Women tell the BBC of a terrible experience of rape in the prison of Munzenze de rubber

WARNING: This article contains distressing content, including rape descriptions, from the beginning.

“He told me that if he tried to escape, he would kill me.”

Pascaline, 22, remembers the words of his rapist in a rubber prison, the largest city in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the early hours of January 27.

“I was forced to let it happen instead of losing your life,” Pascaline tells the BBC.

He was the second man to rape her in Munzenze prison. The first attack was so violent that it passed out.

His attackers approached the wall from the male block right to the side called “Safina,” she says.

“We listened to a noise when they jumped on the water tanks. There were many of them, and we were so scared. Those who had bad luck were raped. Those who were lucky came out without being raped.”

Chaos extended in jail and the surrounding city. The M23 rebels backed by Rwanda were approaching rubber, after a rapid advance through the region.

Most prison guards and city authorities had already fled. You could hear shooting out of jail.

Hours later, within the complex, there was a fire, apparently established by male prisoners while trying to escape.

In the morning, about 4,000 inmates had been triggered. But few women managed to escape. A total of 132 prisoners and at least 25 children burned to death, according to two sources.

A UN official told the BBC that “at least 153 women had perished,” citing “reliable sources in prison.”

A month later, Pascaline has returned to the carbonized shell of the prison complex, where an empty clock tower continues.

She wants to tell her story and is willing to be identified. She is also a voice for the dead.

Walk through the main courtyard of the Women’s Section, looking at the burned walls, scattered kitchen pots and piles of clothing. His hand reaches his mouth with horror without words, and takes his head.

“At one point I didn’t know what was happening,” she says. “It was after seeing others to die that I began to join, I would say that it was God who wanted me to save me.”

Pascaline, an onion seller, ended after bars here when her employer accused her of theft.

Nadine, 22, has also returned to prison for the first time. In her mind, she can’t escape him.

“When I sleep at night, everything I’ve seen here comes back to me. I see the dead again, as many bodies as I saw here until I left. Instead of opening the door, they let us die like animals here”

Nadine says she was also raped by two men.

“They came with alcohol,” he tells the BBC. “They wanted to drug people. They took me by force. They took all the women here.”

The BBC cannot verify how many women were violated that night, of a total of 167 that, according to the sources, were arrested.

Nadine is furious with the authorities, to enclose her first about an unpaid debt, she says, and then not let her out.

“I don’t think justice can exist in Congo,” she says. “I condemn the way in which the government is directing things.”

The government of Dr. Congo, more than 1,500 km (1,000 miles) away in the Kinshasa capital, is no longer executing anything in rubber. The rebels have total control and continue to advance in the east.

Among the ashes batteries that carpet the floor of the prison after the fire, there is a small pink sandal, which burns on one side. Some bright buttons shine on Earth next to their side, perhaps from children’s clothes.

Prisoners were allowed to keep one of their children in jail with them. Only two children of 28 survived the fire in the prison, according to a source. Prison children, retained in a separate block, were released earlier in the day.

It was not just smoke and flames that killed the most vulnerable, according to a detailed 38 -year survivor account, which does not want to be identified. We call it Florence.

She says that “the children began to die” when tear gases shot in the women’s section.

“The prison was surrounded by soldiers and police officers who, instead of coming to turn off the fire, fired bullets and threw us tear gas,” says Florence.

“When tear gas dropped over us, the fire became intense. Our concrete eyes as if Chile had been poured into them. There was almost no way to breathe,” he adds.

Fire and violations are wrapped in confusion, with all sides anxious to blame someone else.

Human rights groups say that rape is widely used as a gun in the DR Conggo both by the M23 rebels and by government forces.

However, in this case, Florence says they were fellow inmates.

“You could see that they were prisoners. Some came without shoes. When they got on the roof of women’s prison, they called the names of those who knew. And none of the attackers was armed or uniform.”

Florence says he heard “crackling bullets” out of prison from 23:00 onwards, and the police outside the prisoners who escaped.

“If a prisoner left, they shot him. When the bullets flew, he was on his knees begging God to free us from this bad situation.”

Some of the prisoners who broke into the women’s section were looking for a safer exhaust route, she says.

They interrupted one of the walls in front of the outside, a place where the police were usually not parked. But soon that gap was filled by fire.

Florence first saw the flames around 04:00. Then, time after time, he ran by meant.

“People died in front of our eyes. They couldn’t tell them. We tried to relive them by giving them water. Some women were stifled by fire, as well as gas. Some died of heart attacks,” says Florence. The BBC.

She also blames the Congolese authorities for the loss of so many lives.

“The state should have opened the doors when it saw the fire or come and turn it off.”

The BBC has contacted the government in Kinshasa asking for an answer to what the survivors have told us, but we have not yet received one.

Florence says that the women’s prison finally opened at 11:00, does not know who, and emerged with another 18 survivors. They were not offered help.

“Even the police found on the road did not ask for news from the prisoners, or asked if someone had been injured or how we were,” she says.

By then, the rebel combatants were in parts of the city, having entered around 08:00. Rubber was falling.

Women did not seem to import, inside or out of prison.

In a tent on the fields of the rubber hospital, we find another survivor, Sifa, 25, who was taken from the flames by a friend.

She lies on her left side: any other position is too painful. His right arm is heavily bandaged, and there are brands of burns in the arm and face. She also has burns on her back. When dressing is changed, nurses have to give it morphine.

But his agony is more than physical.

His two -year -old daughter, Esther, died in prison.

“I had Esther on my back. When we wanted to escape, something fell on her. A bomb? I don’t know what. She died on the spot,” Sifa tells the BBC.

She adds that Esther just started walking and was “without sin.” Sometimes he played with the other children in prison, but above all he was next to his mother.

How did Sifa end, a peanut seller, after bars in a prison full of full with her daughter?

She was accused of participation in a robbery, which she denies. She says she was imprisoned without being convicted. Local sources say it is a common fact.

The complete story of what happened in the Munzenze prison can never be known. It seems that those in power are not in a hurry to find out.

Sifa and the other survivors we talked to told us that no one had contacted them to take their testimony about the horrors of January 27, not the rebels in rubber control now, nor the government in Kinshasa who used to direct the prison.

“No one will continue (this case),” says Sifa. “No one will be persecuted. It’s over.”

Additional Wietske Butema reports of the BBC, Göktay Koraltan and Yvonne Katina.