Women’s Agency in the DRC War

The sharp sound of glass breaking under a rubber boot echoes over the rooftop like the crack of gunfire, as Thérèse Ndarubyariye leans forward in her chair. Her mouth is set in a thin, determined line and she speaks in a voice no louder than a whisper.

Ndarubyariye, who is using a pseudo-nym for her protection, is a soldier with the Alliance of Patriots for a Free and Sovereign Congo (APCLS), just one of the 120 armed groups battling in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). ‘I joined to protect my country,’ she says simply.

We meet on the roof of a rundown bar on the outskirts of Goma, the lakeside capital of the DRC’s North Kivu province and the region’s strategic and economic hub. It is a safe place to talk freely, she tells me. Other uniformed fighters with bullets strung across their chests and AK-47s slung on their backs admire the view, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. Far below us, a line of people with yellow jerry cans waits to collect water from a pump. White land cruisers stamped with the insignia of international NGOs speed towards sprawling displacement camps, further along a potholed road that stretches from Goma to the frontlines north of the city. Ndarubyariye goes to battle there whenever she is called.

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The APCLS is part of the Wazalendo, a loose network of militias whose name means ‘patriots’ in Swahili. These government-aligned units fight against rebels from the March 23rd Movement (M23), who are in the midst of an insurgency in the DRC. Originally formed in 2012 by disgruntled members of formerly disbanded armed groups, the M23 took its name from the date of failed peace agreements. The insurgents managed to capture Goma briefly that year, with support from neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda.

M23 surrendered a year later, following an offensive by the Congolese military, backed by a United Nations peacekeeping force. Fighters laid down their weapons or slipped over the border into Rwanda and Uganda.

But the same guerrillas resurfaced in late 2021. A series of attacks on farming villages have forced nearly two million civilians to flee their homes and take refuge in ramshackle tents on the outskirts of Goma and other small cities. M23 has been accused by Amnesty International of indiscriminately targeting civilians, while using high-tech weaponry such as drones and guided mortars.

Women have borne the brunt of this violence.

Some have taken up arms and joined the fighting themselves or been wounded by bombs and bullets. Others are caring for fellow displaced women raped in war. Still others have emerged as peace activists striving to build a better future for their homeland. Together, their experiences reveal the difficult decisions women must make in wartime and how, day by day, they are trying to break the DRC’s cycle of conflict.

The fighter

With her round cheeks, closely cropped hair and an oversized camouflage uniform the colour of a forest canopy, Ndarubyariye looks like a child playing dress-up. She swears that she is 19, but she seems younger than this. Before joining the APCLS, Ndarubyariye was married to a man who hit her daily. ‘He was brutal,’ she recalls. After a year, she returned home to her parents but did not know how to spend her days.

At the time, President Félix Tshisekedi was calling on all young people in the country to enlist in the national army, or at least to take up weapons to defend themselves against M23. A friend suggested to Ndarubyariye that she could join one of the government-allied Wazalendo groups.

That was a year ago. The young militant is now a private in the APCLS. Like other female fighters, she has a dual duty of caring for the men — cleaning the camp, cooking food and washing clothes — and fighting alongside her comrades on the battlefield.

‘I am proud because the way the men are fighting is the same as I am,’ Ndarubyariye says. The battles have become routine for the young combatant. ‘We lose men. They (M23) lose men. Then, we go back to the barracks,’ she adds. Her voice turns cold, and she sounds almost bored. But the life of a female soldier in the majority male Wazalendo forces is particularly dangerous. Women enlist in low-rank positions, so are deployed as cannon fodder and are more at risk of being killed on the frontlines.

It’s now hard for Ndarubyariye to imagine a life without war. ‘I am ready to die for my country,’ she says. ‘I cannot leave this army.’

I ask the young fighter what hopes she holds for her future and that of her homeland. ‘An end to the war,’ she answers quickly.

For some women, joining the Wazalendo is a chance to defend their community. For others, it’s a way to escape economic hardship. But once in, it’s not easy to get out.

