U.N. Report

BUKAVU, Congo — At the Panzi Hospital here in South Kivu province, doctors repair some of the most horrific injuries of war.

The hospital treats women with gynecological and reproductive injuries, the seemingly unhealable wounds inflicted by the gang rapes or invasive tortures of soldiers bent on terrifying the civilian population.

Doctors here treat women with pregnancy complications and obstetric fistulas, in which a woman’s reproductive and urinary organs are so badly injured they cannot heal, creating chronic injury and infections.

Kivu has long been a battleground, with more than a dozen militias sporadically fighting government troops and each other for control of resources and transportation routes.

War has battered eastern Congo for a decade, and the women are paying with their lives and dignity.

The Panzi Hospital has treated some 10,000 victims of sexual violence in the past five years and operated on more than 1,200 women with rape-induced fistulas.

Jan Egeland, the U.N. coordinator for humanitarian-relief operations, said he has seen dozens of sexually assaulted girls recovering at this hospital — all of them younger than 12 years old.

Many women have been kidnapped by military groups, forced to work as soldiers, sexual slaves or in other capacities until they are ransomed or escape. HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases are also a problem.

“It is a new technique of war that we are seeing,” Dr. Denis Mukwege told reporters last week. “It is a sickness of our century … a tactic that aims to destroy through the spread of HIV and mutilation.”

He was speaking on Friday, which was World AIDS Day.

Dr. Mukwege is something of a maverick in this part of the world, where women’s health issues are forgotten as a community unravels.

Congolese President Joseph Kabila promised Mr. Egeland during a recent visit that if he won last month’s election — which he did — he would invite the Panzi Hospital’s staff to undertake a national campaign against sexual abuse.

Mr. Egeland told reporters last week that war-related violence and fistulas are now a global problem, although “it is probably more prevalent now in eastern Congo than anywhere else in the world.”

The U.N. Population Fund, known by the acronym UNFPA, seeks $20 million this year to prevent and treat sexual violence against women in refugee camps and conflict zones. That amount is included in the $3.9 billion humanitarian appeal the United Nations issued Thursday for humanitarian relief next year, a smaller amount than last year, but still nearly twice the annual U.N. operating budget.

The 2007 appeal will help 27 million people, nearly all of them in two dozen African countries, as well as the Palestinian territories. More than $1 billion — a quarter of the total appeal — is earmarked for Sudan. The Congo, which needs some $687 million, is second.

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