Congo (Kinshasa)

It's a funny feeling when you step off an airplane at Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It's like having landed on a military base. Scores of UN aircraft line the tarmac, all part of a massive nearly 20,000-strong peacekeeping operation now known as MONSUCO.

After 18 months in camps, many of the families displaced by conflict in Eastern Congo are keen to go home and restart their lives. WFP Executive Director Josette recently visited Katsiru in North Kivu and found that, while some are held back by fears over security, others are taking the risk. In either case, WFP is helping.

Women activists from across Africa have gathered at a women's conference in Entebbe, Uganda, to demand that African Union (AU) heads of state consider gender equality when choosing representatives at all levels of AU structures. The female African activists raised concerns that there were very few women representatives within AU structures which made it harder to push gender-related issues.

Civilians in eastern Congo are facing an increased risk of rape and forced labor as a result of internationally backed military operations against rebel groups, according to new research released today by aid agency Oxfam.

The United Nations said on Wednesday it was investigating allegations of sexual exploitation by two of its peacekeepers serving in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Spokesperson Farhan Haq said the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) was looking into the charges against the two military personnel assigned to the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in DRC (MONUSCO).

When nine-year-old Jeanne* from North Kivu Province in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was raped by a neighbour, her parents were determined he would not get away with it. With the help of an international organization that provides legal services for victims of sexual violence, they contacted the police and got a lawyer.

Then the DRC's legal system kicked in.

The road from the Rwanda-Congo border to Bukavu—a war-torn city on the southeastern edge of Lake Kivu—was almost impassable. Intermittent, torrential rain showers turned the rutted, cratered road into a bog of red mud. On the shoulders, an endless procession of Congolese men and women carried babies slung to their backs and loads of vegetables, eggs, and bananas on their heads.

A 17-fold increase in civilian rape between 2004 and 2008 in the Democratic Republic of Congo underscores the wartime legacy of sexual violence. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, sexual violence has become so common that the eastern provinces are sometimes called "the ground zero of rape."

President Joseph Kabila called Wednesday for a "moral revolution" in the Democratic Republic of Congo at ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of the war-torn country's independence from Belgium.

Congolese should put an end to "attacks on human life and dignity" and in particular the widespread rape that has become a feature of the guerrilla conflicts racking the vast nation, he said.

Twenty-two thousand, three hundred and eighty-one: the number of cases of sexual violence treated in a decade at the Panzi Hospital in the Congolese town Bukavu. And that is just a fraction of the number of survivors in this one eastern province. The number of women and girls who have survived rape and sexual assault here in this province of South Kivu in the war-wracked east of the Democratic Republic of Congo runs into tens of thousands.