Why the Congo?

1. The Congo is a central storehouse of strategic minerals for the functioning of modern society, particularly as it relates to the mining and technology sectors. We must demand that foreign countries and corporations implement humane policies toward the Congo.

2. The Congo sits in the heart of Africa and is bordered by NINE other countries, therefore as the Congo goes so does the rest of Africa. We must work with the Congolese and other Africans to make sure that the Congolese and NOT external forces determine the future direction of their country.

3. The Congo has a history of being pillaged and the people being used as fodder in a rush for natural resources. The Belgian king, Leopold II, ruled over a death chamber from 1885 - 1908, when conservative estimates put the number of Congolese dying as a result of Leopold's personal rule at 10 million. During Leopold's era the resources at the root of the suffering of the Congolese were ivory and rubber, today it is coltan, tin, diamonds, gold and copper to name a few. We must put a stop to mass murders in the quest for riches. To profit at the expense of the people is destructive to the human spirit.

4. Western nations under the auspices of the cold war assassinated an elected nationalist leader (Patrice Lumumba) and put in place a brutal dictator (Mobutu Sese Soko) and propped him up for 37 years while he brutalized the Congolese people and systematically stole the riches of the country. Surely, these nations have an obligation to make sure that international networks and actors refrain from undermining genuine Congolese leadership aiming to create a decent way of life for the average Congolese.

5. The rapes, slaughter and savagery being committed in the Congo are affronts to the human conscience. Every individual and leader in the global community should be ashamed and outraged that we have allowed an estimated
6 million Congolese to die since 1996 as a result of a resource war. As human beings in a so-called civilized world, we can and must do better.

CLICK [link:www.congoweek.org/english/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=85&itemid=101|HERE] to get involved!

[div class=excerpt style=background:#FEFEFF]Congo's coltan rush

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1465000/images/_1468772_coltan300.jpg
DRC is home to 80% of the world's coltan reserves

By Helen Vesperini in Goma, DRC
In the yard of the Shenimed sorting house, young men are busy sorting and cleaning colombo-tantalite ore, or coltan, as it is known in this part of the world.

Regional analysts say the international demand for coltan is one of the driving forces behind the war in the DRC, and the presence of rival militias in the country.

First the young men toss it up into the air as if they were winnowing rice.

Then they sort it with magnetic tweezers to eliminate any particles of iron ore.


It is then washed, crushed manually in a big pestle and mortar and tested again for iron ore before being fed into a photospectrometer to test its tantalum content.

The men concentrate calmly on their work or joke among themselves.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1465000/images/_1468772_coltan_rocks150.jpg
Coltan is used to make pinhead capacitors - an essential component in mobile phones

Blood tantalum

It is a far cry from the drama of the "No blood on my cell phone" campaign that a group of NGOs and religious communities have launched in Europe to lobby for an embargo on so called "blood tantalum", the colombo-tantalite ore that comes from the war zones in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Tantalum is essential in the manufacture of electrical components known as pinhead capacitors.

These regulate voltage and store energy in mobile phones, tens of millions of which have been sold in the past few years.

The European lobby groups, like the regional analysts, say that coltan production is fuelling the war in Congo.


Such allegations infuriate both the rebels who control this part of Congo and their Rwandan backers.

They baffle the men on the ground in the coltan business, too preoccupied with making a living.

"It's our only way of making a living," said Blanchard, an intermediary who travels upcountry to buy coltan from the small-scale miners and brings it back to Goma to sell. "There's nothing else to do here."

Most of the men now in the coltan trade used to be farmers.

Bandits

Local human rights' groups say that coltan production does lead to security problems.

They say it is not uncommon for a miner who has just sold, say, $200 worth of coltan to be visited by bandits in military uniform who know exactly how much money he has in his house.

Foreign criticism of child labour in the coltan mines must be put into the context of Congo.

It is a country where the preoccupation of the average peasant is finding enough cassava to eat for the day.

If children were not helping mine coltan they would be working in the fields.

What would be cause for concern in the long term is if coltan were to be such big business for so long that the peasants forgot their farming skills in the way that some Central African villagers have forsaken logging for oil jobs.

When the coltan or the oil reserves run out they no longer have any means of livelihood.

Given the recent slump in coltan prices on the world market that scenario no longer seems so likely.

Local people say the price drop has had a disastrous effect on the region's economy.

