Repeated meetings with Israeli, Palestinian and other Arab officials with Obama’s special envoy, former Senator George Mitchell, haven’t cleared several obstacles to resuming talks, Clinton told the president, according to an administration official who provided a summary of the White House session.

The Palestinians need to do more to stop incitement and prevent terror, and Israel, while it has expressed a willingness to curtail settlement activity, needs to do more to improve the lives of the Palestinians, the official said Clinton told Obama.

Clinton was at the White House to give Obama a progress report that he requested after the president brought Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas together in New York Sept. 22.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aSy6NI0n.AM8

In the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s recent trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, women’s rights and safety activists in Congo and Uganda reflect on the hope she leaves behind in one of the world’s worst rape zones.

KAMPALA, Uganda (WOMENSENEWS)–Sarah Assimwe, 13, is far from her family’s former home in Bunia, a city in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Now she lives here in Kampala with her mother, as members of the city’s urban refugee population.

Assimwe is being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s been seven years since she crossed the Congolese border, but memories of her father’s death often cross her mind in painful flashbacks.

“The memories come three times a day,” she said, at Butabika Hospital, a mental-health facility here supported by the World Bank and the Ugandan Ministry of Health. “They frighten me very much.”

When Assimwe was 6, Congolese rebels attacked her family’s neighborhood in Bunia and burned houses there to the ground. When rebels entered her own home, Assimwe watched them kill her father and brother with machetes and rape her mother before going on to slaughter her neighbors.

Assimwe’s mother, Jacqueline Kabonesa, carried her daughter on her back as they fled to Uganda, which borders eastern Congo.

Assimwe may not have known about U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent trip to her native country.

But the kinds of suffering she has endured have a lot to do with Clinton’s August 11 mission to Goma, a city in the eastern Congo at the epicenter of a massive epidemic of rape. The sexual violence that Assimwe’s mother once endured there is suffered by hundreds of women and men on a daily basis.

More than 4,000 rapes have been reported in the eastern Congo this year; few assailants, usually soldiers or members of militias, have been convicted.

http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/4115/context/archive