Things are not pretty in the Congo:
BUKAVU, Congo — Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, cannot bear to listen to the stories his patients tell him anymore.
Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.
“We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo’s rape epidemic. “They are done to destroy women.”
Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence, and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen here. According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country.
“The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” said John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. “The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling.”
You can’t make this stuff up.
According to victims, one of the newest groups to emerge is called the Rastas, a mysterious gang of dreadlocked fugitives who live deep in the forest, wear shiny tracksuits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys and are notorious for burning babies, kidnapping women and literally chopping up anybody who gets in their way.
United Nations officials said the so-called Rastas were once part of the Hutu militias who fled Rwanda after committing genocide there in 1994, but now it seems they have split off on their own and specialize in freelance cruelty.
Honorata Barinjibanwa, an 18-year-old woman with high cheekbones and downcast eyes, said she was kidnapped from a village that the so-called Rastas raided in April and kept as a sex slave until August. Most of that time she was tied to a tree, and she still has rope marks ringing her delicate neck. The men would untie her for a few hours each day to gang-rape her, she said.
“I’m weak, I’m angry, and I don’t know how to restart my life,” she said from Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, where she was taken after her captors freed her.
She is also pregnant.
What is there to say?
There isn’t anything to say except to wonder when we’re going to take some evolutionary jump and this kind of sickness will be in our past.
Are you a sociobiologist?
It is a matter of culture, not “human nature”. Some cultures lead to people being raised civil and compassionate; others to people being raised cruel and uncaring.
As glitterscale suggests, the fundamental problem here is overpopulation.
No I’m not a sociobiologist. My comment seems to be taken the wrong way. What I meant in a very simple way was that I hoped that someday people would learn and be taught to value each other as human beings and these kind of stories from here and around the world would be a thing of the past.
I was just hoping I guess that years from now somehow this would be the case.
I was just hoping I guess that years from now somehow this would be the case.
That should have been the case after World War II. The Europeans (with the exception of the British and the odd East European people such as the Poles) learned the lesson that no good can ever come from war. There was no reason for the relations between all nations to be governed analogously to how EU members deal with each other. That was the dream behind the UN.
But evidently, that was not meant to be. Our elites have become unenlightened.
that we humans are like rats: once we get to a certain population density we turn on each other!
All over the globe we see horrible things happening – Burma being the latest. And those things just seem to have no real cap on the cruelty and inhumanity going on.
Iraq is our mess and nobody can really tell me why we created it. Yes I know all the words spoken, but none of them resonate with truth. (Except that we did it for the oil!)
Now Iran is in the crosshairs. Nobody has explained why we need to go bomb it especially given the dire situation of our army. But I suppose that they, too, have oil?
How could we lose our country to oil so thoroughly?
You reach this point of depravity when you come to believe that Darwinism is a valid principle upon which to build a society. That principle is the only one which begins to give meaning to it all.
evolution meant that someday we would begin to live up to our potential and be the best humans we could be – wise, compassionate, caring, fearless. Not the best thugs!
Thanks for the other side of evolution.
Evolution could be the way you describe, if one believes that there has been a slow emergence of humanism across these many centuries that history has enlightened us about. But the last century was not very promising. After WWII we said no more genocides, and what happened? Every decade since the Holocaust, we have experienced another genocide. For that matter, look at how the Israelis have been treating the Palestinians, all for the same kind of ethnocentric ideal that ultimately led to WWII. If Jews could not learn from their Holocaust experience, how can the rest of us expect to learn from it?
Truth is that many did but, still, we are seeing low life genes returning and winning battles.
The comments here about this story add grievous insult to injury. The initial excuse was an apologetic comparison of demonic human behavior to that of rats stressed by over population. How bizarre!! Comments of this nature shine a glaring light on the racist attitudes in so-called western society.
Do you think for a minute if these wretched victims of such horrific brutality were White/Caucasian women, that people internationally, including those commenting on this report would accept these grim reports of widespread rapes and torturous mayhem impassively and as just a repugnant disgusting quirk of nature (read natural behavior due to over-population). I think not. If just ONE White woman was subjected to such a brutal attack in the Congo, governments from around the world would be sending troops into the Congo to seek retribution from the perpetrators.
From Dafur to the Congo the message is becoming clear to those who feed upon the blood of the innocent; “confine your victims to black African women and you can enjoy yourself with impunity.”
I suspect from my feelings anyway that this story and ones here in the US that are as brutal that sometimes there is just nothing to say because it is too awful. I know when I read this I was quite literally physically sick-the skin color has nothing to do with how I feel. Although I do believe that there are many people who do feel that way as you said and if this was about white women the story or outrage would have far different results.