Amnesty: 40,000 rapes in Congo

[Hellcat]

Amnesty: 40,000 rapes in Congo
KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) -- Fighters in Congo have raped at least 40,000 women and girls over the past six years yet the health system in the central African country can offer the victims little help, Amnesty International said on Tuesday.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/africa/10/26...reut/index.html

[Rasp]

Congolese rape victim learns to smile again

BUKAVU, Democratic Republic of the Congo (CNN) -- Jeanne is one of the "lucky ones."

She was 15 years old when armed rebels attacked her village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She fled her home with her uncle into the night, but the rebels caught them, stabbing her uncle as he tried to protect her. Then they dragged her into the forest, tied her to a tree and raped her on and off for a month.

"No one came for me,'' says Jeanne, now 18. "No one asked about me or where I had been. No one from my family looked for me."

Jeanne is lucky because she found refuge. She discovered a new family in the General Referral Hospital of Panzi in Bukavu, Congo. Thousands of Congolese women are not so fortunate. Their bodies and souls have been brutalized: systematically raped by marauding rebel soldiers during a 10-year-old war; ostracized by their husbands and villages like modern-day lepers.

[Rasp]

Mass rape spreads to Kinshasa

Kinshasa - "They threw me onto the ground and raped me. There were two of them, two fake policemen," said Clara, 16, just days after her ordeal in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Kinshasa has become a hotbed of rape by men posing as policemen. As armed militiamen rape and kill hundreds of women in the war-ravaged east of the country, the capital has witnessed a similarly disturbing rise in this trend.

Suffering acute stomach pains, Clara travelled to Saint-Joseph hospital in a slum district in eastern Kinshasa where dozens of people sat perched on benches waiting anxiously to be examined.

Inside his bare office, Doctor Arthur Ngoy presented a bleak picture: "Already this morning we have had two cases where women who were raped have become pregnant," he said.

"In our medical unit alone we receive on average three rape victims (from Kinshasa) a day. The majority of them are less than 15 years old. I even cared for a two-year-old girl who had been raped by her brother," he added.

Clara visited the hospital after she was raped on December 10.

"That night I was coming back from my sister's home when I was accosted by plain-clothed men in a jeep with blacked-out windows around 20:00. They showed me their police badges," she said.

Country ravaged by rise in sexual assault

The men told Clara she was not allowed to be outside in the night and she climbed into their car expecting to be driven home to her parents.

But the men had other ideas and drove her to the Ngaba district of Kinshasa where they ordered her to pay a $120 fine.

"I told them: 'I am young. I do not have that kind of money.' But they took the 1 500 CDF (roughly $3) that I had on me and my gold chain as money for transport," she said.

"Then they took me to a dark place. As two men raped me, the driver watched," she said, adding that the men "gave me a lot of pain. I still have pain".

Abandoned by her attackers, she was found on the side of the road the next morning by a mechanic who drove her near to her parents' home.

Clara's story underscores the spread of rape from the eastern DR Congo by rebel fighters to the usually safer districts of Kinshasa. Overall the country is being ravaged by the rise in sexual assault.

On Tuesday several thousand women took to the streets of the capital to denounce the impunity enjoyed by men who engage in sexual violence against women and children in conflict.

Meanwhile, a 2008 report by the United Nations Development Programme said "Congolese women live in a soul-destroying environment in which they are undervalued, discriminated against and sexually assaulted."

According to Doctor Dolores Nembunzu rape is committed in DR Congo either in the family, during abductions or as girls travel to and from school.

She added that violent rape can lead to fistula, a condition when the walls between the vagina, bladder and anus are torn, resulting in severe pain and debilitating incontinence.

"We receive rape victims every day. In this country women have become an outlet whose suffering is long-lasting," she said.

[Whitebear]

Court hears of Bemba 'war crimes'


Jean-Pierre Bemba

War crimes judges have begun hearing evidence against a militia commanded by former Democratic Republic of Congo Vice-President Jean-Pierre Bemba.

His Movement for the Liberation of Congo intervened in a power struggle in neighbouring Central African Republic in 2002 and 2003.

The International Criminal Court pre-trial hearings involve claims of murder and rape. Mr Bemba denies all charges.

He says his troops were not under his command once they crossed the border.

His lawyers told judges in the Netherlands there was not enough evidence against Mr Bemba to proceed to trial.

But in an opening statement, deputy prosecutor Fatou Bensouda
told the court of graphic testimony from one man who said he had been raped in front of his family, then forced to watch his wife and children abused.

Mr Bemba is the most high-profile of four Congolese warlords facing trial at the ICC.