PrairiePundit

 

Image via Wikipedia Guardian: More than 30 women were raped in a coordinated attack in the Democratic Republic of Congo on New Year's Day , the aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières has reported. MSF said 33 women were raped in Fizi , South Kivu , in the eastern part of the war-torn country. "Women had been restrained with ropes or beaten unconscious with the butt of a gun before being attacked, some in front of their children," said Annemarie Loof, an official with the medical aid organisation. "Up to four armed men were involved at a time and homes and shops were looted," she said in a statement. MSF teams treated 14 women at the hospital in Fizi on 3 January, and 19 the next day. Two severely wounded people were transferred to Baraka hospital, one with serious head injuries after being beaten with a rock, the other having been shot in the chest. The United Nations says rape is a frequent weapon of war in Congo. Around 15,000 women were raped in ea...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife Examiner Editorial: Americans can give thanks in this Christmas season for an end to the reckless and destructive 111th Congress . This is the Congress that passed Obamacare , against the wishes of a substantial majority of the public, on Christmas Eve of last year. In the dead of night, Democratic lawmakers stuffed the monstrous 2,700-page bill with special-interest goodies and political payoffs like the " Cornhusker Kickback " and the "Louisiana Purchase." As we have learned since, most members were still ignorant of the bill's contents three months later, when it gained final passage in the House. No surprise that its immediate results -- both intended and unintended -- have been almost uniformly bad. Similarly, odds are that not one member of the 111th Congress actually read the so-called "cap-and-trade" bill before it passed the House in June 2009. Even a speed-reader could not have digested House Energy ...

AFP: Three groups of armed militia raped at least 303 civilians in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo over four days, said a UN initial report on the atrocities whose "scale and viciousness... defy belief." "At least 303 civilians were raped, in many cases multiple times," said a statement issued by the UN Joint Human Rights Office in the country in a preliminary report outlining the violations which took place between July 30 and August 2. "The known victims include 235 women, 52 girls, 13 men and three boys," detailed the probe, following the team's visit to 13 affected villages in the Walikale region in Nord-Kivu province. "In addition, at least 923 houses and 42 shops were looted and 116 people were abducted in order to carry out forced labour," it said. Rupert Colville, spokesman for the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned that the figures could still rise. ... "The scale and viciousness of these...

NY Times: United Nations officials had been warned about rape ocurring in a remote Congolese area much earlier than officials originally said, according to an internal United Nations e-mail and a humanitarian bulletin. The United Nations’ beleaguered peacekeeping mission in Congo, which costs more than a billion dollars a year but has failed to stop widespread violence against civilians, has been harshly criticized since the news broke 10 days ago that United Nations peacekeepers did not respond to a rebel attack in which nearly 200 women were raped. According to an e-mail sent within United Nations agencies on July 30, as the attack was unfolding, United Nations officials knew that the rebels had infiltrated the area and that at least one woman had been raped. “The town of Mpofi, 52 kilometers from Walikale, has just fallen into the hands of the F.D.L.R. A woman was raped there,” said the e-mail, which was sent by the United Nations’ humanitarian office in eastern Congo to sev...

The UN has accused both sides in the Congo fighting of war crimes for executing civilians. If that happened they are no doubt correct that it was a war crime. But, I don't recall them ever accusing the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan of war crimes for deliberately targeting non combatants or using human shields. Why not?

Telegraph: ... Full scale work by the Chinese begins to rebuild 2,050 miles of roads in the Democratic Republic of Congo, left to rot in the rainforest after the Belgian colonialists pulled out 48 years ago and further shattered by seven years of war. The vast project, which will triple Congo's current paved road network, is part of China's largest investment in Africa, a £4.5 billion infrastructure-for-minerals deal signed in January. As well as the roads, Beijing has promised to repair 2,000 miles of largely defunct railways, build 32 hospitals and 145 health centres, install two electricity distribution networks, construct two hydropower dams and two new airports. In return, China has won the rights to five copper and cobalt mines in Congo's southern minerals belt which boasts some of the world's richest ore deposits. The deal has confirmed Beijing as Congo's largest foreign investor and extended its dominance over swathes of...