From Foreign Policy via PressOK

Bembeleza Mungo Akonkwa, 41, cradles her infant son and hunches slightly. “I have so much back pain,” she says, sitting in the backroom of a hotel restaurant in Congo’s South Kivu province. “I have pain in my uterus. So much pain. I’m unable to walk or to carry big things.”

It’s worse when she menstruates; her periods last for two weeks and leave her barely able to stand. There’s no money for a doctor.

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” she says. “It just hurts.”

Akonkwa’s old job, hauling minerals and supplies up and down the hills of the Marok mine in the eastern Congo, left her physically debilitated. The pain also means she can no longer easily work. That’s a big problem: With 11 children and no husband (he ran away), the $2 a day she earned from carrying 100 lbs. packs kept her family afloat. The infant, she says, is almost 2 — but he’s so malnourished and small that he looks like he’s closer to 9 months old.

A few years ago, Akonkwa had a particularly unproductive day hauling supplies, and she was on her way home when a miner spotted her and offered her $2 for sex. Unsure of how she was going to feed her children that night, she agreed.

“And that’s where I got pregnant with this child I have in front of me,” she says.

Akonkwa is one of hundreds of thousands of women who work in and around Congo’s mines, sometimes extracting minerals directly but more often cleaning, hauling, panning and processing materials or engaging in secondary economic activities like cooking or selling food to miners, almost always under tremendously exploitative conditions.

These same mines have helped sustain eastern Congo’s 20-year-long conflict — they’re a source of political power and economic support for whoever controls them. For smaller-scale artisanal mines, that control is usually asserted by one of the many militia groups (even though large, multinational corporations technically own the title to many of them) who operate with impunity.

Although violence against and exploitation of civilians is rife in Congo’s conflict — most notoriously, the rape of women — it is particularly atrocious around mining sites. In addition to being treated as packhorses, women who need access to the mining sites to sell food or other goods have to negotiate permission from site owners, who routinely demand sex as part of the cost of entry.

Men who work in and around the mines also frequently rape women and girls. Child marriage, which is uncommon throughout most of Congo, happens with regularity in mining areas.

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