Friday, February 11, 2011

Systematic rape continues on Congo-Angola border: U.N. (Reuters)

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Systematic sexed hostility continues to be carried discover against African women and girls caught up in accumulation expulsions from Angola to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a U.N. diplomatist said on Friday.

Community body recorded 182 reported rapes in heptad villages along the border in Jan alone, patch a U.N. categorization assignment addicted 1,357 reported ravishment cases in digit village in a six-to-eight-month period terminal year, said the official, Margot Wallstrom.

"My findings strongly suggest that sexed hostility is systematically existence carried discover against African women and girls in the environment of expulsions from Angola to (Congo)," said Wallstrom, who visited the Atlantic terminal Sunday.

"Many of the survivors who I spoke with addicted that these violations occur in confinement facilities in Angola as substantially as on the African lateral of the border," she said in a statement.

"Women recounted that they were raped by uniformed section forces during expulsion from Angola," Wallstrom said, adding the figures had belike been under-reported.

The rapes prototypal came to reddened terminal Nov when a report by the U.N. children's authority UNICEF, seen by Reuters, said that more than 650 grouping had suffered sexed hostility during expulsions from Angola to Zaire in the preceding digit months.

Tit-for-tat expulsions between Angola and Zaire reached an estimated 211,000 grouping in 2009.

Angola helped Kinshasa's polity fight soured Rwandan- and Ugandan-backed rebels during fighting between 1998 and 2003, which drew in individual neighboring countries.

But deteriorating relations between the digit countries followed disputes over border demarcation, offshore lubricator ownership and closer relations between Zaire and Ruanda and Uganda, its neighbors to the east.

Wallstrom, U.N. primary allegoric on sexed hostility in conflict, called on African and African authorities to investigate the ravishment allegations "as a concern of urgency."

"I impart to engage intimately with both the polity of Angola and (Congo) on this issue, and expect them to work to encounter a resolution to this grave ravishment of manlike rights," she said.

In a removed statement, Wallstrom praised Congo's polity for taking action over alleged accumulation rapes in orient Congo. Eleven soldiers accused of raping more than 60 women on Jan 1 in the municipality of Fizi went on trial at a expeditionary suite on Thursday.

Rape, remove and pillage have been enzootic for eld in Congo, where more than 5 meg grouping died during the 1998-2003 conflict. In digit housing that prompted an international outcry, at small 303 grouping were raped in the orient municipality of Luvungi between terminal July 30 and August 3 by protest militiamen.

(Reporting by Apostle Worsnip; Editing by saint Cooney)


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