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

Congo: Chaos By Design

Obama makes no significant change in U.S. foreign policy towards Congo - The Real News

DR Congo police ban election rallies

Police in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have blocked President Joseph Kabila's main rival at an airport in Kinshasa. The authorities stopped Etienne Tshisekedi from staging an election rally after at least three people died in violence across DRC's capital city during campaign rallies.

The violence broke out when security forces used tear gas and live fire to disperse those attending campaign rallies. Two days before presidential and parliamentary elections, rival factions hurled rocks at each other and gunfire was heard across town on Saturday. Al Jazeera's Yvonne Ndege, reporting from Kinshasa, said "thousands of supporters" had tear gas fired on them, adding that the "feeling among the opposition is that this is a sign of how popular the opposition are and that Kabila can't win Monday's elections".

Daniel Howden, Africa correspondent for the UK newspaper The Independent, said on Twitter: "Live rounds and tear gas" were being used "at large crowds in Kinshasa airport". The violence was the latest sign of tension in the run-up to Congo's second election since a 1998-2003 war, a poll which has been marked by opposition allegations of irregularities and concerns about inadequate preparations.

Al Jazeera English

Profiles of Kabila, Tshisekedi and Kamerhe on BBC

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Rape of women in DR Congo 'tops 1000 a day'

More than 1,100 women are raped every day in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), making sexual violence against women 26 times more common than previously thought, a study has concluded.

More than 400,000 women and girls between the ages of 15 to 49 were raped in the war-ravaged country in central Africa during a 12-month period in 2006 and 2007, according to the study published in the American Journal of Public Health on Wednesday.

That is 26 times more than the 15,000 women that the United Nations has reported were raped there during the same 12 months.

"Our results confirm that previous estimates of rape and sexual violence are severe underestimates of the true prevalence of sexual violence occurring in the DRC," Amber Peterman, lead author of the study, said.

Full article on Al Jazeera

Cruel life of ‘child witches’

They are condemned as witches and warlocks, the demon seed of sorcery. Denounced, shunned and ejected from their homes. Yet they’re children as young as 4 and 5, tossed onto the scrapheap of street life to fend for themselves, chased by predators and running away from police.

Platini — named grandiosely for a former soccer star – is 14 and for the past three months has been sleeping in the doorway of a bakery in Makala, one of the capital’s poorest communes, where he can smell the aroma of fresh-baked bread and beg for morsels.

“My mother died when I was little and they said I killed her, that I ate her from the inside,’’ the youth explains in his native Lingali tongue through an interpreter. This accusation – feeding off the internal organs of a relative who’s died from an undiagnosed illness – is a common motif in the mystic anthropology of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the growing phenomenon of “child witches’’ driven from their homes.

Platini’s father remarried. His new wife wanted nothing to do with the boy and resurrected rumours of the child’s possession by evil spirits. She beat him remorselessly — 16 surgical staples required at one point, for a broken joint and an attack with the jagged edge of a smashed bottle.

Full story on thestar.com

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