'Here it’s not rape because you have desire for a woman, it’s rape because you want to destroy that person through her private parts. There’s no appropriate expression for it, because if it were men shot by a gun we would call it genocide. But it’s another type of genocide.’

So says Dr Denis Mukwege — also known as the Angel of Bukavu — a Congolese gynaecologist specializing in the reconstructive surgery of Congolese women gang-raped or sexually brutalized. 

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) war is being waged against women. And the Congolese militia’s weapon of choice is rape. The statistics are grim. A 2006 United Nations report talks of 27,000 sexual assaults reported in the Kivu Province alone.

'The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,' says John Holmes,  United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. 'The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling.'

Dr Mukwege — for a long time the only gynaecologist treating rape wounds in the Congo — is probably the world's leading expert on how to repair the internal physical damage caused by gang rape. From the Panzi hospital in Bukavu, of which he is the director, he works eighteen hours a day operating on women and girls often left for dead.

An average of ten women come to the clinic every day, sometimes from hundreds of miles away, having been subjected to some of the worst acts of sadism imaginable. They are often naked, usually bleeding and leaking urine and faeces from torn vaginas. He performs as many as six surgeries a day and has so far treated 21,000 women. With his pioneering reconstruction work, many women are able to reclaim something of their physical selves. They can also begin the long process of healing the psychological wounds.

As the son of a Pentecostal pastor, Dr Mukwege saw first hand the suffering of rural women when pregnancies went wrong. His desire to help those his father prayed for led him to France, where he studied obstetrics and gynaecology. His first clinic in Lemera, Kivu, was burned to the ground in 1996 during the first civil war. Setting up again, this time in Bukavu, he found that women with rape injuries overran the maternity ward at Panzi. To deal with this tragic influx, he set up a ward specifically for victims of sexual violence.

To Dr Denis Mukwege’s multitude of female patients, he is more than just their physician: he is a brother, father, counsellor, protector and confidant. In 2008 his work was recognized with the Olof Palme Prize. The same year he was named African of the Year and awarded the UN human rights prize. Dr Mukwege was one of the nominees for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, unexpectedly won by President Obama.