Bob Harris:
Violence Against Women in the D. R. Congo: The Most Horrible Thing You Will Read Today — And, Unfortunately, Perhaps The Last You’ll Hear Of It For Weeks
Here’s a bit from the latest report on the Democratic Republic of the Congo from the International Rescue Committee:
“It was not uncommon to hear accounts of armed groups seizing young women from farms or water points and enslaving them and raping them for one to three months,” says Mosely. “Now women in North Kivu talk to me more about gunmen breaking into their homes and brutally raping them in front of their families.”
She says the attacks have become so frequent that families in the north cross into Uganda at night to sleep in the forest. It’s safer than staying at home.
As to what happens in some of these attacks, the Sydney Morning Herald has more (and look away now if you’re squeamish):
Attackers are now identifiable by their manner of attack: one group, after raping the woman or girl, inserts the barrel of a gun…
(Sickening next section edited, simply because I personally can’t stand to reprint it.)
… A large percentage of the attackers are HIV-positive and knowingly try to infect their victims.
These aren’t just random acts of grotesque inhumanity; it is the systematic sexual and social destruction of whole populations in eastern Congo. And little, it seems, is being done to stop it.
The eastern D. R. Congo borders on Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi, and the current horrorshow is a direct descendant of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the 1998-2003 Second Congo War (aka the African World War) which followed it.
This Second Congo War, which at its height involved about two dozen factions from eight different countries, is almost certainly humankind’s deadliest conflict worldwide since the end of World War II, with a death toll estimated by the International Rescue Committee at 3.8 million people as of April 2004.
more (with links):
http://thismodernworld.com/4077Snip:
If you’d asked me a year ago to name the most deadly conflict of our lifetimes, I might have guessed Vietnam. Most Americans I’ve asked out of curiosity have guessed the same. But the Second Congo War surpassed its death toll in about half the time. Ask what overseas conflict might merit more media coverage, and many Westerners may respond with Darfur. But the IRC estimated last year that Darfur’s sparse coverage is still five times more than the D.R. Congo gets.
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