"It's been a catastrophe," said Antoine, a local businessman. "I would estimate that 80% of all business here is either in coltan or dependent on the coltan trade and there's just a lot less money in circulation now."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1468772.stm [/quote]

[div class=excerpt style=background:#FEFEFF]A World Playground: Congolese People Sacrificed for International Games and Profits
by Roxanne Stasyszyn / November 8th, 2008

She wore a light blue headscarf, like most of the women at this camp for internally displaced people (IDPs). They were given out to the Congolese people, along with baseball caps for the men, during the presidential elections of 2006. On it is pictures of president Kabila and the slogan: bonne gouvernance—“good governance”— in French.

Yet all Venansia Habimana, a displaced woman in the North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), had to say was that she wished her government would create peace. She said it was promised to them during that campaign, and she wanted to return to her home.

“To be here is to miss what you do, but we all need to be safe,” Habimana said to a single white journalist in a square wood frame no larger than a port-a-potty, covered with blue and white United Nations tarps. Habimana spoke to the journalist in 2007, before the recent wave of fighting forced additional hundreds of thousands of people to flee.

Homeless and income-less, people at the camps lived uncomfortably. There was little space, diets were unbalanced, and there was no way to work or occupy them each day. IDPs are unwelcome in surrounding communities where they try to rebuild a life. They are ostracized for fear they will take the few jobs available and, most depressing to them, they are forced to pay extortionate fees to bury friends and family that die at the camp.

Given the heightened hostilities—and the permanent state of war that has devastated millions of Congolese lives over the past two years alone—Habimana is probably now listed among the unnamed and soon-to-be-forgotten dead.

Safari Majune was an IDP representative elected by the others. He said that while people longed to return to their own land, the biggest problem was that there is not enough food for everyone at the camp. Famine and malnutrition, coupled with malaria and tuberculosis, means high death rates. More than 1000 people have daily died in Eastern Congo for over a decade now and there have been over 1,000,000 IDPs in the North Kivu region alone, for years.

Majune is one of many who, in 2007, had been at the IDP camp for over a year, and another human being likely to become a meaningless statistic in the long, bloody war in Congo.

This camp was in Rutshuru, just outside the “safety zone” designated by the United Nations Observers Mission in Congo (MONUC). There were over 4,250 children, men and women at the one camp in 2007. They lived in banana leaf domes that look like small, brown, camping tents.

With IDPs crowded and scratching at the UN tarps to see the white “mazungu,” hoping to talk to her or to get some food or money, Habimana told her story. It is an all too familiar story for IDP women all over Eastern Congo. A week earlier she had been walking on foot to her village near the border of Uganda, about 24 kilometers (11 miles) away.

“I have been looking for food and I met some soldiers and they took me,” she said. “They were four, but only two raped me.”

Habimana claimed her attackers were government troops, the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, called FARDC. After some time, she said, she regained enough strength and walked to the road where people found her and helped her back to the camp. Once she arrived, others helped her find enough money to pay for a motorcycle taxi to the hospital. There they gave her medication and instructions to return once the medication was done to test for infections, like HIV/AIDS. She was still taking the medication when she spoke and said she worried that the soldiers who raped her were infected.

The camp in Rutshuru was one of three in a 15 km radius according to Bruno Matsundo, director of the non-profit Centre of Intervention, Social Promotion and Partner Participation (CIPSOPA), a non-government organization (NGO) that was coordinating the three camps.

Everyone in the Rutshuru area and in the main border town with Rwanda, called Goma, speaks about the rights to home, land and—more than anything—a stable country to live in.

Latest reports say the insecurity has reached unproportional heights. Most of the villagers and IDPs from this Rutshuru region have recently flooded into Goma—walking on foot, carrying what they can. Meanwhile the former “safety zone” demarcated by MONUC has disintegrated.

The Indian UN forces within Goma are doing little to prevent murders and pillages now happening in the city. Rwandan rebel rockets destroyed two MONUC armored vehicles on October 26, wounding several peacekeepers. There have been talks of MONUC abandoning the region completely and a recently appointed MONUC commander— Lieutenant General Vicente Diaz de Villegas y Herreria of Spain—resigned after only three weeks of duty.

Hell on Earth

For people not already living there, Eastern Congo is a place almost unreachable and, according to many, even less desirable to arrive in. Most international news reporters describe Goma as “Hell on earth.”

The people who do reach Goma tend to fit into four main categories.

First, there are rich businesspersons and the aid organization types who circulate to and from Europe and America, back and forth between the big business offices in capital cities like Kinshasa (DRC), Nairobi (Kenya), Kampala (Uganda) and Kigali (Rwanda). The businesspersons are involved in minerals, aviation, timber, petroleum, weaponry and other international commerce.

