It's two days since the results of Democratic Republic of Congo's first free elections in 40 years were announced and the country is not doing badly in AlertNet's World Press Tracker, which ranks the humanitarian emergencies getting most press coverage. There were still 11 times more articles about Iraq than Congo, but the elections pushed Congo into sixth place yesterday , when it's usually closer to the bottom of the table in the tracker's pool of more than 100 English-language publications around the world.

But if you look a little closer, hardly any of the articles are comment, analysis or editorials.

Al Jazeera International, a new TV channel launched two days ago, seemed to be fulfilling its promise not to be Western-centric, leading with the Congo election story on its inaugural day.

As for the print media, Britain's Daily Telegraph speculated that runner-up Jean-Pierre Bemba's announcement about challenging the result may simply be "crying wolf", as a way of "bolstering his bargaining power when it comes to forming a coalition government". At the same time, the paper pointed out, the winner and current president, Joseph Kabila, needs to make sure the the new government includes regional powerbrokers if he wants to keep the peace.

Uganda's Monitor urged rivals Kabila and Bemba to show "a level of statesmanship and leadership" so that Congolese citizens' hopes for reconciliation and peace won't be in vain.

Some newspapers used the increased interest in the elections to highlight the plight of people living in a country destroyed by wars, dictators and foreign occupations. U.S. weekly Newsweek reports from eastern Congo where the condition known as fistula is widespread among raped women. This rare complication means a rupture of the walls that separate the vagina and bladder or rectum , and in most of the world it's usually caused by abnormal childbirths. But in Congo the main cause is extremely violent rapes, when attackers introduce objects like sticks, pipes or gun barrels into the victim's vagina after raping her.

And peace accords haven't stopped the rapes. The militias who have signed agreements might not be attacking rival militias, but civilians are an easy enough target.

"(Militias) won't go ahead and fight each other, (but) they attack that village that supports the other group," says Lyn Lusi. "This is a horrible perpetual movement of militias. They join after their families are killed, sometimes right in front of them. They see their women raped, and then they go and do the same thing. It's a cycle of violence," Lyn Lusi, manager of the HEAL Africa hospital in Goma, in eastern Congo, Newsweek quotes.

Britain's Guardian also highlights the high rape rate in eastern Congo. It's hard to find reliable statistics on this, as we found when we were putting together our AlertNet Congo crisis briefing, but human rights group Global Rights says 24,000 women sought treatment last year in just one province.

"In the afternoon five men came into the house," the Guardian quotes a 54-year-old rape victim. "They told my husband to put three kinds of money on the table: dollars, shillings, francs. But we didn't have any of that kind of money... So they shot him. My children were screaming and so they shot them. After that they raped me, all of them."