Annual V-Day Celebrations
New Orleans, LA 4:00 pm CDT, Saturday, April 12, 2008
Saturday, 12 April 2008
Today is a day that has largely --and rightly-- been given over to Dr. Mukwege and his astonishing and heroic work in the Congo. Driving the work is the endlessly grim and despairing litany of rape and sexual violence. All of us assembled in the Superdome, talk of V-Day and the Vagina Monologues; in the Congo there's a medical term of art called 'vaginal destruction.' I need not elaborate; you've heard Dr. Mukwege. But suffice to say that in the vast historical panorama of violence against women, there is a level of demonic dementia plumbed in the Congo that has seldom, if ever been reached before.
That’s the peg on which I want to hang these remarks. I want to set out an argument that essentially says that what’s happening in the Congo is an act of criminal international misogyny, sustained by the indifference of nation states and by the delinquency of the United Nations.
See full text on AIDS Free World
See also:
The war that never ends
By Paula Donovan, Sunday, 24 February 2008
Women left for dead—and the man who’s saving them
In the Congo, where tens of thousands of women are brutally raped every year, Dr. Denis Mukwege repairs their broken bodies and souls. Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, visits him and finds hope amid the horror. By Eve Ensler.