Then there are the poor, displaced people who walk the dangerous and dense forests from Uganda, Burundi or Rwanda, fleeing one unsafe and impoverished situation for another.

Third come the passport-stamp seeking Western tourists that brag at cafes and Traveler’s Lodges in Kigali and Kampala about how they crossed the border and spent an afternoon in the “Heart of Darkness.”

Last are the journalists and human rights activists who chat with local people and try to find the most bloated belly for a photo opportunity.

Goma is the eastern “capital” of the DRC and is a drastic change from Rwanda’s border resort town, Gisenyi. After the volcanic eruption in 2002 the city is black and dirty, and everywhere is covered in volcanic rock—except for the big hotels, restaurants and expatriate houses on the shore of Lake Kivu. Most buildings in town were incinerated. Some were salvaged but the original second floor is now the first, sitting on the black charred-rock ground where hot lava flowed through the house.

Goma is in the province of North Kivu and is highly patrolled by MONUC forces in Armoured Personnel Carriers (APCs) and jeeps mounted with machine-guns. An old colonial building stands in the centre of town as MONUC’s hospital. Walking past the hospital is a part of daily life for most people in the town. They see the high walls, laced with barbed wire and sand bag lookouts on top of each corner. A gun barrel pokes out from the stacks of sandbags and a camouflage hat pokes out from above; only MONUC personnel are allowed in.

United Nations tanks patrol Goma today due to the recent military thrust where Rwandan-backed rebels threatened to take the city. The locals are unhappy with the United Nations forces—and aware of the minimal protection offered by the MONUC peacekeepers—and have repeatedly protested by hurling rocks at APCs and secure UN compounds.

Because of geography and economics, the eastern border provinces of North Kivu, Orientale and South Kivu have direct influence over all the DRC. They are full of militia, minerals, AID workers and wildlife conservation professionals, and starving refugees.

Whomever you ask, the main problem for the DRC is the same: too many influences from too many exterior countries. They all have big guns and little care for the people trying to live there. While all agree on the problem, everyone blames someone else and no one takes responsibility. The highly paid foreign professionals won’t say anything on the record, but they all admit to the obvious contradictions.

The main players are Rwanda, Uganda, MONUC and the United Nations (with countless international partners), and North American and European humanitarian organizations. But it isn’t as simple as pointing to one of these. They are all intertwined with the ethnically fueled militia groups and big business from the USA, Europe and China.

Vital Katembo is a Congolese socialite and conservation professional who lived for years in Goma and has worked for the United Nations Development Program and, until recently, for the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN). Katembo knows whom you need to know if you want to push through the constant conspiracy mill, and, most importantly, if you want to keep yourself alive. He points to Rwanda and humanitarian aid organizations for the continuing strife of the DRC, especially in the mineral-rich east.

“I have seen massive humanitarian interventions. I will not say that they have done much or are doing much. It is difficult to define who is deciding their agenda,” Katembo argues. Katembo has seen many of the biggest humanitarian, human rights and relief groups come and go from the DRC, and the former Zaire, through many political transitions, always working with each new man in power.

He points out that many organizations have been here over 15 years now, and he questions their efficiency, if nothing else, asking how they can still be dealing with an emergency. For him, the reasoning seems pure logic, “having the chaos also allows them to have the jobs, and they [humanitarian aid organizations] will do whatever they can to keep it going. They are the masters of the chaos. I have never seen an assessment of what is achieved,” he summarizes.

Vital Katembo offered this insight in Goma in 2007 but soon afterwards he was fired from ICCN, threatened, forced to run for his life and go into hiding after openly denouncing international humanitarian organizations operating in Eastern Congo.

Humanitarian aid in the eastern Congo provinces is an octopus whose tentacles reach far and wide. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) serves to “mobilize and coordinate effective and principled humanitarian action in partnership with national and international actors.” This is according to their mission statement, which hangs opposite a wall of cubbyhole mailboxes in the front office in Goma.

Nestor Yombo-Djema, Senior Liaison Officer with OCHA, explained that OCHA coordinates 126 organizations, including 10 United Nations agencies and 50 international NGOs, and scores of donor, state and national NGOs. OCHA also works with Congolese governmental officials and donors.

