07/10/13 Reuters: U.S., Britain push Congo to prosecute soldiers over Minova rapes

U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, and British U.N.
Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant raised the issue during a meeting between
the 15 Security Council envoys and Congo's
defence, interior and justice ministers in Kinshasa on
Saturday.

"Nobody
knows better than the Congolese the price of impunity, because the
Congolese people have for years been the victims of armed groups who
have been killing and raping their way through eastern Congo,"
Power told Reuters on Sunday.

"On
the Minova case, the government must show it practices what it
preaches by punishing those officers and soldiers responsible. We
made clear our concerns about the lack of progress thus far,"
she said.

The
United Nations threatened in February to withdraw support for two
Congolese battalions after soldiers raped at least 97 women and 33
girls, some as young as 6, in the eastern town of Minova after the
troops fled from advancing M23 rebels in late November.

The
peacekeeping mission decided to keep working with the 41st and 391st
battalions after 12 senior officers, including the commanders and
deputy commanders, were suspended and about a dozen soldiers were
charged over the rapes in Minova, according to a U.N. human rights
report.

The
391st battalion was trained by the United States in 2010 as "a
model for future reforms within the Congolese armed forces,"
according to the U.S. Africa Command website.

Lyall
Grant said the Congolese ministers told them there was no question of
impunity and investigations were still continuing. The ministers said
there were some difficulties obtaining victim statements from a
humanitarian group due to patient confidentiality, which had delayed
inquiries, he added.

"We
made clear we were expecting some follow-up prosecutions because the
concern that we had was although some lower level soldiers had been
arrested and some others had been suspended, we hadn't seen any
evidence of prosecutions," Lyall Grant said.

After
provincial capital Goma and
the town of Sake briefly fell to M23 rebels, a U.N. report said,
thousands of Congolese troops fled in a disorganized manner toward
Minova, where they "committed mass rape and other acts of sexual
violence, as well as arbitrary execution, mistreatment and systematic
looting."

Congolese
troops and U.N. peacekeepers have been battling an M23 rebellion in
the resource-rich eastern part of the country for the past 18-months.