the guys in the World tour (aka Top Gear 2) do their last show in Zimbabwe, showing the beauties of the land.
this is a big boost for tourism.
alas, not their best show, and it could have shown more of the country, but it is a welcome change from most of the reporting by western outlets, showing the good part of the country in their trip from Mutare to Botswana.
Instapundit, which usually covers politics and science, took time to do a post about the atrocities in the DRC civil wars.
No, it's not the culture: The culture was destroyed by Arab slave traders (east Africa slave trade was documented by Livingstone, but sort of ignored by the western historians) and later the Europeans who wanted cheap labor, and of course, the desire of everyone to get gold (and now other rare earth metals).
here is the entire post.
Over a decade ago, political leaders and celebrities from around the globe made a high-publicity pledge to put an end the use of rape as a weapon of war. Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, met survivors in eastern Congo, which amid years of back-to-back and parallel conflicts, had become known as the “rape capital of the world.” The U.K.’s then-foreign secretary, William Hague, who visited Goma, the biggest city on Congo’s border with Rwanda, with actress Angelina Jolie, likened sexual violence in conflict zones, and the world’s quest to end it, to “the slave trade of our generation.”
But it gets worse: Congo’s Forgotten Curse: Epidemic of Female-on-Female Rape. “Rape in conflict zones has long been the subject of news reports and academic study and large amounts of donor funding is channeled to organizations that respond to it. But rape specifically perpetrated by women has received less attention. Recent studies suggest the problem is more widespread than many experts previously believed. In 2010, Harvard academic Lynn Lawry and a team of researchers conducted a survey of human-rights abuses in over 1,000 households in conflict-ridden eastern Congo. It was the same year that Margot Wallstrom, the U.N. special representative on sexual violence in conflict, dubbed Congo ‘the rape capital of the world.’ Lawry’s study asked victims of sexual violence to specify their assailant’s gender. It found that 40% of the women — and 10% of the men — who said they were subjected to sexual violence were assaulted by a woman.”
Also rape by U.N. “peacekeepers.”
And of course, there’s lots of rape of men in Congo too. “During his escape from the civil war in neighbouring Congo, he had been separated from his wife and taken by rebels. His captors raped him, three times a day, every day for three years. And he wasn’t the only one. He watched as man after man was taken and raped. The wounds of one were so grievous that he died in the cell in front of him.”
