More good news out of the Congo, from the Economist, in an article titled "Atrocites Beyond Words." A high(or low)light:

Most victims, as ever, are women and girls, some no more than toddlers, though men and boys have sometimes been targeted too. Local aid workers and UN reports tell of gang rapes, leaving victims with appalling physical and psychological injuries; rapes committed in front of families or whole communities; male relatives forced at gunpoint to rape their own daughters, mothers or sisters; women used as sex slaves forced to eat excrement or the flesh of murdered relatives. Some women victims have themselves been murdered by bullets fired from a gun barrel shoved into their vagina. Some men, says a worker for the UN's Children's Fund (Unicef), have been forced to simulate having sex in holes dug in the ground, with razor blades stuck inside.

The idea is to help draw world attention to the plight of civilians, whose suffering is at least as extreme as anything witnessed in the better-publicised conflict in Sudan's western region of Darfur.

This doesn't surprise me given the description Gourevitch gave of this area in his book "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families." I am appalled that the world community allows this to happen, yet not surprised that once again the UN is not only not doing anything to help these people but also, according to Gourevitch, probably at least partly complicit in setting up these conditions and not bringing the perpetrators to justice.