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EDICOLA / KIOSK | LADINBolzano/Bozen, Göttingen, 29. August 2007
Increasing violent unrest in eastern DR Congo has sparked a
huge increase in the numbers of internally displaced people (IDP)
fleeing the fighting and women and children suffering from sexual
violence. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) warned
that at least 640,000 people in North and South Kivu were
displaced in June and July 2007. More waves of internally
displaced people are arriving at camps in the Kivus on a daily
basis. Aid agencies believe a further 280,000 may flee in the
next six months. Women and children are the main victims of armed
conflicts in eastern DRC.
The brutal war in DRC which left four million people dead since
1996 is supposed to be over but armed groups are still attacking
local communities, raping and kidnapping women and children and
looting property. UNICEF estimates that hundreds of thousands of
women and girls have been raped since the armed conflict began in
1996. But even after the signing of peace treaties in December
2002, there has been no end to sexual violence. In 2005 alone
there were more than 40,000 reported rapes or other sexual
assaults in DRC. Some 4,500 cases of rape were reported in South
Kivu between January and August 2007 - with many more cases
believed to have gone unreported. Most victims are too afraid to
report the crime, fearing to become stigmatised by their families
and other negative social impacts. At the community level, rape
victims usually suffer in silence, fearing stigma if their ordeal
is made public.
Women are gang-raped, often in front of their families and
communities. In numerous cases, male relatives are forced at
gun-point to rape their own sisters, daughters or mothers. Many
rape victims were tortured or forced to eat human flesh, reported
eye witnesses. Some rapists aggravated their crimes by other acts
of extraordinary brutality, shooting victims in the vagina or
mutilating them with knives or razor blades. Some attacked girls
were as young as five years of age or elderly women as old as
eighty. Some perpetrators killed their victims outright while
others left them to die of their injuries. In addition to the
severe psychological impact, sexual violence leaves many
survivors with genital lesions, traumatic fistulae and other
physical wounds, as well as unwanted pregnancies and sexually
transmitted diseases, including AIDS. However, health
infrastructure in the DRC is almost absent. The shortage of
medical services is particularly critical given the prevalence of
such sexually transmitted diseases among irregular combatants and
Congolese soldiers.
In the last decade, all armed groups involved in the conflict in
DRC perpetrated sexual violence and used sexual violence as a
"weapon of war". Although in August 2006 a new law in DRC
outlawed sexual violence, rape is still committed on a daily
basis by the Armed Forces of DRC, the National Congolese Police,
and by many non-state armed groups. We welcome the fact that the
new law redefines sexual violence, that it increases the
penalties and improves the penal procedures. However, the
judicial system remains too weak to implement the new law and to
establish precedents that might serve as a deterrent against
further violence. Impunity still prevails because senior army and
police officers have been shielding their men from prosecution so
that only few soldiers were charged with rape.
Society for Threatened Peoples calls on the Human Rights Council to: