200 Rraped in DR Congo Over 4 Days, Near UN Compound

[Saya]

JOHANNESBURG — Rwandan and Congolese rebels gang-***** nearly 200 women and some baby boys over four days within miles of a U.N. peacekeepers' base in an eastern Congo mining district, an American aid worker and a Congolese doctor said Monday.

Will F. Cragin of the International Medical Corps said aid and U.N. workers knew rebels had occupied Luvungi town and surrounding villages in eastern Congo the day after the attack began on July 30.

More than three weeks later, the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo has issued no statement about the atrocities and said Monday it still is investigating.

Cragin told The Associated Press by telephone that his organization was only able to get into the town, which he said is about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from a U.N. military camp, after rebels ended their brutal spree of ****** and looting and withdrew of their own accord on Aug. 4.

At U.N. headquarters in New York, spokesman Martin Nesirky said Monday that a U.N. Joint Human Rights team verified allegations of the **** of at least 154 women by combatants from the Rwandan rebel FDLR group and Congolese Mai-Mai rebels in the village of Bunangiri. He said the victims are receiving medical and psycho-social care.

Nesirky said the U.N. peacekeeping mission has a military company operating base in Kibua, some 30 kilometers (about 19 miles) east of the village, but he said FDLR attackers blocked the road and prevented villagers from reaching the nearest communication point.

Civil society leader Charles Masudi Kisa said there were only about 25 peacekeepers and that they did what they could against some 200 to 400 rebels who occupied the town of about 2,200 people and five nearby villages.

"When the peacekeepers approached a village, the rebels would run into the forest, but then the Blue Helmets had to move on to another area, and the rebels would just return," Masudi said.

There was no fighting and no deaths, Cragin said, just "lots of pillaging and the systematic ****** of women."

Four young boys also were *****, said Dr. Kasimbo Charles Kacha, the district medical chief. Masudi said they were babies aged one month, six months, a year and 18 months.

"Many women said they were ***** in their homes in front of their children and husbands, and many said they were ***** repeatedly by three to six men," Cragin said. Others were dragged into the nearby forest.

International and local health workers have treated 179 women but the number ***** could be much higher as terrified civilians still are hiding, he said.

"We keep going back and identifying more and more cases," he said. "Many of the women are returning from the forest naked, with no clothes."

He said that by the time they got help it was too late to administer medication against AIDS and contraception to all but three of the survivors.

Spokeswoman Stefania Trassari said her U.N. Organization for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid was monitoring the situation but that access for humanitarian workers remains "very limited due to insecurity."

Luvungi is a farming center on the main road between Goma, the eastern provincial capital, and the major mining town of Walikale.

Kacha said on one day during the rebel occupation Indian peacekeepers had provided a military escort against the rebels to a large commercial truck traveling from Kemba to Luvungi, which is near a cassiterite mine and about 88 miles (140 kilometers) south of Goma.

U.N. mission spokesman Madnodje Mounoubai promised to get military comment on the assumption that the peacekeepers were protecting commercial goods but not civilians, which is their primary mandate.

Survivors said their attackers were from the FDLR that includes perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide who fled across the border to Congo in 1994 and have been terrorizing the population in eastern Congo ever since, according to Cragin. The Rwandans were accompanied by Mai-Mai rebels, he said, quoting survivors.

Masudi, the civil society leader, said the rebels arrived after Congolese army troops without explanation redeployed from Luvungi and its surroundings to Walikale. He said this happened after some soldiers deserted and joined rebels in the forest.

**** as a weapon of war has become shockingly commonplace in eastern Congo, where at least 8,300 rapes were reported last year, according to the United Nations. It is believed that many more rapes go unreported.

Congo's army and U.N. peacekeepers have been unable to defeat the many rebel groups responsible for the long drawn-out conflict in eastern Congo, which is fueled by the area's massive mineral reserves. Gold, cassiterite and coltan are some of the minerals mined in the area near Luvungi, with soldiers and rebels competing for control of lucrative mines that give them little incentive to end the fighting.

"The minerals are our curse with the FDLR looting on one side and the soldiers looting on the other," said Masudi.

The Congolese government this year has demanded the withdrawal of the $1.35 billion-a-year U.N. mission, the largest peacekeeping force in the world with more than 20,000 soldiers, saying it has failed in its primary mandate to protect civilians.

Mission officials have said that the peacekeeping army is too small to police this sprawling nation the size of Western Europe, and that its peacekeepers are handicapped by rebels using civilians as shields and operating in rugged terrain where they are difficult to pursue.

The mission also has a difficult mandate of supporting the Congolese army, whose troops often also are accused of ****** and pillaging.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/0..._n_690960.html

[PortraitOfSanity]

It's a bad indication of your country's stability when the title of this thread/article fails to shock anyone at all.

[Fruitbat]

Sorry Saya I couldn't read this, it is too upsetting.

I am astounded at the way humans treat other humans.

But these acts are all about power and control, often committed by people who have no power and feel their loss of control.

[HumanePain]

This is why that region of the world fails to receive any respect: after the non-violent examples of political change by Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and others, these dirtbags resort to rrape. This isn't a war but simple crime committed with war as an excuse. I cannot describe my contempt for the assholes who perpetrated this crap.

[Ben Lahnger]

Even though this registers on my radar as more of the same from that area of the world, it still saddens me to think that people can still commit such inhumane acts of terror on other people.

