Nobel Prize-winner to contest Democratic Republic of Congo presidency
In 2012, Nobel Prize-winner Dr Denis Mukwege was attacked by gunmen – a consequence, he believes, of criticising the Democratic Republic of Congo government’s policies on gender-based violence.
A decade later, living under the protection of UN peacekeepers, Dr Mukwege has launched another challenge against the nation’s leadership. He will be running for president in elections due in December, he announced on Monday.
Known as “Dr Miracle”, the 63-year-old rose to global fame for performing reconstructive surgery on women who had been raped in the country’s war-torn east. His hospital has so far treated more than 50,000 survivors of sexual violence, while he has cemented himself as one of the world’s foremost experts in his field.
Dr Mukwege was born in 1955 in Bukavu, a city in eastern DR Congo. After numerous visits to see sick members of the community with his preacher father, he decided he wanted to become a doctor. He began his training at a medical school across the border in Burundi, later studying gynaecology and obstetrics at the University of Angers in France.
In 1998, he set up a clinic in his home city. The doctor intended Panzi hospital to be for maternal health, with his team treating new or expecting mothers. However, when war broke out, more and more women came to the clinic with gruesome injuries from sexual violence committed by various armed groups.
In 2013, Dr Mukwege told the BBC that rape in eastern DR Congo was part of a ‘stratergy’ to force communities away from their land and resources.
For three decades the region has been wracked by conflict, with numerous armed groups battling for gold and other valuable resources. Different militias have been accused of carrying out indiscriminate rape – tens of thousands of women are thought to have been attacked over the course of the conflict, Amnesty International has reported.
Dr Mukwege told the BBC about his first experience of treating a woman who had been raped and mutilated by armed men. “After being raped, bullets had been fired into her genitals and thighs,” Dr Mukwege said of the first rape survivor that came to his clinic. “The real shock came three months later. Forty-five women came to us with the same story.”
Along with his colleagues, Dr Mukwege has since treated tens of thousands of victims and become “the world’s leading specialist in the treatment of wartime sexual violence”, according to the Nobel Prize.
(BBC)
