International rights watchdog, Human Rights Watch (HRW), on Friday accused forces involved in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) war of committing war crimes against women and girls in the east of the sprawling central African nation.
In its report titled ”The War Within the War. Sexual Violence against Women and Girls in Eastern Congo”, the group said rape and other forms of sexual violence were ”frequent and sometimes systematic in areas occupied by Rwandan troops and rebels allies”.
It said that testimonies of victims, witnesses and officials, indicated that some rapists attacked their victims with extraordinary brutality.
It cited two cases where ”assailants inserted firearms into the private parts of their victims and then shot them, and where combatants mutilated the sexual organs of women with knives or razor blades.
”Some of the combatants attacked girls as young as five years and women as old as 80 years,” HRW noted.
”War continues to rage in eastern DRC, but within that larger war, combatants carry out another war — sexual violence against women and girls,” HRW senior advisor for Africa Alison des Forges said.
A twenty-year-old girl, Generose, narrated to HRW that on August 2 last year, a soldier attacked her on the road from Kalonge to Mudaka and took money she had collected from her fiance for a wedding dress.
”He took me away into the forest, where there were three other soldiers, who roughed me up and each one of them raped me every day until August 25. They finally just sent me away when they were tired of me,” she said.
A forty-year-old woman farmer from Uvira also narrated an attack in July last year.
”We were all working in the fields when some armed Banyamulenge men in uniforms surrounded us. We ran and hid, but they grabbed a Burundian woman who was with us, accusing her of being the wife of the Mai-Mai”, another armed group.
”Seven soldiers took the Burundian woman off and raped her, then put a gun into her vagina and shot her. When they left, we carried her with us, but she died on the way,” the woman said.
Another 20-year-old girl, Eleonore, told how her parents were tortured before she was herself raped by men who spoke the Kinyarwanda and Kiswahili languages.
The HRW report said assailants often attacked women and girls engaged in activities necessary for survival of their families, such as cultivating the fields, collecting firewood, or going to market.
”Medical services in eastern DRC have almost totally collapsed, leaving most victims of rape and other sexual tortures with little hope for treatment of injuries or sexually transmitted diseases,” the report noted.
The report quoted some experts as estimating that the prevalence of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, among military forces in the region may be higher than 50%.
The armed groups accused of sex abuses include Rwandan army soldiers and its DRC rebel ally, Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), as well as armed groups opposed to them — the Mai Mai and Burundian and Rwandan armed rebel groups.
”The Mai Mai rebels and other armed groups abducted women and girls and forced them to provide sexual services and domestic labour, sometimes for periods of more than a year,” the report said. – Sapa-AFP