I think the best solution is to invite these people to move to America and criminalize all criticism of them.
KAMPALA, Nov 13 2011 (Street News Service) – They are men who have lost all pride and self-confidence and who have been left severely traumatised by their experience. At the medical centre in Uganda where they are being treated, they talked candidly about the crimes carried out against them.
“In the past, I thought that it was only females who were raped but not men. I cannot understand myself today. I feel pain all the time in my anus and bladder. I feel like my bladder is full of water. I do not feel like a man. I do not know whether I will ever have children,” said John (not his real name), a 27-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo who is just one of possibly thousands of victims of male rape as civil wars and tribal conflicts continue unabated across Africa.
On Jan. 14, 2009, rebels loyal to the former renegade Congolese general Laurent Nkunda attacked Jomba village in the DRC’s North Kivu province. There, the militia abducted ten people including six boys and forced them to carry out looting before taking them to a jungle base in Virunga National Park. John was among those captured.
“We were held for nine days. The leader of the group asked to have sex with me. I did not understand what he meant. He ordered that I be tied up and then he raped me. The other nine came after him. I passed out. My bottom was covered with blood. All nine days in the bush were like that. It was like that for the others. One of the boys died,” John said.
Nearly two years on from his ordeal, he is one of dozens of male and female rape victims being treated at a trauma counselling centre called the Refugee Law Project (RLP) in the Ugandan capital, Kampala. The survivors come from a number of African nations ridden with conflict including – among others – DRC, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Burundi.
The RLP was founded ten years ago and is an outreach of the law faculty at Uganda’s main university of Makerere where staff help rape victims recover from their mental and physical wounds. The project is unique in that it is largely unknown by the Ugandan community and it is situated on a hill in the northern part of the city called Old Kampala where it is housed in a colonial-style residential building.
Salome Atim, the RLP gender official responsible for aiding male rape victims, said that since the beginning of the year they have received about 30 cases of male rape, mostly refugees who have escaped from conflict zones. “These are the ones who are open. The others do not speak, and that means there could be very many (victims),” she said.
Many boys and men fear speaking out because they are often branded homosexuals, even by doctors and medical workers trying to help them. Rape victims from Islamic states such as Somalia, for example, often refuse to talk because revealing what happened can result in them being labelled criminals by wider society.
