Systematic rape of girls in “forgotten war”

Congolese children are facing “terrible suffering” in the country’s “forgotten war”, the UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, Olara Otunnu, said last Thursday. There were reports of widespread atrocities, including the systematic rape of young girls, children returning to Brazzaville were malnourished, and many were severely wounded, he said. Otunnu, speaking to journalists in New York on the tenth anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, urged the international community to give the Congo’s humanitarian crisis “the attention it deserved,” a UN statement said. Meanwhile, humanitarian sources told IRIN this week that the number of serious human rights abuses reported against returning internally-displaced persons (IDPs) had increased. Those abuses included summary executions and rapes, the sources said.