A commander listens to our conversation, surrounded by young, Kalashnikov-carrying bodyguards.

Mothers and daughters

In a sprawling displacement camp, not far from where the fighters drink, Jaqueline Uwimana, 35, is seething with anger. Last year, her 15-year-old daughter announced that she would join the Wazalendo. She took up arms with the APCLS, the same group as Ndarubyariye, and disappeared from her family’s tent.

A furious Uwimana met with the group’s leaders, begging them to release her child from their ranks and allow the teenager to come home. They refused to listen unless she brought a crate of beer and two goats to slaughter and eat. ‘I don’t even have food at home,’ she says, her voice brittle with loss. ‘I am just praying for my daughter. May God keep her alive.’

The girl soldier has now been fighting with APCLS for about nine months. Her sixteenth birthday is approaching. Sometimes, she returns to the same camp where the family lives to collect water for her comrades. On one occasion, Uwimana organized some neighbours to convince her daughter to abandon war and come home. She did not listen. Now, the mother cannot bear even to look at her daughter.

The Wazalendo groups and the M23 alike have been accused of recruiting children into hostilities, according to a report from the United Nations Group of Experts. UNICEF — the United Nations children’s agency — has also documented the recruitment of child soldiers in record numbers, with more than 1,500 used in armed conflict during the first half of 2022, including those as young as five.

I ask Uwimana if any part of her is proud of her daughter taking up arms. The mother’s face contorts. ‘There is no way. I cannot feel proud of that. She is still young. She is a little girl. I need her with me,’ she says. Uwimana tells her other children that their sister is suffering. She counsels them to resist the temptation of joining an armed group. They’ve expressed no interest in fighting themselves, but she does not know how long this will last.

Together, their experiences reveal the difficult decisions women must make in wartime and how, day by day, they are trying to break the DRC’s cycle of conflict.

The never-ending war

Camps, like the one where Uwimana lives with her children, house people who have already been displaced two or three times over — a testament to a country long beset by crises.

The war with the M23 is only the latest wave of conflict to crash through the eastern DRC. In the aftermath of the slaughter of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Hutu refugees and extremists alike fled over the border into the DRC. Rwandan troops pursued them, while supporting a 1996 uprising by Congolese rebel leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila to topple long-ruling president Mobutu Sese Seko. These events are now known as the First Congo War.

Kabila became president in 1997. But less than a year later he began to clash with his international backers, leading to the Second Congo War. The swirling maelstrom drew in nine neighbouring nations and spawned new militant groups in the DRC, the remnants of which are active today. By the time the war drew to a close in 2003, Kabila had been assassinated by one of his teenage bodyguards and replaced as president by his son Joseph. Millions of people had died.

Despite a series of peace agreements, daily life in the DRC’s east is still plagued by conflicts that repeat and repeat. The younger Kabila clung onto power until 2018, when Tshisekedi ascended to the presidency in the first peaceful transfer of power in Congolese history. But his tenure has been marked by continued unrest, as various rebel groups fight for influence, resources, or simply survival.

The M23 claims to protect the DRC’s Tutsi population against Hutu extremists. Its rebellion is rooted in the ethnic tensions of the Rwandan genocide and the First and Second Congo Wars.

The United Nations Group of Experts found that some 4,000 Rwanda Defence Force soldiers fight alongside the M23 in the DRC, with their numbers potentially exceeding those of the rebels.

By backing the M23, Rwanda is also looking to secure its own borders, and profit from the vast mineral wealth in the DRC. Neighbouring Uganda has been accused by the UN experts of providing diplomatic and logistical support to the M23, hoping to gain power, wealth and influence in the embattled region. Both countries have repeatedly denied working with the M23.

War on the body

The Congolese explain the war in more personal terms. People talk of not having enough food to eat, and a desperate longing to return home after years trapped in hellish encampments. Displaced children who venture into Goma to beg are hit by motorcycles and cars. Women who go into the surrounding forest risk being raped by armed men.

