I woke up this morning and found on the NY times front page an article on brutality in the Congo. I looked for a discussion of this article, which is traumatic also to read, as far as that can be, on the Daily Kos, but haven't found it so far.
I looked also at the Huffington Post but found instead an article on how these same rebels are invading one of the last habitats of gorillas, but not how they are systematically raping women, girls, and the elderly.
Is it really too ugly, or too common place to discuss?
It makes you think about what can happen in society once the bonds of humanity are broken.
Quotes from the article:
"These are people who were involved with the genocide and have been psychologically destroyed by it," he said.
Mr. Bourque called this phenomenon "reversed values" and said it could develop in heavily traumatized areas that had been steeped in conflict for many years, like eastern Congo.
In almost all the reported cases, the culprits are described as young men with guns, and in the deceptively beautiful hills here, there is no shortage of them: poorly paid and often mutinous government soldiers; homegrown militias called the Mai-Mai who slick themselves with oil before marching into battle; members of paramilitary groups originally from Uganda and Rwanda who have destabilized this area over the past 10 years in a quest for gold and all the other riches that can be extracted from Congo’s exploited soil.
According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country.
I hardly know what to say or think.