Abducted two years ago when she was 16, Ombeni was kept as a concubine in the forests of eastern Congo. She became pregnant and at nearly nine months gestation, her captors cut her vagina with a machete, leaving the baby dead and abandoning the teenager in the forest.
'I laid there for one week,' Ombeni said. 'Until insects came out of my body.' Ombeni was eventually rescued by a woman who was foraging for food and made her way to a clinic for rape victims.
She is one of thousands of women who are brutally raped each year in Congo, another layer of degradation in a war that never seems to end."...
Most rapes in the area are committed by Rwandan Hutu rebels, who fled into eastern Congo after Rwanda's 1994 genocide, said Panzi's medical director Denis Mukwege.
Generally, militiamen will circle a village and rape all the women, he said. Then they'll choose the young ones and take them as slaves into the forest-covered mountains.
"I had a 60-year-old woman who was raped with bamboo. Can you imagine?" Mukwege asked. "Yesterday she died."
"This is not an issue of sexual desire," he added. "The aim is to destroy."
The number of rape cases is increasing, he said. Since January, 1,700 women have been admitted to the clinic. The clinic expects to treat about 3,600 women by year's end -- up from 2,700 last year. ...
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