Posted on 02/23/2006 7:11:41 AM PST by Danae
KINSHASA (Reuters) - Thousands of civilians have taken refuge on floating islands in the lakes of Congo's Katanga province to escape rape and murder by government and militia fighters, a top U.N. humanitarian official said on Thursday.
Some 120,000 people have fled their homes in the remote Mitwaba area, where hundreds of women have been raped during fighting between the army and former pro-government militiamen that U.N. peacekeepers are unable to control, he added.
Congo is staggering toward elections, due later this year, but fighting continues in Katanga and elsewhere in the lawless east, where minerals are plentiful and gunmen continue to roam, nearly three years after the war was officially declared over.
(snip)
Congo is home to some 17,000 U.N. peacekeepers, making it the world body's largest peacekeeping mission. But they are spread thinly across the vast country and just several hundred have been deployed to Katanga, which is the size of France.
Humanitarian crises elsewhere in the Congo, where aid workers say fighting and war-related hunger and disease kill 1,000 people a day, mean there are also only a handful of organizations looking after Katanga's displaced.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at today.reuters.com ...
Paging Kofi and the UN.....in whatever 5 star hotel you may be meeting at today:
Please set aside your report on the brutality of Gitmo and check this out.
Thank you.
This is isnt headlines because it shows black Africans in a bad light. This is the media - whites bad blacks good no matter the crime or statistics. It is unfortunate but true.
True. But even the papers that do carry it will miss the obvious point: this isn't about blacks being bad, but about government being bad. These are government soldiers doing what they always do--the same things that Union soldiers did as they swept through Georgia, for that matter.
I think that was a yawn.
I would imagine that just like in years past you will find the hand of the Communists from China, Cuba, Venezuela, and others behind all this turmoil.
What a horrendous story. I hope those animals who use rape as a weapon of war get castrated.
What exactly are "floating islands" in an African lake? I'm currently reading C.S. Lewis's Perelandra, part of which takes place in the floating islands of Venus, so that part really caught my eye.
How about an air drop of weapons to the refugees?
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