My name is Denis Tougas. Thank you for having me here. I represent the Entraide missionnaire, which has been part of the Table de concertation sur la région des Grands-Lacs since 1989. The Table de concertation brings together missionaries and international co-operation organizations that have been working there for a long time.
My presentation continues along the same lines as my predecessors, but it is more specific still. I would like to answer the following question. When faced with a situation like the one in the Congo, what can we actually do? What are we doing?
I will go back to the Canadian program on the prevention of sexual violence in eastern Congo and try to draw some lessons from it. At the same time, I will talk about what is being done and what could be done despite all the challenges. You must have also heard criticism of both Canada's interventions and those of the international community when it comes to supporting women or taking action on the ground in order to stop the violence.
So what I am going to talk to you about comes from the following sources and documents: two interim reports from CIDA; a confidential report from CIDA received under the Access to Information Act by the Canadian Federation of University Women; an independent evaluation report done in 2009 by Ideaborn on the joint project between Canada and Belgium; my ongoing communication with the members; and on-site visits.
I would like to give you a quick overview of the Canadian project. By a 2005 decision of the Minister of International Cooperation, Aileen Carroll, the project received $15 million over four years. It started in 2006 and it will end in March 2011. It has three objectives: to help to prevent and reduce sexual violence; to assume responsibility for the victims; and to build the capacity of players and organizations to take care of the victims. There are five parts: the prevention of violence, providing health care, psycho-social follow-up, socio-economic support and the reintegration in communities, and legal support. We are talking about two provinces: North Kivu and South Kivu, which have 8 million people. The territory is as big as the area between Ottawa and Toronto. It is 250 kilometres wide. The goals of the project—and they are decisions made as part of Canadian co-operation—are the following: to go through UN agencies and have enforcement officers, and especially to partner with Belgium to develop a joint project that covers all of the territories. There are three agencies: the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, merged with the Human Rights Division of the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC). UNFPA is run from Washington, but the operations are carried out in Kinshasa. Everything that has to do with relationships with women, care and so on, is done through on-site local and international NGOs.
For those of you who are in public administration, I am going to explain where this project is within the national framework. This project has to be co-ordinated with what is locally called the joint initiative, an umbrella organization that groups all the Congolese ministries, 10 UN agencies, major donors and major NGOs. In the case of the two provinces and the territories, things have to be coordinated with the Commission provinciale de lutte contre les violences sexuelles.
I will now go to the results. I am not doing full justice to the Canadian project because I don't have time, but I am going to point out what might be useful for us to improve things.
It is important to note that Canada's decision played a major role in the Congo. It was the first time a country contributed $15 million to a project of this importance, in a particularly difficult area.
Trying to carry out this program jointly with Belgium was a second very good decision. Since 2005, Canada has assumed leadership in providing care to sexual violence victims.
The statistics are impressive. Here are some figures: 21,897 victims were provided with medical care and 22,500 with psycho-social support; 2,800 women partook in income-generating activities; 1,150 cases went to court. The strengthening of local medical clinics and the creation of mobile clinics—a Canadian invention—were the most significant measures. Yet—and this is where my presentation starts—the Canadian project has been and still is highly criticized locally by women's groups. I personally think that's very significant. I will read you comments that I heard and received in writing from women's groups. The following is from October 2007:
Ever since our country was devastated by war, humanitarian INGOs came...to help vulnerable people, especially people displaced by war, and to build the local civil society...National NGOs, so-called local, without sufficient resources, were helping the victims before the humanitarian organizations came in. The same “local” organizations provide the data to the INGOs that use them to develop their projects. But once the projects are funded, the INGOs no longer want to work with the local NGOs to implement the projects, on the grounds that the local NGOs are not credible or professional, or are too demanding.
A year later, a CIDA delegation went there to meet with partners in Uvira, a major small centre. The following was said:
When asked how the CIDA officers assessed the state of the victims, the delegation answered that there would be a special visit for that. When the meeting was over, the women were unhappy and discouraged because they were expecting to have enough time for discussion. Oddly enough, no one came from the NGO offices that received the CIDA funding. And they weren't asked any questions about the management of those funds.
I will end with a final quote. A year ago, in December 2009, at a meeting in Goma, 20 organizations issued an urgent call to re-think efforts to end sexual violence. And I quote:
It is essential that a common vision be developed by both national and international actors that take into account the realities facing victims of sexual violence, their immediate needs, their rights and long-term goals for the future. Victims need to be consulted regularly and involved in all phases of the decision-making process...We must start talking to victims and listening to what they have to say.
