South Sudan sexual violence on ‘massive scale,’ report says
A new Amnesty International report has indicated high rate of sexual violence in Southern Sudan, the world’s youngest nation, four years into the country’s devastating civil war.
The report said that thousands of women, children and some men are suffering in silence, grappling with mental distress. Some now have HIV. Others were rendered impotent.
The report is based on interviews with 168 victims of sexual violence in South Sudan and in refugee camps in neighboring Uganda, home to the world’s fastest-growing refugee crisis.
Some of the sexual assaults occur not during the fighting but among the millions of people sheltering from the conflict.
The U.N. last year reported a 60 percent increase in gender-based violence in South Sudan, with 70 percent of women in U.N. camps in the capital, Juba, having been raped since the start of the civil war in December 2013.
“This is premeditated sexual violence. Women have been gang-raped, sexually assaulted with sticks and mutilated with knives,” says Muthoni Wanyeki, Amnesty’s regional director for East Africa. Victims are left with “debilitating and life-changing consequences,” and many have been shunned by their families.
The new report interviewed 16 male victims, some who said they had been castrated or had their testicles pierced with needles.
“Some of the attacks appear designed to terrorize, degrade and shame the victims, and in some cases to stop men from rival political groups from procreating,” Wanyeki says.
The U.N. Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan and others say both government and opposition forces use rape as a weapon of war – a strategy made worse because of the country’s culture of stigma.
Taliban Suicide Bomber Kills 35 in Afghan Capital
A Taliban suicide car bombing has killed at least 35 people and injured dozens more in the Afghan capital, Kabul.
An Interior Ministry spokesman, Najib Danish, while confirming the casualties, explained that a bomber rammed his explosives-laden vehicle into a minibus packed with civilian government workers in a western part of the city.
The blast took place while the bus was passing through a crowded marketplace, inflicting casualties on shopkeepers and passers-by, eyewitnesses told reporters.
Hospital officials expected the death toll to rise.
A Kabul police spokesman told VOA the victims were mostly employees of the mining and petroleum industry.
The Taliban swiftly took credit for plotting the violence, claiming its bomber targeted two minibuses carrying personnel of the Afghan intelligence agency, or NDS, and 38 of them were killed.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani condemned the bombing of civilians as appalling and cowardly.
Amnesty International has denounced the attack on civilians, saying it constituted a war crime and demanded the Afghan government ensure protection of its citizens.
“A record number of civilians have been killed in the first half of this year, with women and children being the worst affected. And neither the Afghan government nor the international community is paying enough attention to their plight,” the rights watchdog lamented while responding to Monday’s attack.
The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan documented nearly 1,700 civilian deaths from January 1 to June 30, with Kabul accounting for 20 percent of the casualties.
Monday’s deadly blast came amid revelations by the Taliban that one of the three suicide bombers who attacked Afghan forces in the southern Helmand province this past week was the middle son of Hibatullah Akhundzada, the supreme leader of the Islamist insurgency.
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