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Congo-Kinshasa: Civilians Face Horrific Sexual Violence
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Inter Press Service (Johannesburg)
30 November 2007
Posted to the web 30 November 2007
Nergui Manalsuren
United Nations
Humanitarian workers and U.N. experts say that extreme sexual violence is being used systematically as a weapon of war and terror in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as the international community sits by and watches.
"I was in total shock when I went there," the U.N.'s long-time special rapporteur on violence against women, Yakin Erturk, told IPS.
"We knew what was going on in DRC, but the situation is far graver. It is a brutal situation out there. I've been told a story where a whole family was abducted, taken to the forest. Men are at gunpoint forced to rape their own daughters, or other female relatives. And if they refuse, they are killed. People are forced to eat human flesh," said Erturk.
"What happens is that there are too many actors involved, too many interests involved. It is not a situation that you can refer only to the government of the Congo, there is incredible need for strong international action."
Earlier this month, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and John Holmes, the U.N.'s emergency relief coordinator, once again briefed the Security Council on the dire situation of civilians living in conflict zones, in particular the ongoing sexual violence in the DRC.
"A leap of imagination is not always easy, sitting in this warm and comfortable chamber, but let us remember the essential background," Holmes began his statement.
He said that rapes and sexual abuse are being committed with unprecedented cruelty, and the perpetrators have devised the most humiliating and degrading acts they can inflict on their victims. A large number of rapes occur in public places and in the presence of witnesses. Four types of rape have been identified: individual rape, gang rape, rape in which victims are forced to rape each other, and rape involving objects being inserted into the victims' genitals. In many cases, the rape victims are tortured and others are murdered.
Holmes and Ban proposed the establishment of a Security Council working group on the protection of civilians that would report to and assist the Council in moving decisively towards action, including the creation of special courts to try the perpetrators of sexual violence.
"Combating sexual violence, and the impunity on which it thrives, requires a rethink of how we use the tools of the international community and, in particular, the Security Council," Holmes said.
"We need for instance, to look at referring situations of grave incidents of rape and other forms of sexual violence to the International Criminal Court [in The Hague]," he said.
He also suggested imposing targeted sanctions against governments and non-state armed groups that flagrantly perpetrate or support such crimes.
However, after eight hours of impassioned testimony and speeches, the Security Council failed to act on the proposals, instead reiterating a previous statement on "the need to end impunity for such acts as part of a comprehensive approach to seeking peace, justice, truth and national reconciliation."
The DRC recently emerged from a five-year conflict between government forces and various rebel groups that has claimed an estimated three million lives. Despite a peace deal and the formation of a transitional government in 2003, the threat of civil war remains.
The United Nations has 17,000 peacekeepers deployed in the DRC, but it is not enough to safeguard the populace in a country whose size is comparable to all of Western Europe.
"I think that much was invested into democratic process, but that is not enough unless serious actions are taken to restore justice, because that is what missing in DRC," said Erturk.
The humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) says it has treated 7,400 rape victims at the Bon Marché hospital in Bunia, capital of DRC's volatile Ituri district -- more than one-third admitted over the last 18 months. Most of the victims are women and girls, but 2-4 percent are men and boys.
Despite an overall easing of the violence in Ituri over the last three years, MSF says that its health care workers continue to see 15 to 120 people a month who have suffered from sexual violence.
"There are known criminals," Erturk said. "Unless these high-profile criminals who are implicated for rape, mass rape and other human rights violations, unless they are punished, impunity invites crime to be repeated. So that itself destabilises society. Some of these high-profile criminals hold a command position within an army itself."
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At the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, a provincial capital in the eastern DRC, medical workers treat about 10 women a day, of whom a third need major surgery to repair the horrific wounds they suffered during rape.
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