http://www.alertnet.org/db/blogs/1265/2007/07/9-130615-1.htm

Girls as young as nine raped by soldiers, women with their insides blown apart by rifle blasts, others raped in front of their children - despite the war officially ending in 2003, this is still an everyday reality for many women in eastern Congo, playwright Eva Ensler writes in women's magazine Glamour.

"They flung my baby's body on the ground like she was garbage. One after another they raped me. From that my vagina and anus were ripped apart," says Nadine, one of the women interviewed by Ensler on her recent trip to the region.

Nadine witnessed the killing of her three young children and 10 friends.

She was made to eat the faeces and drink the urine of one of the soldiers. Another soldier cut open a pregnant woman. "It was a mature baby and they killed it. They cooked it and forced us to eat it," says Nadine.

Her ordeal is far from unique. Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, says she met numerous other women who had suffered similar atrocities.

Bosnia, Afghanistan or Haiti, those "rape mines of the world" are bad enough, says Ensler, but they pale into insignificance compared to what's happening in Congo. She calls it "femicide" - the attempted destruction of women.

The nature of the crimes - women being gang raped, in some cases in front of their children or husbands, their vaginas mutilated with guns and sticks - show that sex is being used as a cheap weapon of war, according to Dr Denis Mukwege who works at a hospital in the city of Bukavu.

Women are not the only victims. "When rape is done in front of your family, it destroys everyone. I have seen men suffer who watched their wives raped; they are not mentally stable anymore. The children are in even worse condition, Clearly these rapes are not done to satisfy any sexual desire but to destroy the soul. The whole family and community are broken," Mukwege tells Ensler.

The perpetrators include armed groups, soldiers, police and increasingly civilians, says U.N. rights investigator Yakin Erturk in this report by Reuters. In some cases, even the U.N. peacekeepers are involved.

As Christine Schuler Deschryver, an aid worker for a German aid organisation quoted by Ensler, puts it: "All of them are raping women. It is a country sport. Any person in uniform is an enemy to women."

The situation is unlikely to get better, given the United Nation's warnings about the possibility of another "all-out conflict", the Washington Post reports. An estimated 230,000 people have been displaced since the beginning of the year, generating the worst humanitarian crisis since Congo's civil war. In such circumstances, tackling rape won't be topping the list of priorities for the Congolese authorities.