Why is there ongoing criticism? As you heard, it has to do with the fact that we are not listening to what women's groups have to say and our actions don't reflect their realities. But these are two of the program's main objectives. One explanation is Canada's choice to go through UN agencies rather than through civil society groups, such as international NGOs, local NGOs, local institutions and churches that are ready to do this work and who have already been doing so. The choice that was made simplified CIDA's management process: fewer human resources and light supervision. The officers actually only went on site twice a year. The project was designed as an emergency measure requiring quick execution, which can be provided by international agencies.
However, emergency measures that last for so long should be reviewed. I will tell you about one challenge that you will quickly understand. Huge coordination and harmonization problems that were not anticipated in the beginning have occurred. You must surely be aware of that. Each UN agency has its own structure, its own methods, its own instruments. For example, in order to identify sexual violence victims, at one point, there were 12 different forms that could not be coordinated.
Obviously, there is also the dilution of funds. Canada sent funds to UNFPA, in New York, but between New York and the small Congolese village of Kamituga, there were many middlemen. Let me give you an example of the negative consequences. Here is a passage from the evaluation report:
In the relationships between the agencies and the various partners involved in carrying out these projects, not all partners were in the same boat. Sometimes there was the cascading effect of contracts that would go up to five levels. The agency has a contract with a partner who sub-contracts to another who then sub-sub-contracts to yet another, and so on. In this cascade of delegating and sub-delegating, there are at least two consequences. First, the more contracting levels there are, the more management and administration fees there are, and fewer resources for the players who are in direct contact with the victims and who actually carry out the activities. The capacity building of organizations was more beneficial for the major national or international organizations that receive more funds and that generally are also able to negotiate with the agencies.
Despite the initial good intentions, the project was not developed or implemented according to the needs and resources of local groups, as shown in the evaluation. Here is another passage from the evaluation:
Taking care of sexual violence victims has to be based on the victims' needs and context, not on the needs of organizations and agencies. The conclusion is quite obvious.
And here is a second explanation. The individual approach we use in the western world to address sexual violence is not appropriate and has completely discredited the abilities of the Congolese. Clearly, medical care has to be provided to each victim individually, one by one, even though there are around 200,000 victims. But everything else, including the psycho-social follow-up, support and reintegration in the communities, cannot be done individually. The project tried to provide for individual counselling for each victim. But that's impossible and it goes against the African tradition, just like the aboriginal traditions in Canada. This fact has been recognized. An interesting comparison can be done. The Congolese feel deprived, incompetent, dependent on international experts, who cost a lot more. The evaluation report says the following:
Community participation and volunteering on the players' part made it possible to reach those results. Without this community participation, if counsellors, psycho-social workers had to be remunerated, we wouldn't have obtained the same resource/result ratio. {QuotePara}
This was neither wanted nor intended at the outset, but that's what happened. In cases where women's groups had some freedom, in villages, they used their own group counselling and support methods. The Ideaborn report does not recognize that there is a very different approach than the one used by all the international agencies on the ground. We have to take that difference into account.
I will close by addressing a very difficult issue, by looking at the outcome of the Canadian project and all the other projects too. Acts of violence continue and they are now spreading. It is no longer the rebels who commit them. It is now the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as more and more civilians. Impunity is the general rule. In terms of the two project objectives, which were to contribute to the prevention and reduction of sexual violence and to build the capacities of stakeholders, everything went wrong. I really think practices should be reviewed. Why? Here are some reasons.
First, the joint project evaluation indicates that all its activities present raped women as victims without recourse. Sexual violence has never been presented as a violation of human rights, or as a war crime, either at awareness meetings or in court. But this aspect is vital in supporting militant women’s groups. They can really change the way of thinking in a region where equality between men and women, although promoted in legislation, is not integrated into the values and customs.
In addition, the joint project uses the same standards with respect to sexual violence as those used in bilateral projects to build roads and schools or strengthen political institutions. By doing so, the results were a bit distorted—I will stop here. The statistics are quite telling, and rightly so. Let's recognize that. However, by carrying out the program this way, by evaluating the results based on the objectives, and by using each component for our own ends, politics have been completely removed from the issue. But, in the case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, sexual violence is a highly political issue.
Neither Canada nor the international community will be able to solve this problem for the DRC. The Congolese will have to do it themselves. But in terms of providing support and capacity building projects, we must ensure that our actions allow Congolese women, specifically, to be empowered, simply put.
I will stop here. Although I took so much time, I still have many more specific suggestions and proposals for Canada in terms of its contribution to the DRC.
