Documenting the Women’s Peace Movement in Congo

Over the past two decades, a com­plex web of con­flicts and griev­ances in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Repub­lic of Con­go (DRC) has result­ed in the death of 5 mil­lion and dis­place­ment of near­ly 7 mil­lion civilians. 

What began as region­al war­fare fol­low­ing the 1994 Rwan­dan Geno­cide has gone glob­al as a result of for­eign reliance on the DRC’s extra­or­di­nary reserves of nat­ur­al resources, includ­ing cobalt, ura­ni­um, and cop­per. But it’s the inno­cent civil­ians who are pay­ing the price with their lives.

In 2019, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Hugh Kin­sel­la Cun­ning­ham began doc­u­ment­ing the con­flicts in the East­ern DRC, spend­ing time with those forced into dis­place­ment camps. ​“The tes­ti­monies and scenes of these sto­ries are heart-rend­ing,” he says, ​“espe­cial­ly when lis­ten­ing to them speak about what they have wit­nessed or expe­ri­enced at the hands of rebel groups.”

In 2021, writer Camille Maubert arrived in DRC to research vio­lence against women and the strate­gies they employ to pro­tect them­selves and man­age trau­ma. ​“A lot of the work on Con­go tends to focus on vic­tim­hood,” she says, ​“but I also want­ed to explore what women were doing to stop that cycle of vio­lence.”

That same year, Cun­ning­ham and Maubert teamed up with local cor­re­spon­dent Sifa Bahati, who helped them secure access to a loose net­work of activists and organ­i­sa­tions on the ground to cre­ate ​“The Women’s Peace Move­ment in Con­go.”

The on-going project doc­u­ments the sto­ries of women on the front­lines, risk­ing their lives to medi­ate con­flicts, track human rights vio­la­tions, and advo­cate for vic­tims. Their first-per­son accounts pro­vide a vital account of under­re­port­ed sto­ries includ­ing the eth­nic vio­lence of the Ituri con­flict; an Islamist insur­gency waged by the ADF rebel group in Beni Ter­ri­to­ry; and the resur­gence of the M23 con­flict across North Kivu province.

They spoke with activists who arranged a tem­po­rary cease­fire in 2008 so that they could meet with Lau­rent Nkun­da, the com­man­der of the CNDP rebels. ​“But since then, times have changed, and many rebel groups are far too hos­tile to approach and nego­ti­ate with direct­ly,” says Cunningham.

Rebel groups are not the only threat to peace. ​“Gov­ern­ment forces also prey on civil­ians,” says Cun­ning­ham. ​“Many of the grass­roots activists we have met now con­cen­trate on pro­tect­ing their com­mu­ni­ties from the worst excess­es of their own army and police.”

“The Women’s Peace Move­ment in Con­go” presents pow­er­ful accounts of the work they are doing to end the con­flict while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly work­ing address pover­ty through polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic empow­er­ment and sup­port vic­tims of vio­lence and sex­u­al assault.

The team has inter­viewed mem­bers of the orig­i­nal move­ment going back to the ear­ly ​‘90s, includ­ing Jus­tine Masi­ka and Louise Nyota, who con­tin­ue to do the work while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly engag­ing younger gen­er­a­tions to join the call for peace.

“What moti­vates women to join the move­ment is the belief that if they don’t step in, no one will,” says Maubert. ​“Many explained that, as moth­ers, they want to stop their chil­dren from dying in the con­flicts and they dream of a future where they can live, study and farm in peace.”

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