5,000 rapes in 2012 as unrest engulfs DR Congo

Some 5,000 women have been raped this year in the Democratic Republic of Congo's eastern province of North Kivu as a new rebellion has sown fresh unrest in the conflict-prone region, a local hospital said Thursday. "The number of rapes has risen dramatically: we have registered around 5,000 women raped since the start of the year in North Kivu. It's very dramatic," said Justin Paluku, an obstetrician and gynaecologist at the Heal Africa hospital in Goma, the provincial capital.

Renewed instability has engulfed the region since a group of soldiers mutinied from the army in April and began battling their former colleagues and sowing terror in the east. The group, the M23, was formed by former fighters in an ethnic Tutsi rebel group that was integrated into the army under a 2009 peace deal whose terms the mutineers claim were never fully implemented.

Its members have been raping women and girls, abducting young men and boys to fight with them, and carrying out summary executions, including the killing of young recruits who tried to escape, according to the United Nations and rights groups.

Radio Netherlands Worldwide - Kivu conflict on Wikipedia

Child Soldiers in Thailand

The armed teenagers patrolling Thailand’s southern borderlands with state-backed militias are not kidnapped or brainwashed. They aren’t pumped full of drugs and few, if any, have ever killed.

Still, they operate with grown, gun-toting men defending against Asia’s bloodiest Islamic insurgency. And their dissimilarity with the world’s more horrific examples of child soldiering — think Burma or Liberia — is part of the reason they remain largely ignored.

Just as Thailand’s militia kids are overlooked, so is the conflict that has sucked them in. A little-known rebellion along the Thai-Malaysia border seeks to turn a Connecticut-sized territory into the world’s newest Islamic state. Since 2004, the insurgency has left roughly 4,800 dead.

The rebels’ daily shootings, bombings or stabbings have stoked paranoia among their targets: “infidels,” Thai Buddhists, and their “running dogs,” non-separatist Muslims with ties to the government.

To bolster forces, Thailand’s government has helped organize and arm a patchwork of self-defense militias, amounting to roughly 50,000 men and women, that patrol villages with shotguns and rifles.

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Eta declares halt to armed conflict

Half a century of bloodshed in Spain's northern Basque country has come to a historic close after armed separatist group Eta finally renounced the use of arms and sought talks with the Spanish and French governments. The announcement that one of Europe's bloodiest groups was calling a final stop to the use of bombs and bullets was made by three masked leaders of the group in a video on the website of the Basque Gara newspaper.

"Eta has decided the definitive cessation of its armed activity," they said. Eta was following a peace script put together with the help of mediators led by former UN secretary general Kofi Annan after a year in which it had observed a unilateral ceasefire.

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