Béatrice Bayavuge, who spoke on the condition that her name be changed, told me that she was attacked on 3 January 2023 while looking for work outside her displacement camp.

That morning she walked into the nearby Virunga National Park with another woman, before separating to search for charcoal dealers who might pay them to carry heavy loads back to the main road. Two men approached. She does not know who they were, but remembers they carried guns and wore a blend of civilian and military clothes. They asked Bayavuge if she was displaced, and if she was alone. She was four months pregnant and pleaded with them not to hurt her, saying she had a husband and five children at home. But the men didn’t listen, and threatened to kill her if she didn’t do as she was told.

Both men raped Bayavuge in the same spot where they found her, not stopping even as she wept. Afterwards, the attackers fired bullets into the air to ensure no-one came near to help. Bayavuge was left bleeding on the ground. She could not move, and she could not stop crying. Eventually, some friends found her and brought her to a clinic caring for survivors of sexual violence. Doctors treated her injuries, but the rape had caused her to miscarry.

After the attack, Bayavuge’s husband abandoned her, a common response to the stigma associated with sexual violence in the DRC, taking four of their children with him. The 26-year-old now stays with only one of her children, in a cramped tent where there is not enough space to stand up straight.

She is one of millions of victims of sexual violence in the DRC, where rape has routinely been used as a weapon of war. Cases are now on the rise again as the conflict with M23 escalates, perpetrated by fighters on all sides.

A survey by Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) found that one in ten women had been raped in displacement camps surrounding Goma between November 2023 and April 2024. Its representatives told me that they’d treated another 620 cases of sexual violence in the month of May alone, across three Goma sites where the organization is active.

In response, women have banded together, trying desperately to reduce stigma. Bayavuge has taken to comforting other women who have been raped. ‘I tell them to be strong, to be tough even if neighbours insult you,’ she counsels. ‘You can look at me. I had the same problem, but I’m still alive.’

But with little means of survival the young mother must often return to the same place where she was attacked to collect charcoal and make what money she can. ‘If I don’t go to the bush, I won’t have anything to eat,’ she says, her child’s little hand reaching up to touch her face.

Comfort and care

In another settlement outside Goma about a dozen rape survivors come to Henriette Mbitse’s tent each day. She lives under a fraying piece of tarpaulin once used to bring harvested beans back from her farm.

She was forced to flee her village two years ago. The tarpaulin is one of the few possessions she managed to pack up and take with her when the family was displaced for the third time.

She brings the women to a clinic where they can get treatment. It is the same work she did back in her village, and during the last two wars.

Mbitse also tries to challenge the stigma rape survivors often face from their families and communities by teaching other camp residents to be compassionate. Her sons, daughters and husband also direct any survivors they meet to Mbitse, quietly supporting her work. ‘I may die. I need this job to be continued,’ says Mbitse, who is 52 and prefers simply to be called Mama Henriette.

Death often feels close in the DRC, and the conflict has ripped her family apart. As Mbitse ran towards Goma in 2022, her 30-year-old son was killed trying to protect his cattle. She is now raising his three children, alongside three of her own. The children remind her of her lost son, but her work helping women out of dark places is what keeps her going.

‘My strength comes from the fact that I am also a woman, and I am sad whenever I hear of these cases of rape happening. It comes from my deep heart,’ Mbitse says proudly, her face softening for a moment into a wide and warm smile.

‘My strength comes from the fact that I am also a woman.'

Henriette Mbitse

No safe place

The camps on the outskirts of Goma where Uwimana, Bayavuge and Mbitse live offer some of the last vestiges of safety as conflict engulfs the region. But no place in eastern DRC is truly safe. This May, a displacement camp on the western edge of Goma was hit by bombs fired from the M23 and Rwandan positions. At least 17 civilians, including 15 children were killed in the attack, according to Human Rights Watch. Rwanda has denied responsibility for the attack.

Emanuella Ndoole was standing guard over the camp’s water tanks when the bombs hit. A resident of a nearby village, she took the job guarding water supplies in the camp to make some extra money.

Bomb fragments tore a hole in her cheek and the skin of her back. She cannot remember exactly what happened to her, only that she woke up in the hospital unable to speak. When we meet six weeks later, a white bandage covers one side of her face. Her words are still garbled, and her face will remain scarred after the bandages are removed. Another wound, raised up and shaped like a centipede, runs between her shoulder blades.

The yellow walls of her ward are decorated with cartoon images of African animals, including a smiling lion and a purple hippopotamus. Eleven other women groan in the metal beds beside Ndoole. The one nearest has had her arm amputated at the elbow. These women comfort each other however they can. ‘We always talk together,’ Ndoole says hopefully. ‘We say we have to stand firm and be courageous because after this, with God’s help, everyone will recover.’

The hospital is supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Staff said that they had received nearly 2,000 war-wounded patients between January and June 2024.

Sometimes the 21-year-old Ndoole hopes to return to her job in the displacement camp. Other times, she is afraid of what might happen to her. ‘The war is still ongoing there,’ she says. ‘I don’t know where I will go when I am released.’

A new story

While fighting has not reached inside the city of Goma, its residents feel the fallout of the war raging nearby. Crime is on the rise, with armed groups roaming in a 20-kilometre radius of the embattled city, and weapons easily accessible. Fighting has blocked all routes leading in and out, except for one road running directly towards Rwanda, driving up the price of food and leaving residents desperate.

‘At night I feel afraid not knowing if we are going to wake up, if a bomb is going to be thrown into our quarter,’ says Nicole Musimbi, a 26-year-old peace activist living in Goma. There is a steely undertone to her quiet voice, as she speaks plainly about the realities of living on the edge of a war zone. But empathy in times of hardship can lead to change.

Musimbi grew up in Beni, a small city north of Goma, amidst attacks by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), another armed group. It was that conflict and the ongoing crisis with the M23 that inspired the young woman to become a peace activist. ‘Seeing how women and children are suffering, I feel like I have the responsibility to at least do something,’ she says.

Her father encouraged her to work hard in school, pushing her to learn English so she could share the realities of life in the DRC with the world outside. She began her advocacy as a delegate to the children’s parliament in Beni, which gave her a platform to show the impact of the conflict on her people. By 2015, she was going door to door to explain how grassroots groups could implement tenets of the United Nations Youth Peace and Security Agenda, a programme to involve young people in peacebuilding.

Now, Musimbi is focused on advocating for an end to the conflict with the M23. She is motivated by the strength of the women she meets. When the first wave of displaced people arrived in Goma two years ago, she travelled to the growing camps with other volunteers. It was so overwhelming she could barely stand. But when she returned the next day, she was struck to see people smiling. ‘The resilience of women in the city keeps me doing the work,’ she says.

As a partnership coordinator for the international feminist organization Nobel Women’s Initiative, Musimbi streamlines the activities of different activist groups in the DRC while making use of technology to build solidarity networks with peace activists around the world, including in the Philippines and Nigeria. ‘I really find it so encouraging knowing that we are not alone,’ Musimbi says.

Still, she longs one day to hear different stories about her country. ‘Being in this situation, at a certain point we feel like all we are waiting for is to die,’ she tells me. ‘All you can hear on the radio is the number of people who have been killed; the number of people who have been displaced.’ She is tired of speaking again and again about a conflict that never ends, and hopes desperately that people pay attention. ‘When a war erupts, women and children are really affected in a different way. We need to [listen to] them to make sure that we’re discussing the particular issues that they’re facing during conflict, and also to benefit from their expertise,’ Musimbi says.

In the shadow of ongoing violence in the DRC, women’s lives are forever changed by decades of war. Yet amid such horrors the stories of Ndarubyariye taking to the battlefield, Uwimana protecting her children, Bayavuge and Mbitse caring for other displaced people, Ndoole recovering in a hospital ward, and Musimbi working tirelessly for peace embody women’s efforts for agency, safety and stability in wartime.