Prince of Asturias Awards 1981–2014. Speeches

6 O viedo | C ampoamor T heatre | Today, Congolese women who have been victims of armed conflict, who have suffered violence and rape, have lost all dignity and honour. These women, whose genitals have been subjected to the vilest of assaults, who have been forced into sexual slavery and have been rejected by their own community, have suffered for 18 years. Eighteen years of torture, 18 years of devastation, 18 years of aimless flight and displacement, 18 years of extreme poverty. The children born of this atrocity of sexual slavery in times of war are themselves victims of rape when they are young girls, or forcibly recruited into armed gangs when they are young boys: a vicious circle of suffering and desolation that directly jeopardizes the future of the Congolese nation, with its thousands of unschooled children traumatized by the horrors of war. It is an open secret. Several reports from international NGOs and UN experts have denounced the organized, premeditated slaughter in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Various peace meetings and the signing of peace agreements between the Congolese government and the warring parties led us to believe, at one point, in an imminent end to the conflict. Sadly, however, women are still being raped, children are still being forcibly recruited into armed factions, families are aimlessly treading the path of exile, entire villages are being burned to the ground, people’s belongings are still being looted. No, our war has not finished. We are at war. A war that has been deliberately relegated to obscurity. What is the reason for this war? What is the reason for the suffering of these raped women? Are peace and human dignity a luxury for poor women? Are these women condemned to suffer the horrors of a war they have not schemed? Allow me to bring to account here certain multinational companies which, in the pursuit of their own interests, have contributed to plunging this great and beautiful country, the Congo, into a sea of blood and fire, taking the lives of more than 6million people and deprivingmore than 500,000 women who have suffered rape of their dignity and honour. (…) For how longwill we continue to ignore the pain of womenwho have been raped in theDemocratic Republic of Congo? Congolese women, with ravaged bodies and souls, demand justice and reparation; they demand that the indirect authors hiding in the shadows be pursued along with the material authors. It is proper and fair that those who fund and sustain this horror for economic reasons should be brought to account for their actions. Spain, one of the few European countries that have experienced the horrors of dictatorship in the recent past and which, in such a short period of time, has managed to construct a country of human rights, a country in which women’s rights are respected on a national and international scale, a haven of peace, a country of justice… Spain —as I was saying—will know how you use all its weight to exert pressure before the international community in favour of these Congolese women, whose only desire is to be able to live in peace in their country and satisfy their children’s needs. This justice requires strong, competent institutions. We therefore suggest that an International Criminal Tribunal (ict) be created for the Democratic Republic of Congo like the one created for Rwanda so that the crimes committed against Congolese women in these last 18 years do not go unpunished and, at the same time, to reinforce the mandate of the International Criminal Court. Caddy Adzuba — Prince of Asturias Award for Concord 2014 Excerpt from the speech given on the occasion of receiving the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord on 24/10/2014. 24 th O ctober 2014