The South African journalist and commentator, Christi van der Westhuizen, passed this on:
An “upcoming” singer, writer and journalist with the name Toast Coetzer who gets a lot of airtime in the Afrikaans media made the following outrageous statement in an interview this past weekend (Sat 15 Aug) in the very popular supplement “By” that is carried in the three Afrikaans dailies Beeld, Burger and Volksblad (with combined readership of about 800,000 people).
Jeffrey Gettleman, the New York Times correspondent in East Africa (who seem to report about nothing else but violence, war and death) has a harrowing piece in today’s paper about increasing rape of men by men in eastern Congo. Quoting Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, United Nations officials and several Congolese aid organizations, as well as interviews with some of the male victims, Gettleman reports that “… the number of men who have been raped has risen sharply in recent months, a consequence of joint Congo-Rwanda military operations against rebels that have uncapped an appalling level of violence against civilians. Aid workers struggle to explain the sudden spike in male rape cases. The best answer, they say, is that the sexual violence against men is yet another way for armed groups to humiliate and demoralize Congolese communities into submission.”
The report is also accompanied by a slideshow.
