Nairobi, March 25 -- After specialisation in gynaecology at the University of Angers, in western France in 1983, Dr Denis Mukwege returned to Bukavu, a serene tourist town in South Kivu Province, 1,200 miles east of Kinshasa. He began building birth centres for women, and schools for training midwives in South Kivu's village of Lemera, to reduce maternal mortality rate.

Following the Rwandan genocide in 1994, hundreds of thousands of the population fled across their western border to the nation which was then known as Zaire.

Rwandan army General Paul Kagame, who had ended the genocide, soon came in pursuit of fleeing soldiers. Fierce spill-over battles between the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda sparked the first DRC War in 1996 to 1997. Kag...