Even with all of this AID infrastructure, poverty, malnutrition and human rights abuses run rampant—not to mention the permanent state of war and millions of internally displaced people, half of which are in North Kivu, according to OCHA’s 2007 Humanitarian Action Plan. And that was produced before the waves of fighting that displaced an additional 143,000 people in October 2007, and the additional hundreds of thousands displaced in 2008.

By mid-October 2007, some 500,000 to 1.2 million people were internally displaced in Eastern Congo; with 33,000 newly displaced Congolese people fleeing North Kivu on October 25. Ugandan military had forcibly occupied parts of Orientale Province, while a militia highly suspected of being supported by Rwanda was fighting FARDC troops in North Kivu. On October 25 last year, Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon issued a statement of “deep concern” citing “surging sexual violence and a hike in the number of civilians uprooted due to fighting.”

One year and hundreds of thousands of dead people later—things have only gotten worse.

The 2007 OCHA budget, alone, was $US 686,591,107, “roughly the same level as in 2006,” with an additional $40,000,000 infusion announced by MONUC in October 2007. The final 2008 budget for the World Food Program in DRC was $426,878,043, with 56% of all food resources designated for North Kivu.

Developing Inefficiency

Kisangani is a town just north west of Goma in the province of Orientale. It is where Jean Dupont (name changed to protect his career as an international consultant) worked from 2003 to 2005. For 11 months of that time, he worked for Chemonics International Inc, an American company that helps donors define and implement programs; the biggest Chemonics client, when he was with them, was USAID.

Dupont talks about his experience with Chemonics as a reality check to what humanitarian work really is. “Before going, you think: people give $100 and that one hundred dollars goes to someone, somewhere, to make them happy. And that’s not the way it happens.”

Dupont sheds some light on why so many humanitarian organizations in DRC—and it is the same in most of Africa—develop nothing much more than inefficiency, waste and a small profit.

He sympathizes with the fact that Africa may be poor, but it is not cheap. Workers and companies expect to be paid well if they are to perform well. The constant reality of people—local and expatriate—putting money in their own pockets is also an element.

But in many situations, where money isn’t a heavy constraint, like with the wealthy USAID, the biggest difficulty is ineffective and inappropriate programming.

Humanitarian work has put itself in a trap, Dupont explains. “We were forced to do crappy projects to show we were spending money,” he says. Spending money to get more money, funding allocations in general, and underlying politics are the problems Dupont experienced and witnessed with the humanitarian sector in the DRC.

He mentions one large project with USAID in October of 2004. The idea was to rehabilitate some student housing in Kisangani and it was assigned by USAID after student uprisings and politically motivated protests. It was one political party using students to pressure another, as Dupont puts it. He says, building decent housing for the students was USAID’s way of intervening in political actions.

“My colleagues and I were trying to point out…it wasn’t the best way…to buy students,” Dupont recounts. “What USAID proposed was not good but we had to say yes, because it is their money in the end.”

The plans for construction ran as proposed. Dupont still thinks about why the students would agree to be instruments of the party, but the answer to questions like these are never that uplifting. “If I only knew, it would have been possible to do something about it,” he exhales. That would be true humanitarian work.

“Still, there is some good stuff,” Dupont attempts to reassure. “It’s not all bad.”

He mentions a railway project he worked on with USAID and many other organizations, including the UN, in 2004. Dupont explains it was a fabulous local project to rehabilitate 137 kms of railway and infrastructure through the jungle between two major cities.

Dupont says that when the international organizations got involved, people who had been working without pay for many years were happy to be rebuilding transportation and taking home a salary.

“People were really working to develop something,” but Dupont’s enthusiasm stays curt when admitting the project was still very political. He recounts how the governor of the area and the Belgian Ambassador made a ceremonious launch of the new railway; days later the real participants cut the ribbon without a camera crew.

The railway rehabilitation was one of 26 projects Dupont did with Chemonics and was part of very few that he felt okay about doing. For the most part he says, “the projects were not what I want to do as a humanitarian professional.”

The President of the North Kivu Civil Society, Thomas d’Aquin Muiti, laughed when recounting a list of international initiatives that were inefficient, to say the least.

“There are NGOs that come here with preconceived projects that don’t meet the problems here. One NGO came and built houses for pygmies and the pygmies would not enter the houses. They slept against the walls outside,” chuckles Muiti. “They [NGOs] bring bicycles and they [Congolese] sell them straight away because it does not meet their needs.”

Muiti also stresses that international NGOs do not build things to last: they come, implement a project, and leave. Accountable to no one, “capacity building” is the latest catch phrase most organizations use to sell proposals and win grants.

