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| - The speaker of DR Congo's National Assembly has sparked a debate about sexism, accusing a member of President Felix Tshisekedi's party of targeting her with macho slurs. "The insults of which I was a target last week, by a man who identifies himself as a member of the president's party, assaulted my dignity as a woman," the speaker, Jeanine Mabunda, said in a message to AFP on Monday. Mabunda is a supporter of former president Joseph Kabila, who remains a powerful behind-the-scenes figure despite handing over to Tshisekedi in January 2019, and tensions between the two men's political blocs run deep. In a video circulating on social network, a man speaking to a crowd outside the headquarters of Tshisekedi's UDPS party in Kinshasa says that "Madame Jeanine... is thin and slender like the sister of Paul Kagame" -- the president of Rwanda, who is widely hated in DR Congo. This rules her out as being someone from the DR Congo's Equateur province, as she maintains, he said. "Madame Jeanine has to prove to us that she's really" from there, he says. "Congolese aren't beanpoles -- I am thin but I've got meat on me," he says, showing his buttocks to the jubilating crowd. Mabunda said the remarks not only aimed at her, but "all women, and seek to undermine the institution over which I preside." Nehemie Mwilanya, coordinator of Kabila's Common Front for Congo (FCC) party, said the remarks "strike at the very humanity of women," in comments on Twitter backed by the minister for human rights, Andre Lite. Nicolas Kazadi, Tshisekedi's roving ambassador, had attacked the remarks on Sunday as "gratuitous and public insults." "Let us stay within the political arena, and not go off course," he said. bmb/st/ri/pma
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