A woman is gang-raped by six soldiers

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA (WOMENSENEWS)--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.


Poll: Congo War Is World's Top 'Forgotten' Crisis
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1299318

Sorry I'm just looking for attention this morning

Nope, bush wont send a single man in, call him when they hit a gusher or two, but then it will just be more soldiers to protect KBR workers and rape more women

The Dogs of War
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=125&topic_id=9558&mesg_id=9558

At Abu Ghraib we learned our own country was not above this.

I am disgusted.

A. CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY

Crimes Against Humanity have been crimes under customary international law since at least 1945. Article 7 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court codifies them as follows:

1. For the purpose of this Statute, “crime against humanity” means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:

(a) Murder; (b) Extermination; (c) Enslavement; (d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population; (e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law; (f) Torture; (g) Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity; (h) Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law, in connection with any act referred to in this paragraph or any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court; (i) Enforced disappearances of persons; (j) The crime of apartheid; (k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health….

Crimes committed in violation of customary international law cannot be perpetrated against a civilian population, regardless of whether the State has ratified a particular convention or treaty. According to a current codification of customary international law (articulated in Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the ICC), numerous acts constituting “crimes against humanity” have taken place.

The following acts reportedly committed by the EPRDF and Highlanders as part of the larger widespread and systematic attack against the civilian Anuak population, constitute crimes against humanity and are punishable as violations of customary international law:

1) Widespread and systematic murders and executions of Anuaks
2) Arson and murder in order to forcibly deport the Anuak population
3) Mass rape of Anuak women and girls
4) Forced pregnancy to produce non-Anuak children
5) Enforced disappearances of Anuak persons
6) Arbitrary arrests, detention and torture of Anuak persons
7) Purposeful transmission of HIV/AIDS to Anuak rape victims (inhumane acts)
8) Intentional mutilation of Anuak persons
9) Other cruel or inhumane acts intentionally causing great suffering or bodily harm.

B. GENOCIDE

According to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), Article II, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a. Killing members of the group;
b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group;
e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Ethiopia was one of the first signers of the Genocide Convention on December 11, 1948, and ratified it in July 1949.

The following acts committed by the EPRDF constitute acts of genocide:

1) The intentional killing of members of the Anuak ethnic group, targeted solely because they are Anuak, destroying a substantial part of the Anuak group.
2) The deliberate targeting of members of the Anuak ethnic group to cause serious bodily or mental harm.
3) The deliberate infliction on the Anuak group, through burning of homes and destruction of food supplies, of conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.
3) The systematic use of rape as a weapon against a large number of Anuak women in order to destroy the Anuak ethnic group, by:
a. Forcing Anuak women to bear the children of non-Anuak fathers.
b. Intentional infection of Anuak women with HIV/AIDS so as to cause future death.
c. Rapes of Anuak young girls so as to prevent them from having children in the future.

C. ARBITRARY ARREST, ILLEGAL DETENTION & TORTURE

Article 9 of the ICCPR prohibits arbitrary arrest and detention. It provides in its relevant part:

2. Anyone who is arrested shall be informed, at the time of arrest, of the reasons for his arrest and shall be promptly informed of any charges against him; and

3. Anyone arrested or detained on a criminal charge shall be brought promptly before a judge or other officer authorized by law to exercise judicial power and shall be entitled to a trial within a reasonable time or to release.

States parties to the ICCPR are prohibited under paragraph (1) of Article 9 to deprive persons of liberty “except on such grounds and in accordance with such procedures as are established by law.”

MORE
http://www.ictr.org/ENGLISH/basicdocs/statute.html

it didn't start with a prison in iraq.............

... But I'm not impressed by Americans being horrified w/o looking at our own actions.

Regardless of how long it's been going on, the horror of torture (in any form)isn't lessened.

sometimes it's hard to tell which I have more of regarding this issue, rage or sadness...

Loans provided by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and G8 have traditionally included strategies known as Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) which came in to effect in Africa in 1980. SAPs require that governments reduce public spending (especially on health, education and food/storage) in order to pay Western Banks. They must also increase exports of raw materials to the West, encourage foreign investment and privatize state enterprises. Instead of reducing the debt, since 1980 SAPs have increased African debt by 500 percent, creating a domino effect of disasters (prolonged famine, conflict, abject poverty, environmental exploitation) linked to an estimated 21 million deaths and, in the process, transferring hundreds of billion dollars to the West.

more
http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2004/10.html

Why is the US IGNORING THIS? Isn't it Bush's mission to "spread democracy?"

