Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Meanwhile, in Congo. May Trigger.



Margot Wallstrom, the UN secretary general's special representative on sexual crime in conflict, has been to the village of Kampala where mass rapes took place recently as a war tactic:

Shedla Abedi's age was no protection when the rapists came to her village.

"Imagine – a young boy of 20, and me aged 62, old enough to be his grandmother," she said. She pointed to a frail, older woman walking with a stick. "Her too," she said, "And she's over 80."

...

Rape is a way of humiliating and cowing local populations who may be used as slave labour, but the scale of the August incident shocked even local doctors who have seen many horrors. "It's the first time I have seen something like this," said Dr Cris Baguma of the International Medical Corps, one of the first organisations to help the women. "I can't understand it, because they didn't kill people, it was only for rape."
We must not forget these women, and we must finally stop thinking that the victim of rape is somehow humiliated by that grotesque crime by grotesque perpetrators.