AIDS as a Weapon

In what has to be one of the more grotesque weapons ever devised, soldiers in Uganda have resorted to the most vile form of warfare:

About 2,000 rebels infected with the deadly HIV virus were conscripted to rape women and children in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1998-99 in a bid to spread the lethal virus, a new report alleges.

The allegations levelled at the African countries of Uganda and Rwanda are contained in a report written by McMaster University professor Ed Mills and Johns Hopkins University professor Jean Nachega that is being circulated at the 16th annual AIDS conference in Toronto.

The report includes a copy of a complaint filed by Congo's government in 1999 with the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights in the war with the two countries.

In its 16-page complaint, Congo alleged that "about 2,000 AIDS-suffering or HIV-positive Ugandan soldiers were sent to the front in the eastern province of Congo with the mission of raping girls and women so as to propagate an AIDS pandemic among the local population and, thereby, decimate it."

...Children as young as one were raped by the infected solders, Mills said.

"I've seen war crimes of every possible stripe, but if this is substantiated, it's a first," said James Orbinski, president and co-founder of aid agency Dignitas International.

Update: I know some lefty yahoo is going to leave a comment or e-mail me that American's gave indians blankets infected with smallpox in some misguided attempt to slam the US. I'll save you the trouble. Smallpox did not require rape to be transmitted. HIV requires the systematic rape of children to infect them with a deadly virus with no known cure.

I'll probably still get some comment to that effect but I figured I'd beat them to the punch becuase I know these people.