CIAO DATE: 02/2009
September 2008
One night in March 2007, soldiers arrived in the village of Buramba in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). By the time they left at least 15 people were dead. ‘At 5.30 in the morning', one survivor said, ‘I saw the soldiers coming to our house...They kicked down the door, and killed eight people inside. Only my four grandchildren survived. [They] continued firing in the village. I fled into the bush. I returned three days later to see the bodies of my children and my mother. The bodies were in latrines; I could see the feet of my mother sticking out.'
The point about this story is not that it is shocking, but that in many parts of the world it is unexceptional. In the DRC, the violence that has increased since that incident has forced even more people to flee from their homes, and led to the deaths of almost 1,500 people a day. Though no other conflict causes that kind of death rate, Oxfam's workers hear similar stories of murder, rape, and displacement from men and women from Colombia to Sudan every day. That is why Oxfam is publishing this report. Sixty years after the main Geneva Conventions enshrined civilians' rights to protection, they are violated in every current conflict. Many people sympathise with those who suffer these atrocities, but feel impotent to do anything about it. Many governments feel the same. They think that there is little that can be done. That is wrong.
Resource link: For a Safer Tomorrow: Protecting civilians in a multipolar world [PDF] - 7.8M