UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Two top UN officials urged the Security Council yesterday to consider sanctions against the rebel masterminds of what they said appeared to be organized mass rapes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Deputy UN peacekeeping chief Atul Khare told the 15-nation Security Council during a meeting on Congo that over 500 people were raped, some of them children, in July and August in the North and South Kivu provinces of eastern Congo — 10 of them by the Congolese government’s own FARDC forces.
The United Nations said last week its MONUSCO peacekeeping force in the Congo found at least 242 people had been raped over the course of several days in late July and early August in the town of Luvungi, near a UN camp at Kibua in North Kivu.
Khare and UN special envoy on sexual violence Margot Wallstrom suggested Rwandan Hutu FDLR rebel leaders might be among those responsible for organizing the Luvungi rapes.
“I would recommend … for consideration by the (Security) Council, imposition of targeted sanctions on the leaders of the FDLR, both within and outside the country, if a chain of command is proven,” Khare said.
Seven years after a 1998-2003 war that claimed more than 5 million lives, Congo is still plagued by insecurity, with Rwandan Hutu and local Mai Mai militias at large in its mineral-rich east and the brutal Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army rebels active in the north.
Mai Mai and FDLR rebels occupied Luvungi from July 30 to Aug. 3.
Wallstrom supported the idea of the council blacklisting any rebel leaders involved in the mass rapes, which she said appeared to be “part of a planned and organized attack.”
