catharine

I gave this speech on Tuesday, October 26 at The Women’s Conference in Long Beach, CA.

Illness and treatment only reinforced my determination to shake global indifference to the terrible violence in Congo.

So many women I saw at The Vagina Monologues were trying to overcome what was muted in them when they were young.

Having just been in the Congo for the last month, it is evident that the more than 12-year economic war in the Democratic Republic of Congo rages on. Almost 6 million dead. Almost 500 thousand raped. Here is what I propose.

When I saw the petition protesting the recent arrest of Roman Polanski in Switzerland was signed by some of my most cherished artists — the likes of Pedro Almodovar, Ariel Dorfman, Costa Gavras, Jonathan Demme, Sam Mendes — men who I believed to be champions of women’s and human rights, frankly, I was shocked.

In 1996, I was sitting with twenty thousand grieving women in a stadium in Tuzla, Bosnia. The women were holding photographs of husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and boyfriends who had been disappeared a year earlier in a place called Srebrenica, a UN enclave where Bosnian refugees had turned over their protection to UN peacekeepers who stood passively as ten thousand of their men were marched off to be slaughtered.

Despite an emerging women’s movement, the rape of women and girls continues as the UN looks the other way.

Just over a year ago, in answering whether sexual violence in conflict was an issue that the U.N. Security Council should take on, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice proclaimed, “I am proud that, today, we respond to that lingering question with a resounding ‘yes!'”