The UN's top relief official said on Tuesday that organized, premeditated sexual attack had become a preferred weapon of war in conflicted parts of Africa, with rapists going unpunished and victims of rape shunned by their communities.
The official, Jan Egeland, undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said that local governments were resisting international efforts to intervene, suppressing evidence of the violence and sometimes charging women with becoming pregnant outside of marriage.
"Although we repeatedly condemn such violence, it persists virtually unchallenged," he said. "Far from making progress, we have regressed. More and more women are being attacked, younger and yet younger children are victims of these atrocities."
Egeland made the comments in an interview and a subsequent briefing to the Security Council on the growing failure to protect civilians caught in armed conflict.
"It's much more dangerous to be a civilian in these wars than to be a soldier," he said.
Pointing up the particular vulnerability of women and children, he said that in North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a local rights organization reported more than 2,000 cases of "gender-based" violence in April alone. UN officials determined that 50 percent of the victims were minors and that the number of rape victims in the region was more than 25,000 for the year.
In Gulu, in Northern Uganda, at least 60 percent of the women in a displaced persons camp were found to be victims of sexual violence, he reported.
Egeland noted that all religions condemned rape and that tribal discipline and tradition in Africa once made acts of sexual violence unacceptable.
"But there has been such a deterioration in the social and moral fabric that sexual violence has become a method of war, and not just soldiers do it, many civilians do, too," he said. "It's like there are no barriers anymore."
He said these were cultures in which women once enjoyed respect and protection but no longer did because of the effect of these conflicts.
"It's often a method of ethnic humiliation and elimination; attackers say they are implanting themselves and their tribe in you and in effect ending you as a race," he said. It's a vicious racial issue."
Local authorities will not acknowledge the magnitude of the problem, he said, and people who do call attention to it are "not only not praised, they are castigated."
He cited the cases of two members of Doctors Without Borders who documented 500 cases of rape in the Darfur region of Sudan, a number he estimated as only a fraction of the total. The two were arrested by Sudanese authorities and charged with spying.
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