Local NGOs have problems too, he assures. Either they lack the finances or are unable to manage them. Many projects and organizations are developed after the cheque arrives and little happens except the opening, and draining, of a bank account.

HEAL Africa is an example of humanitarian aide actually working. HEAL Africa was developed by Jo and Lynn Lucy, a Congolese orthopedic surgeon and a British project manager who have been living in the DRC for 36 years.

Beginning as “DOCS,” a medical and surgical training initiative in 1995, HEAL Africa soon expanded and engaged in social and community health as well as physical.

One of its biggest projects is fistula surgery, a restoration procedure for women that repairs tears and holes in the vaginal wall, bladder or uterus. Symptoms are mainly the inability to prevent leaking of urine or bile—conditions that led to ostracization from the community.

The cause of such damage is usually only one of two things: childbirth in poor conditions, or a traumatic and violent sexual encounter, mainly rape. When the surgery first became a specialty of the expanding HEAL Africa mission, 80% of the cases were a result of rape, and most of these are due to the many militaries operating in Eastern Congo.

Either way, the women have been ousted from their communities and, fortunately, they have made it to a HEAL Africa facility. Over 1000 of these surgeries were completed by 2003 and in 2007, there were over 120 women still waiting for their turn. The main hospital compound in Goma is overflowing. Emergency, makeshift UNHCR tents are bursting with women. Across the street is a whole other compound with two, single floor buildings packed with women who have had the surgery and are recovering or waiting for a second attempt on the damage that is just too severe.

As well, there is an apartment compound outside of town full with women, post-surgery, who are unable to return to their communities for fear of social stigma or insecurity.

The fistula surgeries performed at HEAL Africa are such a success, not because of pure numbers alone, but also because of the well-rounded approach taken. Women are given counselling, job training and a small amount of economic support before leaving.

HEAL Africa is one of few triumphs in an overflowing pool of unsuccessful and inefficient humanitarian aid.

You Are A Rwandan Now

More people complain about the huge, international non-government organizations (NGOs) perpetuating the naivety of rushed, unstudied and ill-developed programs than they do about the smaller NGOs who generally have fewer resources to work with. Because the scale is larger, the consequences are much more severe.

Along the lakeside in Goma is the compound for the UN initiative for Disarmament, Demobilisation, Repatriation, Reinstallation and Reinsertion (DDRRR). It is set up exactly like an army base with toweled soldiers walking around, shaving their chins. Directly on the right, through the security gates, is a group of tents where everything happens. The DDRRR has been a massive project to disarm and reintegrate soldiers.

“This is a transit hotel,” explains Ramone, the official in charge who requested his full name not be used. “We’re basically just a taxi here, in a difficult area; in a politically sensitive atmosphere.”

He says the calls usually come at night or on a market day when it is easiest for soldiers to escape. A small team jumps in an armored vehicle and picks up whoever has run away from their militia group. The project responds to the high rate of kidnapping of men and boys for forced labour and combat with rebel groups; they deal mostly with child soldiers.

“All the raping, killing, stealing, burning houses, that’s what we deal with. You know that movie Blood Diamond, the part where they get the boy near the end?” Ramone asks. “That’s what I do.”

Every Tuesday and Friday, all the deserters and escapees are driven to the Rwandan side of the border for 6-8 weeks of training, “where all these ‘rebels’ become officially Rwandese again,” mocks Ramone.

He speaks bluntly and honestly about the promotional propaganda for Rwanda and the UN that the DDRRR is committed to through leaflets, filmed interviews and the United Nation’s radio network, Radio Okapi.

But Ramone jokes about the main concern. Many times these ‘rebels’ that are put through DDRRR training and receive Rwandan citizenship certificates were recruited or kidnapped at young ages and from places outside Rwanda. Many by forces like the Democratic Forces of the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), the group reportedly containing original members of the Interahamwe militia who are continually accused of perpetrating genocide in Rwanda in 1994. It is widely confirmed that FDLR cooperate with both Rwandan rebels and FARDC forces in the plunder of Congo’s resources.

When put back into Rwanda, Ramone says, these escapees are assured safety by the Rwandese government but are not welcomed back into the country socially.

Forced repatriation contradicts international law and invites gross human rights abuses. Further violating international law, in this case, forced returnees were sometimes never Rwandan patriots to begin with.

Eighteen year-old Emmanuel Sebuhinja was taken by force after living for five years as an orphan in the North Kivu town of Walikale. He spent a year hauling baggage, cooking and fetching water for the Mai Mai militia, a long-standing Congolese militia that fights against foreign influences and soldiers in Congo. The Mai Mai consider Rwanda to be their main problem.

