Playwright Fights for Congolese Women

 "The Vagina Monologues" describes her trip to Congo, where thousands of women have been sexually attacked and mutilated in the African nation's civil war.  The 54-year-old playwright has joined with the United Nations in a campaign against what a U.N. expert called the worst violence against women in the world.

"In Congo , you're talking about a situation where Africans are hurting Africans, black people are hurting black people," Ensler told The Associated Press in an interview from Italy. "And it's harder to make people care. People say, 'Oh, it's just Africa.' And nobody is held accountable."

She spent weeks at the Panzi Hospital in the city of Bukavu, in eastern Congo, where Dr. Denis Mukwege is helping to repair the broken bodies of war victims. The hospital sees about 3,500 women a year suffering fistula and other severe genital injuries.

U.N. human rights expert said last month that the sexual atrocities in Congo's volatile province of South Kivu extend "far beyond rape" and include sexual slavery, forced incest and cannibalism. From Geneva, Yakin Erturk called the situation the worst she had ever seen as the global body's special investigator for violence against women. She blamed Uganda-backed militias that occupy Congo 's Ituri region, as well as the nation's armed forces and national police.

Erturk will report her findings in September to the U.N. Human Rights Council. "How do I tell you of girls as young as 9 raped by gangs of soldiers, of women whose insides were blown apart by rifle blasts and whose bodies now leak uncontrollable streams of urine and feces?" Ensler asks in an article in the September issue of Glamour magazine.

The International Criminal Court in the Hague is now considering indictments inconnection with the atrocities. The court's probe started in 2004, instigated byCongo 's president, Joseph Kabila.  Ensler is asking people to write letters to Kabila, demanding that he take stronger action to stop the attacks. Hundreds of letters already have arrived at  the United Nations, which is forwarding them to the African leader, Ensler said. She is working to raise both awareness and funds for the women through the United Nations Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict and through V-Day, a global movement she founded to stop violence against women and girls. 

V-Day was inspired by the overwhelming audience response to "The Vagina Monologues," an award-winning play in which actors share anecdotes about their bodies that reveal heartbreaking and hilarious glimpses of their souls. The movement has raised over $40 million in the past decade, funding thousands of community-based anti-violence programs and safe houses in Kenya, Egypt and Iraq, as well as the United States.  The money Ensler helps raise for Congo will go to Panzi hospital and to establish a safe haven called "City of Joy."

Her journey to Congo in May was inspired by a conversation she had with Mukwege last December in New York, where he spoke about his work - "sewing up women's vaginas as fast as the mad militiamen are ripping them apart," as Ensler describes it. Their friendship "began with my rusty French and his limited English," she wrote. "It began with the quiet anguish in his bloodshot eyes, eyes that seemed to me to be bleeding from the horrors he'd witnessed."-

Iraqis find a Better Life in the Theater

By Robert W. Gee

Posted 6/24/07

DAMASCUS, SYRIA

For refugees in Syria, it's a welcome reminder of home —The theater was sold out on opening night: men wearing suits and ties, jeans and T-shirts; women in conservative black abayas, in designer head scarves and high heels. They were all there, a mixing of the sects and social classes. It was like Baghdad, circa 2002. "When I got on stage, I felt that I was in Iraq," said Rasim al-Joumayli, 69, one of Iraq's most famous comedic actors and the author and star of a new play, Don't Play With Fire. "It's the same audience as in Baghdad."

Only this is Damascus in 2007, the new, de facto capital of Iraqi arts. Actors, artists, musicians, singers, and writers, facing death threats in Baghdad because their professions have been deemed anti-Islamic by extremists, have fled to Syria. Most arrived within the past year.

Damascus is one of the few Arab capitals that can match prewar Baghdad's rich Arabic culture. Here, there are art galleries, theaters, a state-of-the-art concert hall—and an eager audience: Some 1.2 million Iraqi war refugees have poured into Syria. Most of them have settled in the Damascus suburbs, and their yearning for the culture they left behind has helped resurrect Iraqi theater.

Reality based. At the time of the American invasion, there were more than two dozen theaters operating in Baghdad. Today, only the National Theater is still open, with a schedule restricted to matinees because of curfews and the constant threat of violence. In Damascus, as many as three Iraqi plays are running at a given time. Most weave familiar stories of war and loss, and of Iraqis struggling to survive in exile. They are black comedies, tinged with self-criticism and laments of a lost homeland, all fresh expressions of the 21st-century Iraqi experience. "The aim is to call all Iraqis to be united, to be helpful, to give up this dispute between Sunni and Shia, give up these differences between Iraqis," says Nahad Hassan, coproducer of Problems That Make You Laugh, Problems That Make You Cry, which has been running since the beginning of the year. Hassan is Shiite, and the other producer is Sunni. The cast is a mix of the two sects.

As in real-life Iraqi Damascus, the characters in the play come from all backgrounds: a female medical student who flees to Damascus after her father is killed; a peasant who sells all his possessions in Iraq, only to have his money stolen after he arrives in Damascus and then suffer a heart attack because of it; a female dancer; an unscrupulous Iraqi businessman who owns a hotel and a cellphone shop and employs two young Iraqi men, paying them less than he would pay Syrians to do the same job. Eventually realizing his greed, the businessman in the play joins the other characters to pay for an operation to save the peasant's life. "When we entered Syria, we brought our problems to Syria ," says Ahmad Shukri, the play's director. But, he says, the play's message is that Iraqis must help one another in order to survive in their diaspora.

To continue reading this article, go to:  http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/070624/2syria.htm

"He told me... that even if there's nobody in the congregation, you must continue to deliver the message..."

Elliot Gould
on Ingmar Bergman