Atrocities Beyond Words

[from The Economist, 3-9 May 2008 edition]

"A ceasefire signed in the town of Goma [Dem. Republic of Congo] in January between the government and more than a score of militias has so far done little to ease the plight of civilians in the east. All sides--government troops, says the United Nations, as well as the militias--continue to use rape as a weapon of war on the most barbarous scale.

"Most victims, as ever, are women and girls, some no more than toddlers, though men and boys have sometimes been targeted too. Local aid workers and UN reports tell of gang rapes, leaving victims with appalling physical and psychological injuries; rapes committed in front of families or whole communities; male relatives forced at gunpoint to rape their own daughters, mothers or sisters; women used as sexed slaves forced to eat excrement or the flesh of murdered relatives. Some women victims have themselves been murdered by bullets fired from a gun barrel shoved into their vagina. Some men, says a worker for the UN Children's Fund (Unicef), have been forced to simulate having sex in holes dug in the ground, with razor blades stuck inside."