Each time Sebuhinja tried to escape he was beaten. After one such attempt, he and four others were beat so badly three died; he and the other survivor were sentenced. When the soldiers left to fight, shortly after, he escaped into the forest and eventually made it back to Walikale.

Picking up money from a friend, he moved on, walking alone and only at night to Karuba, in the next province. It was here he thought he could finally carry on with his life. Instead, he encountered soldiers of another militia, General Laurent Nkunda’s men.

“They took my money and clothes and everything I had,” Sebuhinja says. “After that, UNHCR took me here.”

Sebuhinja says he is Rwandan but fled to the Congo, in 1994, when he was 13 years old. He considers that he grew up in Congo and while he says he does want to go to Rwanda, he doesn’t know anyone there, and all of his family has died or was killed.

“I am afraid of going there because I don’t know what will happen there. I have no family. I don’t know how I shall be living in Rwanda,” Sebuhinja says rationally. His voice quickens and raises when he adds that he was never a soldier, he never fought or shot a gun, but the UNHCR wrote that he did on their list when they picked him up, despite his objections.

“UNHCR told me even if I just touched a gun for a second, I am a soldier,” he cried. “If in Rwanda they think I was a soldier before, it will be dangerous for me.”

Another escapee was from General Laurent Nkunda’s group. He was the only boy who refused to say anything and even denied his affiliation to General Nkunda.

Nkunda is one of the key men in the DRC right now. He is affiliated with everything that is causing any disturbance: he is the leader of a militia that rebelled against the Congo government’s FARDC, later agreeing to create a half mixed brigade with them, causing only more confusion and conflict. As if by design, it wasn’t long before the mixed brigades dissolved completely.

Most people believe Rwanda backs him and, behind them, many international actors including powerful groups from the United States. It is said that Nkunda even boasts the born-again Christian patch he wears on his fatigues as a badge of solidarity with President Bush and many other American Christians.

Even Human Rights Watch—historically biased in favor of the current Rwanda government—has reported that General Nkunda is backed by Rwanda. Nkunda also recruits soldiers, both children and adults, from Rwanda. These recruits also turn up later amongst the many Nkunda deserters.

Though Nkunda’s Rwandan affiliation has yet to be officially admitted it is drawn on tribal lines. He is a Congolese Tutsi, known widely as Banyamulenge (in South Kivu) or Rwandaphones (people who speak KinyaRwanda). His sympathizers, mainly Congolese or Rwandan Tutsi, recite the narrative of his only wish to bring his parents from a hard life in refugee camps to a secure plot of land in Congo; a supposed promise from President Kabila.

Nkunda is seen as the main threat by MONUC and the main cause of insecurity in eastern DRC, but MONUC has made no effort to drive out the Nkunda insurgency. He is also situated in and around the most potent mines and mineral deposits in the country.

Rebel troops led by Nkunda took the town of Rutshuru on October 28, 2008, and by October 29, 2008, Nkunda’s forces had stopped their military advance just short of Goma, where Nkunda announced a unilateral ceasefire. The rebels announced they would take Goma in the next few days. Goma is home to more than 500,000 people, including scores of thousands of people displaced by earlier fighting.

With the massive atrocities committed during the advances of Nkunda’s army, hundreds of thousands of people are newly displaced, inside Congo and out, to Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda.

The Thinner the Nose, the Smarter the Man

In Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, Ignatius Rwiyemaho Kabagambe was the Managing Director of The New Times in 2007, the only English speaking and daily newspaper in the country, owned and run by the state. He is also a first cousin with President Paul Kagame.

The oppression that Rwandaphones face in Congo from Congolese citizens and organized groups like the Mai Mai is very real and well known; Kabagambe admits that they would be treated differently in Rwanda than other nationals.

“They are brothers and we feel for them. We would accept them as Congolese with Rwandese origin,” he explains, pointing out their physical and cultural likeness. He talked around the details of his cousin; President Paul Kagame’s support for Nkunda, admitting only that moral support is extended from his country, Rwanda.

The region of Eastern Congo is a perfect example of colonial lines being drawn arbitrarily through ancient ethnographic zones. Tribes were divided by colonial powers into what are now Eastern Congo, Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. All the while assigning foreign law and deciding rights, colonizers continued to move these lines according to papers signed in Europe.

