Congolese physician Dr. Denis Mukwege will be awarded the 20th U-M Wallenberg Medal at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 16 in Rackham Auditorium. After the medal presentation, Mukwege will deliver the Wallenberg Lecture.
Mukwege is a leader in the movement to highlight the continued problem of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He is the director of Panzi Hospital, in Bukavu in the eastern Congo, where he specializes in the treatment of women who are victims of the sexual violence that since the 1990s has been part of the catastrophic civil wars in the Congo and Rwanda. He is one of the world’s leading experts on how to repair the internal physical damage caused by rape.
The 12-year war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, centered mainly in eastern Congo, is the widest interstate war in modern African history. It has directly affected the lives of 50 million Congolese people. More people have died in the eastern Congo and adjacent regions than in Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur combined.
“The conflict has become a war against women,” according to a 2007 CNN report, “and the weapon used to destroy them, their families and whole communities, is rape.” Panzi Hospital is the frontline of this war. Hundreds of thousands of women have been raped in the last 12 years, and Mukwege has treated 21,000 of them, many more than once. He performs up to 10 surgeries a day during his 18-hour workdays. He says that his patients often arrive at the hospital naked, bleeding and with severely damaged reproductive organs.
“You know, they’re in deep pain. But it’s not just physical pain. It’s psychological pain that you can see. Here at the hospital, we’ve seen women who’ve stopped living,” Mukwege told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. Many of the women he treats are blamed for what happened to them and then shunned because of fears they’ve contracted HIV or because their rapes were so violent they can no longer control their bodily functions.
Mukwege recently has been the recipient of several major awards, including the first African of the Year Prize and the UN Prize in the Field of Human Rights. In 2009 he received the Swedish Olaf Palme Prize for being “an admirable example of what courage, persistency and enduring hope may accomplish for human rights and dignity in times when these values seem the most distant.”
Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, a 1935 graduate of the U-M College of Architecture, saved the lives of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews near the end of World War II. Working in Budapest in the late 1930s, Wallenberg came into contact with many Jewish refugees from Europe. In 1944, at the request of Jewish organizations and the American War Refugee Board, the Swedish Foreign Ministry sent Wallenberg on a rescue mission to Budapest. Over the course of six months, Wallenberg issued thousands of protective passports. He confronted Hungarian and German guards to secure the release of Jews whom he claimed were under Swedish protection, placing some 15,000 Jews into 31 Safe Houses.
After reporting to Soviet headquarters in Budapest on Jan. 17, 1945, Wallenberg vanished into the Soviet Gulag. Although the Russians claim that Wallenberg died in 1947, the results of numerous investigations into his whereabouts remain inconclusive.
For more information, contact Wendy Ascione at 734-764-5536 or [email protected], or go to www.wallenberg.umich.edu.