WTF?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.

said Gareth Evans, head of the International Crisis Group think tank.

...

Almost half of those polled -- including U.N. relief coordinator Jan Egeland and U.S. leftwing intellectual Noam Chomsky -- nominated Congo, citing the brutality of an ugly, tangled war that has killed nearly 4 million people since 1998.
Congo's war officially ended in 2003 but fighting still rages in parts of the east and the United Nations estimates that 3 million people are cut off from desperately needed aid.


http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=7862859&pageNumber=0

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=7862859&pageNumber=0

"It's the worst humanitarian tragedy since the Holocaust," said John O'Shea, chief executive of Irish relief agency GOAL. "The greatest example on the planet of man's inhumanity to man."

Many experts accused the Western media of routinely ignoring emergencies in countries of little geopolitical significance for big powers despite the enormous scale of suffering. "One television news producer we met in the U.S. summed up the situation since spring 2003 this way: 'Look, we've got three foreign news priorities these days: Iraq, Iraq, Iraq,"' said Gareth Evans, head of the International Crisis Group think tank.

"And Iraq is not simply an American obsession. We've heard a similar refrain from news producers and newspaper editors again and again throughout Europe and elsewhere."

KILLING IN AFRICA Continued ...
More than 20,000 children have been abducted by a cult-like rebel group and forced to serve as soldiers and sex slaves, while most of the population in the conflict zone have been forced from their homes into squalid camps, say aid agencies. "Like many people, I didn't have any idea of the scale of this conflict," said British Hollywod star Helen Mirren, who traveled to Uganda with relief agency Oxfam.
"Nearly two million people have been made homeless and hundreds of thousands more have been killed."

What is WRONG with people? How can people be ok with spending BILLIONS to kill Iraqis over oil and NEGLECT intervening on the worst incident since the Holocaust?

US stays out, it's a monster.

It goes in, invariably there are civilian deaths, it's a Western power invading a small poor "country of color"; the locals fight back, it's a "quagmire", we don't have an "exit strategy", "no blood for iridium".

Being beaten up for inaction is better than being beaten up for action: if nothing else, it's cheaper and easier.

Now I just need a ticket, a translator, and a map to the homes of the perpetrators.

Gyre

The world is draining and destroying the continent.


Signs in Kisangani warn people not to step in a minefield.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/photogallery/HIgallery.htm

As a practical matter, it would not be particularly easy to intervene in constructively. The area involved is vast, and aflicted with poor communications. Neither the terrain nor the forces involved are partcicularly susceptible to the activities of modern military forces; it would take a great many infantry and involve a great deal of brutality to sort the thing out.

Over the next century or so, the map of Africa is going to be re-drawn by violence, in the same way the map of Europe was created in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Humans being what we are, this seems to me to be unavoidable. It is probably not manageable from the outside, either.

I would never advocate military intervention. However the world is already intervening unconstructively and this is a Holocaust, 21 million. A silent uproar has unleashed the dogs of war.

"The Dogs Of War"

Dogs of war and men of hate
With no cause, we don't discriminate
Discovery is to be disowned
Our currency is flesh and bone
Hell opened up and put on sale
Gather 'round and haggle
For hard cash, we will lie and deceive
Even our masters don't know the web we weave

One world, it's a battleground
One world, and we will smash it down
One world ... One world

Invisible transfers, long distance calls,
Hollow laughter in marble halls
Steps have been taken, a silent uproar
Has unleashed the dogs of war
You can't stop what has begun
Signed, sealed, they deliver oblivion
We all have a dark side, to say the least
And dealing in death is the nature of the beast

One world, it's a battleground
One world, and we will smash it down
One world ... One world

The dogs of war don't negotiate
The dogs of war won't capitulate,
They will take and you will give,
And you must die so that they may live
You can knock at any door,
But wherever you go, you know they've been there before
Well winners can lose and things can get strained
But whatever you change, you know the dogs remain.

One world, it's a battleground
One world, and we will smash it down
One world ... One world

PINK FLOYD


The Dogs of War
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=125&topic_id=9558&mesg_id=9558