TheCable

Dozens of Congolese women and children have been allegedly raped and subjected to other abuses during a mass expulsion of migrant workers from Angola to their country of origin.

According to United Nations (UN) figures, Angola has deported thousands of migrant workers in recent months, which rights groups said was not different from previous purges over the past 12 years during which abuses also occurred.

The size of the latest expulsion is not yet known, but 12,000 workers have passed through one border crossing near the Congolese town of Kamako in the past six months.

Last month, UN staff visited the area and wrote an internal preliminary report on the situation, Reuters reports.

“Girls and women are arrested wherever they are, without the necessary needs, detained and then separated from their children and husbands, subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, sometimes raped,” Reuters quoted the unpublished report.

Perpetrators were not identified but a doctor working in the area blamed civilians in the DRC and Angolan security forces.

Victor Mikobi, a doctor who specialises in treating victims of sexual violence at a health centre near a border crossing around the DRC town of Kamako, said local clinics had recorded 122 cases of rape this year.

“These are women or girls expelled from Angola, some of them under 10 years old, without any means of subsistence and very vulnerable to this type of violence,” he said.

He added that there have been instances of gang rape that have caused medical complications.

According to Mikobi, accounts from patients treated at the health centre showed that at least 14 rapes were committed by Angolan security forces. Dozens of others were committed by civilians in Congo.

Simão Milagres, Angola migration authority spokesperson, said there had been an increase in expulsions in the past few weeks but denied that rapes and other abuses had occurred.

“That’s not true. I can guarantee that there isn’t an institutional attitude promoting violence against migrants,” he said.

However, a Congolese immigration official who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said that the subject of rapes on both sides of the border had been brought up in official meetings.