Congo (Kinshasa)

After being raped by government troops, women in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo face the further pain and humiliation of being repudiated by their husbands.

“My husband refuses to share the bed with me. I sleep on the floor,” one woman who asked not to be named told AFP in the eastern village of Nakiele, where soldiers raped more than 100 women in early June.

Washington - The United States said on Wednesday it was "gravely disturbed" about the mass rape of women in a remote area of the Democratic Republic of Congo last month.

Some 248 women said they were raped by soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Sud-Kivu province last month, local medical reports showed Monday, in a region the UN has called the world's "rape capital."

A hospital doctor in Nakiele told AFP that 121 local women reported being the victim of rape on the night of June 11 to 12.

"The soldiers were calling 'dinner, dinner, dinner'. And we women who were in the forest thought people were bringing dinner for them. It was not that.

The United Nations Refugee Agency reported this month that 170 women were raped during a raid on a village by an armed group in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Women between the ages of 17 and 90 were sexually assaulted. The paramilitary group also stole medicine, goats, motorcycles and cell phones.

Josephine, from Masisi in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, says that she chose to join the National Congress for the Defence of the People, CNDP, militia in order to escape a marriage that was being forced upon her by her parents.

"I joined the CNDP to avoid revenge from [the man that was to be] my husband," Josephine said. Her parents had wanted her to marry a widowed man when she was just 16.

November is hot in Congo. Every month is hot in Congo.

So it's likely their faces shone with sweat when the first residents of Duru, in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, raced from mud hut to mud hut with a warning that sounded like, “El are ah!” That's “LRA,” in French or the Congolese dialect Lingala.

The envoy spearheading United Nations efforts to combat sexual violence during conflicts has strongly condemned the mass rape of more than 150 civilians in the far east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) earlier this month.

The UN says it is sending a team to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to investigate allegations of rape.

The French aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF, has said that more than 100 people in Niakiele village, in Sud-Kivu province, were raped or beaten in an attack which took place between June 10 and 12.