Dieudonne Amani is a 24 year-old Rwandaphone who has felt the lasting consequences of arbitrary colonial rule. The problem, he explains, is that Rwandaphones are not accepted as true Congolese and are ostracized within the DRC because they are the same tribe and culture as those congregated mainly in Rwanda. Yet Rwanda, he claims, also rejects them. They are people without a homeland, claims Amani, who are systemically persecuted by the Congolese government, by militia groups and by Rwanda.

“There are people sent by the authorities to investigate people’s origin,” he says. “Rwandaphones are a minority, non-Rwandaphones are majority. They wish to please the majority.”

The reason why other tribes do not like Rwandaphones, Amani claims, is a mixture of sculpted modern political mind and envy.

“I think Hutus are not as educated as Tutsi. If Hutus are not educated it is not the fault of Tutsi or anyone else, it is because they are stupid,” Amani says boldly. “For 34 years they had control of their country (Rwanda), what were they doing? Tutsi refugee’s sent their children to be educated. People say Tutsi are just as intelligent as the white man,” Amani pontificated with his index finger jutting into the air.

These claims are extreme and, in parts, ignorant of colonial leaderships’ structuring of education and employment systems along tribal lines, favouring Tutsis. Unfortunately, this argument of Tutsi being better managerially with money, government and development is heard often, repeated even by international expatriates. It is an explanation used commonly to justify and explain Rwanda’s post-1994 transformation to an international business port of Africa, and it ignores important facts, like Rwanda’s militarism and exploitation of Congo.

Modeste Makabuza Ngoga is a very powerful man in Goma. Officially, he is the director general of Jambo Safari, a company that claims to take white foreigners gorilla trekking. Complete with airport access, Jambo Safari looks like a cover-up for Makabuza’s minerals dealings in Eastern DRC—perhaps the most volatile and rich mineral trade arena in the world.

Makabuza is also a Rwandaphone who shares Mr. Amani’s arguments about persecution. Both stand in strong support of Laurent Nkunda, claiming him as good representation for their kind and cause. Also like Amani, Makabuza preaches ancient and historical tribal and colonial history to explain divine-like rights and tribal division. As well, his argument gets politically dense the closer it comes to the present situation. Claims like President Kabila having agreements with the French government to arm and support the Interahamwe and the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), to sustain them and keep them killing Tutsis. He claims that Kabila was elected by the white man and is the bad guy in the situation for not withholding his promise to Nkunda of bringing Nkunda’s family to Congo.

The General and His Labyrinthe

“Kabila asked Nkunda to help him with war. Nkunda made the deal so his parents in refugee camps in Rwanda could come live in the hills. Kabila broke his promise,” Makabuza retells. “All Nkunda wants is his family to stop starving in refugee camps and come here. I am happy Nkunda is there with the same face [as me] but I am not alright with everything he is doing.”

The reason Makabuza withholds support for everything Nkunda does is because it is bad for business.

Nkunda has control over vast mining territories in North Kivu, including the Lueshe mine, just outside of Rutshuru, which he uses as a rear base for his soldiers. Powerful officials in the surrounding area reinforce Nkunda’s control. For example, Nkunda occupies the main area in Masisi province, just south of the mine, and his cronies run the town of Rutshuru. Soloman Nkujima, chief of the town Kiwanja—just outside the mine—was with Nkunda before settling there and is still a senior manager of Nkunda’s party, the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP).

In 2007 Makabuza assured the Lueshe mine was not working. It’s pyrochlore and ferro-niobium cannot be refined in Africa due to lack of adequate technology, he insists. But even if it was possible, he argues that he cannot sell it, thanks to the western nickname of blood mineral.

“It’s called blood minerals because governments say when rebel soldiers are on the hill [Lueshe mine], it means you are financing them,” Makabuza details his business woes while drawing his fingers across the wooden top of his office desk. “When they produce pyrochlore they want to sell it in the international market but no one will buy it because it is called blood minerals.”

“Minerals are all over the world and all over the world people put guns to other peoples’ heads for those minerals, but only in Africa do they nickname them blood minerals,” claims Makabuza.

His final shot goes to the ‘white man’ and the inequality he claims he, as an African, will always face in the international market no matter what mineral he has in his hand. He says calling something a ‘blood mineral’ only worsens the problem because it prevents Africans from making money equally. Instead, it is taken under the table by the white man who then reaps the profits.

