WAR-RELATED rape cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo are being reported at the rate of 40 per day and rebels are forcing eight-year-old boys to become soldiers, a press conference was told yesterday.
Called to draw attention to the systematic rape of women as a weapon of war in the Congo, it was told by Fr Eoin Cassidy, of the Catholic Bishops Irish Commission for Justice and Social Affairs (ICJSA), of a statement last month from the Congolese bishops.
They said they were “living through a genuine human tragedy that, as a silent genocide, is being carried out under everyone’s eyes”.
Referring to the lack of any response by 17,000 UN troops in the Congo to this, the bishops said “large-scale massacres of the civil population, the selective extermination of young people, the systematic violations carried out as a weapon of war” were taking place “under the impassive gaze of those who have received the mandate to maintain peace and protect the civil population”.
Fr Cassidy called on the Irish Government to exert pressure on the Congo’s former colonial masters in the EU “who have a responsibility for the legacy there”, to intervene.
Out of respect for the 26 Irish soldiers killed in the Congo on UN service in the 1960s, he appealed to the Government to support the immediate deployment of EU troops to support the UN in the Congo, and to use its influence at the UN to push for renewed peace talks in the Congo.
Launching the ICJSA document, Violence against Women in War: We Cannot Remain Silent, Bishop Raymond Field, Auxiliary Bishop of Dublin and chairman of the ICJSA, said that in the Congo “women are being systematically targeted and raped to humiliate and instil fear in the indigenous population”.
Dr Field said this was being done as a deliberate strategy of war and there was forced recruitment of boys and men by armed groups there.
He called for national and international policy makers to focus on the “human devastation unfolding in the Congo which is physically ripping families and communities apart and whose psychological and social legacy will have lasting repercussions for future generations”.
Sr Ethna Regan, of the ICJSA, said war-related rape cases in the Congo were now being reported at the rate of 40 a day and children aged between eight and 14 are being forcibly inducted into the ranks of the rebels.
She recalled that last month 44 non-governmental organisations in the eastern Congo had issued a statement pleading for international assistance as, particularly since August, such was the incidence of sexual violence there that “military forces and armed groups have reduced women to a battlefield”. Sr Regan said it is now believed that it is more dangerous to be a woman in the Democratic Republic of Congo than to be a soldier there.
