WP,pg1: Congo's Desperate 'One-Dollar U.N. Girls'

Congo's Desperate 'One-Dollar U.N. Girls'
Shunned Teens, Many Raped by Militiamen, Sell Sex to Peacekeepers

By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 21, 2005; Page A01


BUNIA, Congo -- She's known in the community as a "one-dollar U.N. girl." At night, she sleeps on the cracked pavement outside a storefront. In the mornings, she sashays through the dusty streets, clutching a frayed parasol against the blinding sun.

Yvette and her friends are also called kidogo usharatis, Swahili for small prostitutes. They loiter outside the camps of U.N. peacekeepers, hoping to sell their bodies for a mug of milk, a cold soda or -- best of all -- a single dollar....

***

When Yvette was 10, a militiaman raped her, leaving her without clothes, she recalled. She cried a lot, wrapped her body in rags and then got up. She sought counseling at a women's organization, where she was told that she had done nothing wrong but that the theft of her virginity made her worthless as a bride. She should understand, the counselors said, that now no man would marry her....

***

Yvette's story is not uncommon. The United Nations is investigating 150 instances in which 50 peacekeeping troops or civilians in the Congo mission are suspected of having sexually abused or exploited women and girls, some as young as 12....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52333-2005Mar20.html

Much of it is fueled by coltan trade. Coltan is essential for many high tech gadgets, particularly cell phones. Another reason to boycott cell phones.

What a disaster of a system for mining an essential metal. Destroys the environment, kills and enslaves people because of greed.
All this to reduce the price of a laptop by about $15.

This is horrendous.


Here's a similar story. Cites the International Rescue Committee, a New York-based human rights organization, saying that 31,000 people are still dying in the Congo each month, many of them children killed by war-related disease or malnutrition. Plus, the group estimates that almost 4 million people have died since the beginning of the conflict in August 1998.

Sorry I don't have an exact link -- it's at the website http://www.womensenews.org

Sex-Assault Continues Unchecked in Congo

By Nicole Itano - Women's eNews correspondent
03/13/2005

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA (WOMENS ENEWS)--A woman is gang-raped by six soldiers, in front of her husband and children, while their companion assaults her 3-year-old daughter. A 13-year-old girl dies, vomiting blood, two days after being brutally raped by a group of militants. A United Nation's peacekeeper trades a desperate woman two eggs for sex.

The stories are horrifying and endless and come from a new report by Human Rights Watch, evidence of the ongoing tragedy in a forgotten corner of Africa. In the jungles and border towns of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the world's greatest humanitarian crises staggers on largely ignored by the international community. Millions have died or been displaced. And tens of thousands of women and girls have been victims of sexual assault.

"Something we are increasingly seeing in conflict zones, in wars, is that rape is being used as a weapon of war," said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher on the Democratic Republic of Congo for Human Rights Watch.

"This isn't just soldiers on occasion wanting a bit of sex. This is becoming part of conduct of war. In that sense Congo is not unique. What's particularly frightening, of course, is the scale of what's happening in the Congo." <more>