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| Getting Serious about Ending Conflict and Sexual Violence in Congo |
| Author: Rebecca Feeley and Colin Thomas-Jensen |
| Publisher: ENOUGH Project |
| Publication Date: March 20, 2008 |
| Publisher Website: http://www.enoughproject.org/ |
| Language: en |
| Category:
Congo-Kinshasa, Conflict, Peace and Security, Human Rights, Women and Gender
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While a recent ceasefire agreement is hailed as a diplomatic success, the continued suffering of Congolese civilians remains an international failure. Systematic and widespread crimes against humanity continue to haunt the region. According to the International Rescue Committee’s latest study of mortality in Congo, death rates there remain unchanged since the end of the regional war that tore through Africa’s Great Lakes region from 1998 to 2004. By the end of this and every month, 45,000 more Congolese—half of them children—will die from hunger, preventable disease, and other consequences of violence and displacement.
Congolese women and girls in particular bear the vicious brunt of this crisis. Indeed, eastern Congo right now is perhaps the worst place in the world to be a woman or a girl. The sexual violence and rape exists on a scale seen nowhere else in the world as it is part and parcel of the conflict. It mutilates and humiliates. Its nature is brutal and vicious; it defies both description and imagination. Often successful in its intent to destroy and exterminate, rape as a weapon of war is causing the near total destruction of women, their families, and their communities. |
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