Congo (Kinshasa)

UN troops failed the victims of mass rapes in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo where more than 500 sex assaults have now been reported in the past month, a top UN peacekeeping official said Tuesday.

Atul Khare, under secretary general for peacekeeping operations, warned of a growing "culture of sexual violence" in the stricken region where rival groups are fighting for control of gold and mineral wealth.

UN investigators have accused a group of rebels of gang rape. Members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) committed the crime in late July in a small village in North Kivu province (eastern Congo). At least 200 FDLR rebels participated in a series of night-long assaults on women in the village.

Congolese community leaders say they begged local U.N. officials and army commanders to protect villagers days before rebels gang-raped scores of people, from a month-old baby boy to a 110-year-old great-great-grandmother.

Some 240 women, girls and babies may have been raped after rebels recently seized a town in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the UN says.

Officials had previously said they had received reports of 150 rapes in and around the town of Luvungi.

The UN mission has been heavily criticised for not doing more to protect the local population as it had peacekeepers based nearby.

“Rwandan and Congolese rebels gang-raped nearly 200 women and some baby boys over four days within miles of a U.N. peacekeepers' base in an eastern Congo mining district,” wrote Michelle Faul of the Associated Press in an August 23, 2010 article. She cites an American aid worker and a Congolese doctor as her sources.

The European Union (EU) has expressed 'deep indignation and consternation' over the group attacks and rape recently perpetrated by militiamen of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) and Congolese allied armed groups in the province of North Kivu, official sources in Brussels revealed.

As reports of nearly 200 women raped in a systematic attack emerge from Kivu Province in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Medical Foundation reflects on the use of rape as a weapon of war.

The United Nations special envoy to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Monday condemned the recent incident of gang rape by members of armed groups in the east of the country, saying that the UN mission there was reviewing its procedures so that it can offer better protection to civilians.

A recent graduate from Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Amy was volunteering as a rape crisis counselor in Chicago when she learned about the alarming levels of sexual violence in Congo. When Amy told family and friends that she wanted to relocate to the Democratic Republic of Congo, her cousin gave her the email address of Father Charles, a Catholic priest from the war-torn province of North Kivu.

Leaders of militias that carried out mass rape in Democratic Republic of Congo will face war crimes charges, a UN conflict envoy said Tuesday.

Margot Wallstrom, special representative on the prevention of sexual violence in conflict, made a direct warning to the heads of militias and armed groups in the African nation where more widespread sexual attacks were reported in August.