Sick, Twisted Priorities

The typical, racist slop from AP and Reuters below came from Yahoo.

No explanation of why the Jewish film instructor
had his photo before the photo of the African war victims.

The AP 'report' was buried even deeper under the usual Israel crap.
None of the major U.S. news services bother
to include it w/ their daily Israel propaganda.

I doubt if Ngowi understands that most of the Western politicians
who opposed UN intervention in the African wars were Zionists
who wanted the wars because they kept diamond prices so low.
Israel is the world's leading exporter of cut diamonds.

I wonder what Maurice Bahati Mashekaga Namwira
of Inheritors of Justice thinks of Zionism?

An undated hand out photograph released on January 4, 2004 shows Los Angeles-based film instructor
Dov Simens who runs a two-day crash course which boasts a host of famous former students.
The fast-track course, which Simens told Reuters during an interview in London condenses
four years at film school into two days, has influenced former students including
Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Spike Lee and Guy Ritchie.
Photo by Reuters (Handout) - Mon Jan 5,10:46 AM ET

Chikuru Muhigo, 4, sit on her mothers knee in an aid office in eastern Congo, Nov 8.
The girl was raped in October in a region where civilians are now joining the
fray after watching troops rape with impunity during five years of civil war.
(AP/Rodrique Ngowi) - Mon Jan 5,10:23 AM ET

Horrific extent of rape emerges at the end of Congo's civil war

RODRIQUE NGOWI

BARAKA, Congo (AP) - Nursing her year-old daughter under a tree, Zaina Kisa talks softly about how her life was destroyed when she was raped by 10 rebels from neighbouring Burundi and conceived the child.

"There is no future here for a woman stigmatized by rape," says the 20-year-old woman. "Many times I look at this child and remember the horror and pain of that day . . . But she is a victim, too, because she will never know her father."

Stories like Kisa's are agonizingly common in eastern Congo, where the scale of suffering during five years of civil war is only now coming to light as the fighting ends.

Medical and aid workers say the extent of rapes is unusually large for two reasons: rape has been used as a weapon in both the political conflict and overlapping tribal fighting, and there is a widely believed folk myth in the region that sex with young virgins cures AIDS.

Rape has been used deliberately as a weapon, said Marie-Honorine Mwayuma Chiribagula of the International Rescue Committee, a New York-based aid group.

"There was systematic rape in villages. Armed men would go from house to house and systematically rape every female in a village. The fact that no one was punished and it was methodical shows that this was a deliberate policy," she said.

Rick Brennan, the group's health director, said rape was widely inflicted in recent civil conflicts from the Balkans to the West African countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Congo, a country the size of western Europe, saw some of the worst.

Young girls and elderly women show up daily at hospitals and clinics in this part of eastern Congo to be treated for wounds inflicted by rapists. Attackers rarely face punishment by authorities struggling to keep control over the central African nation.

"Impunity bred this crisis," said Maurice Bahati Mashekaga Namwira of Inheritors of Justice, a Pentecostal human rights group. "People raped with gusto, and there was no one to hold them to account."

After the war broke out in 1998, thousands of women are believed to have been assaulted by rebels, soldiers and tribal fighters seeking to destroy communities that supported their rivals. In the largely traditional societies of eastern Congo, wives who are raped are almost always rejected by their husbands.

Now HIV-positive civilian men are committing rape, believing the tales spread by traditional healers of rape being an AIDS cure. 

That superstition may have been the reason Mapendo Magamba's four-year-old daughter was raped in Bukavu, the provincial capital about 200 kilometres north of Baraka.

Magamba trembles with rage as she describes her child returning from an errand and sobbing that a neighbour had "hurt her." An elder sister called for help from other neighbours, who examined the child and discovered her thighs covered with semen and blood.

The child was treated at Bukavu's Panzi Hospital where Dr. Josee Mwiyaso Yangoy, a gynecologist, said the onslaught of rapes is only now coming to light because long-closed roads are opening, allowing thousands of women from isolated villages to seek treatment.

"Some come with knife and gunshot wounds in the vagina, others with large sticks shoved into their genitals and others with broken limbs after they are beaten to submission," she said.

"Even pregnant women are not spared; they are gang-raped until unborn babies die," Yangoy said while pulling on a pair of surgical gloves to examine one of the latest victims.

Of the dozens of rape victims she has treated, Yangoy estimated three per cent were infected with the AIDS virus and 40 per cent with other sexually transmitted diseases.

There is no sure way to tell whether a woman was infected as a result of rape.

Most of the programs that treat rape victims are paid for by international aid groups like the International Rescue Committee, which funds the program at Panzi Hospital.

Aid workers involved in the programs estimate that for every rape reported, 30 are not.

Officials in Bukavu insist they are trying to prosecute rapists. The deputy provincial governor, Jean-Pierre Mazambi, said at least 20 former rebel fighters had been convicted and jailed for rape.

But that hasn't deterred many rapists, Yangoy said. They "now block victims from leaving areas they control . . . because they fear being reported and charged," she said.

The situation is complicated by the fact that some of the deadliest culprits - thousands of rebels from neighbouring Rwanda and Burundi - are still operating from bases in eastern Congo and remain beyond the reach of Congolese authorities.

Hamunazo Musoke was one of their victims.

When Rwandan insurgents first attacked the Congo town of Shabunda last January, they raped Musoke and her mother-in-law, and forced their husbands to watch, she says.

"They said they wanted to destroy us. The gang rape was intended to wound not only the women, but also destroy our families," she says.

Musoke's marriage survived that attack, but her husband kicked her out after she was raped again six months later, by four Rwandan rebels, as she was tending her fields.

She and three other rape victims then walked 335 km southeast to Bukavu for treatment.

Mid East | Africa | Jan. 2004