Rape adds to dread for war-ruined Liberia's women

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http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/reuters07-31-032606.asp?reg=AFRICA

MONROVIA, July 31 — Rosaline did not come out to say she had been raped by Liberian fighters until she suspected she had caught a venereal disease.

''They were just young boys, little boys,'' she says, staring empty and crushed at the palm-thatched clinic where she had finally come for treatment.

Rosaline, lethargically nursing a one-year-old son, did not want to give her full name. But she has already gone further than most of the growing number of rape victims in Liberia, where war is destroying what little remains of law and order.

The fighters who raped Rosaline were, she thinks, from one of President Charles Taylor's militias, but they could just as easily have come from the rebel Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD).

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