officials, is also a center of excellence when it comes to the physical and psychological treatment of women who have suffered violent rape. It is something of a dark irony that Congo, a country known to the outside world as “the rape capital of the world,” and the “world’s worst place to be a woman,” according to high-ranking U.N. “Instead I found incredible stories of courage.” “I went there expecting to be traumatized,” says Platon. This project was reported and researched in collaboration with Physicians for Human Rights and the Panzi Foundation USA, and funded by Platon’s charitable foundation, “ The People’s Portfolio.”
Denis Mukwege, visited Panzi Hospital at the doctor’s urging last spring, to work on a documentary series for Netflix, Abstract: The Art of Design. Platon, a friend of the hospital’s Congolese founder, Dr. Panzi Hospital treats those women, and the tens of thousands more who have been violently raped since the war ended, victims of Congo’s wartime legacy of impunity. At least 200,000 Congolese women and children were raped during the seven-year conflict, in one of the most overt cases of sexual assault being used as a weapon of war. Rape has almost always been a part of armed conflict, but in Congo’s civil wars, it was a strategy. Though the most recent civil war ended in 2003, the scars of that conflict are carved deep into the bodies and psyche of the nation, most particularly its women. Photographer Platon, known for his unflinching close-up portraits of presidents, dictators and other powerful icons of our era, found his in the surgical suites and recovery rooms of a small-town hospital in one of the most traumatized nations on earth, the Democratic Republic of Congo.Ĭongo’s dark history spans centuries and lingers even into the present day.
Heroes often come from the most unlikely of places.
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