DR Congo: Part 2 - By Rachelle Money

AS the violence escalates in Congo, a Scottish international aid agency has warned that incidents of rape in the country are reaching "epidemic" levels.

In some areas it is estimated that 70% of women have been subject to rape and sexual violence. In the South Kivu region of eastern DR Congo alone, 4066 cases were reported between January and March this year - compared with 1123 cases in Scotland in 2006/07, where the population is three times that of South Kivu.

Sciaf (Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund) Africa manager Deborah Livingstone said the agency had received reports that the number of rapes had sharply increased in the last few weeks.

Livingstone, who has recently returned from eastern Congo, said she had spoken to many women there who had been the victims of sexual violence.

"I think with all conflict woman and children become more vulnerable than they would normally be to sexual violence and exploitation. In eastern Congo there is no infrastructure to protect women, the police are very under-resourced, as well as the courts, and you then have to combine that with the culture of impunity of the militia, army and police. This means it's very hard for women to get any protection."

Livingstone spoke to a woman called Aimerance Chibalonza, from Mulungu in South Kivu, who was subjected to an attack by six men who came to her village.

"Her husband gave them all the money they had but it wasn't enough. They threw her two-month-old child to the ground and tied her husband to a tree.

"They forced the father-in-law to have sex with her and then stabbed her in the legs and stomach. Then some of the men took her husband, father-in-law and two eldest children and killed them. They made her father-in-law jump on a landmine and decapitated her husband and put his head in a tree for the village to see."

Livingstone said Aimerance was then taken to a forest, held there by militiamen and repeatedly raped and beaten.

However, crimes of this kind are going unreported by the media during this most recent escalation of violence in the region, Livingstone added.

"As violence is mounting in the Congo, it's becoming more noticeable to us that all the reporting has been about the end of conflict and sexual violence against women is always treated as a secondary problem," she said.

"We want it to be part of the conditions of peace."