And I'm kinda pissed that the U.N.'s $1.35 billion-a-year peacekeeping force is so impotent. I think if that kind of money is being spent it ought to be an asskicking force.

[Saya]

You'd think, huh? Or that people can realize what conflict minerals are paying for.

What kills me most is the apathy, not many news sources are reporting this.

In her memoir A Thousand Sisters, Lisa Shannon wrote about her visit to a UN refugee camp in eastern DR Congo, and how the women are often ***** on their walk from the fields where they work back to the refugee camp. She asked a UN worker what they are doing to protect the women. The UN worker shrugged her shoulders and said something like "There's not much you can do about rrape here. Its cultural." O.o

Somehow we've managed to forget that in wars our soldiers have committed mass rrape as well, its just something dirty Africans do now.

[Saya]

Its a blog post, but they did a good job trying to piece together what lead up to the attack, and why the UN was so inefficient: http://congosiasa.blogspot.com/2010/...-happened.html

you have to delete the space in ra pe there.

[Saya]

The number they are now reporting is 500, and the UN admits it has failed to protect the Congolese.

The UN "failed" the victims of a mass **** in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a top official has said, as the number of reported cases rose to more than 500.

The world's biggest UN peacekeeping mission has been accused of ignoring warnings from community leaders days before Rwandan and Congolese rebels began a spree of ****** and looting 20 miles from a UN base.

Atul Khare, the UN assistant secretary general for peacekeeping, conceded: "While the primary responsibility for protection of civilians lies with the state, its national army and police force, clearly we have also failed. Our actions were not adequate, resulting in unacceptable brutalisation of the population of the villages in the area. We must do better."

The number of victims in July and August is now double that previously reported. Khare told the UN security council that at least 267 rapes occurred in another area of eastern Congo, in addition to 242 rapes – ranging from a month-old baby boy to a 110-year-old woman – earlier reported in and around the village of Luvungi.

Khare later told the BBC: "Graphic examples were provided to me by the victims themselves when I met them in Luvungi and in other parts where I travelled. And I must say that this is why I feel that we have a responsibility, we owe a responsibility to the victims to make their lives better but also we owe them the responsibility of making DRC better."

Khare called for prosecution of Rwandan rebel group FDLR – which is led by perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide who fled to Congo – and Congolese Mai-Mai militia blamed for many of the attacks and UN sanctions against their leaders.

Khare was sent to Congo by the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to investigate why the UN did not learn about the 242 rapes in the Luvungi area between 30 July and 4 August until 12 August, when it was informed by the International Medical Corps, which was treating many of the victims.

The additional sexual attacks, in an area called Uvira and other regions of North and South Kivu, came to light during Khare's trip. He told council members he learned of 74 cases of sexual violence, including against 21 minors – all girls between the ages of seven and 15 – and six men in a village called Miki, in South Kivu. All the women in another village, Kiluma, may have been systematically *****, he said.

Khare said that in a community called Katalukulu 10 women were ***** by Congolese soldiers. He said Congolese forces must "maintain a much higher standard of discipline, good behaviour and conduct, and observance of human rights".

Altogether, he detailed new reports of mass rapes on various communities that added up to at least 267.

Last week the UN peacekeeping mission Monusco launched an operation using 750 troops to back efforts by Congolese security forces to arrest the perpetrators of the attacks, Khare said. At least 27 rebels armed with automatic rifles have surrendered and at least four more have been arrested.

Meanwhile, peacekeepers would undertake more night patrols and perform more random checks on communities, Khare said. The UN was also looking into ways of providing peacekeepers with mobile phones by installing a high-frequency radio in Luvungi.

The scale of the recent attacks stunned even seasoned observers of Congo, where **** has become a commonplace weapon of war. Khare told reporters after the council session that more than 15,000 rapes were reported in the country in both 2008 and 2009.

Margot Wallstrom, who is responsible for UN efforts to combat sexual violence in conflict, expressed her alarm over the increase in reported rapes, saying they show "a broader pattern of widespread and systematic **** and pillage".

"It is evident that **** is increasingly selected as the weapon of choice in eastern [Congo], with numbers reaching endemic proportions," she told the security council. "The sad reality is that incidents of **** have become so commonplace that they do not trigger our most urgent interventions."

Wallstrom last month warned leaders of rebel groups that they could be prosecuted by the international criminal court because widespread and systemic sexual violence can constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Congo's UN ambassador, Ileka Atoki, expressed his "deep disgust" with the mass rapes and thanked the security council for investigating the attacks.

"These heinous acts, that have become a weapon of war, are one more episode of the unspeakable suffering that the people of Congo have been plunged for more than a decade now," Atoki told council members.

Atoki said his country would continue to need international help to combat the attacks, characterising national police sources as "pathetic". But international backing for efforts to end the protracted conflict in eastern Congo are just as important, he said.

Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the UN, called Khare's briefing "very frank, comprehensive and illuminating" and said she looked forward to more sessions examining ways to prevent future mass rapes in Congo.

Congo's army and Monusco have been unable to defeat the few thousand rebels responsible for conflict in eastern Congo that is fuelled by vast mineral reserves. Monusco has been accused of supporting army units responsible for grave atrocities. The Congolese government wants it to withdraw next year.

Ban, who had been travelling in Europe, unexpectedly flew to Rwanda yesterday to discuss with officials their threat to withdraw UN peacekeepers from Sudan if the UN publishes a report accusing Rwanda's army of possible genocide in the 1990s.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010...****-500-khare

[Fruitbat]

Humans are barbarians.