rape epidemic raises trauma of congo war

[niyad]

(cross posted in "women's rights" forum)

(google "congo rape" and be prepared to be horrified

Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War


By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: October 7, 2007
BUKAVU, Congo — Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, cannot bear to listen to the stories his patients tell him anymore.




The New York Times
Soldiers and militiamen have raped women around Bukavu.

Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.

“We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo’s rape epidemic. “They are done to destroy women.”

Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence, and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen here. According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country.

“The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” said John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. “The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling.”\
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/world/africa/07congo.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin


AMY GOODMAN: President Bush made a strong statement about rape and genocide at a UN Security Council meeting on September 25th.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Maybe some don't think it’s genocide, but if you've been raped, you think it’s -- your human rights have been violated. If you're mercilessly killed by roaming bands, you know it’s genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: President Bush was talking about the violence in Darfur, Sudan, but he made no mention of another crisis in Africa: the long and ongoing wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Between 1997 and 2004, up to four million people died in the conflict. That's according to the latest mortality survey carried out by the International Rescue Committee and published in the British medical journal Lancet. The IRC also estimates today, three years later, 38,000 people continue to die each month.

Today we focus on a particularly brutal aspect of the ongoing war in the DRC: the war against women. Speaking to the New York Times, John Homes, the UN Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, called the sexual violence in the Congo “the worst in the world.”

Christine Schuler Deschryver is a Congolese human rights activist. She lives in Bukavu in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the violence against women is the worst. She came into our firehouse studio last month. I asked her to describe the situation in her country.

CHRISTINE SCHULER DESCHRYVER: In Congo, since ten years ago, the war started in ’96. After the genocide in Rwanda in ’94, all the one who made the genocide arrived in Congo and stayed there in camps. And in ’96, when the war started, they went out from the camps and went inside the forest, and then they started killing and raping the Congolese population. Three years ago, we had the report from International Rescue Committee that already four million people died in Congo, so it's one of the most --

AMY GOODMAN: Four million?
. . . .

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/08/1340255