Makabuza is right when he says mineral sales are dependant on the international market. Nowhere in Africa are the products of such minerals enjoyed: MRI machines, home and leisure electronics like cell phones, DVD players, stereos, video games, mP3 players, eye glasses, heat resistant materials, jet engines, stainless steel, some medicines, aerospace and defense products, nanotechnology, communications, and biotechnological applications. It is an understatement to say that the minerals of North and South Kivu—niobium, tantalum, ferro-niobium, cassiterite and coltan—are in high demand internationally. Whoever controls the Kivu provinces controls the potential of more money and influence than some of the wealthiest countries, combined.

The company that controls the Lueshe niobium mines is the Mineral Society of Kivu (SOMIKIVU), a company formed in 1982 between the German company GfE Nuremberg (Gesellschaft fuer Elektrometallurgie GmbH) and the former Republic of Zaire (former name of the DRC). Since then, names have been changed and the agreement redrafted. GfE Nuremberg owns 70% of SOMIKIVU, but ownership is disputed because the company was not drafted with the current DRC government.

Lueshe mine is one of only three niobium mines in the world—in Brazil, Canada and DRC (Lueshe)—and it is intentionally kept closed to artificially induce “scarcity.” All three niobium deposits are controlled by a company named Arraxa, owned by the U.S. company Metallurg Inc. of New York: GfE Nuremberg is a 100% subsidiary. Metallurg Inc. is itself a subsidiary of Mettalurg Holdings of Pennsylvania—one of many companies in the investment portfolio of Safeguard International Investment Fund of Philadelphia (PA), Frankfurt and Paris.

“It is a very big mine, the potential of it is huge,” said David Bensusan, a European and Rwandan based minerals trader and past C.E.O. of Eurotrade International, in a 2007 interview. Bensusan refuted the idea that the Germans are keeping Lueshe closed to control the prices. “It is closed because there is an argument of who owns it and it’s in an area where the fighting is taking place. The issue is security.”

Professor Kisangani, the vice governor of North Kivu, explains eastern Congo’s mineral trafficking situation through the analogy of an unhappy child. He expresses that Congolese nationals were historically upset and began illegitimate international trade (mostly with weaponry and minerals). A ‘window’ or ‘open door’ into the country and it’s minerals was completely broken off with these unhappy children of the DRC and the Congolese wars, from 1996 to present, involving Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Libya, Tanzania, Burundi, South Africa and Angola, at least, with Western powers allied with or behind these.

“It’s mostly hearsay, nobody can give a truthful account of what happened,” David Bensusan looks back to what is considered the actual time of war, despite the fact it has continued on. The Congo was obviously raped of its raw materials, he adds. That element took Bensusan to a much lower note as he warned of the volatile state Eastern DRC was in. “It’s sliding back into a major war. It needs to be developed. I think the way is through minerals, but it needs to be done properly.”

The suggestion that no one can give a truthful account of what happened mirrors the western media’s perpetual obfuscation of the realities in Congo: while the people involved are easily named, and while many remain active in plundering Congo today, the decades of exploitation (1960-1996) prior to the current era of perpetual warfare are always dismissed with the invocation of a single word: Mobutu. The suggestion of full sovereignty and control of the mineral wealth of the DRC is one that many share, however. Mainly Congolese people, including Vital Katembo.

Professor Kisangani’s analogy of unhappy children soon turns into “mafia” and rebel militias who are still climbing in the open doors and windows. “And those people are supported by other people in the world, who can give them guns to trouble our country,” Kisangani says.

Diplomatic relations is the answer, he urges, mentioning that the DRC is trying to control the traffic of its minerals and make money off them. The problem he says, is that slipping through the window and door is easier.

Vice Governor Kisangani is confidant that if the government had the means, the situation could be controlled. “They are hungry and not strong enough,” he says of the DRC military forces and government. “Rich countries are supporting guys in the forest [militias], but they could intervene and tell armies and MONUC to leave.”

There are over 100,000 FARDC soldiers that need paychecks and too many managers and generals who loot. He says there is no way to pay them all, and therefore command them all.

And yet the Democratic Republic of Congo has the world’s purest and largest deposits of strategic minerals, including gold, coltan, niobium, cobalt, heterogenite, columbite (columbium-tantalite or coltan), copper and iron. Heterogenite exports coming out of Congo are alone valued at between $260 million (at $20/lb.) and $408 million (at $30/lb.) every month. That’s between 3.1 and 4.9 billion dollars a year. Diamonds account for another billion dollars annually. Oil has been pumping off the Atlantic Coast for decades, but now oil and gas deposits are being exploited from the great lakes border region—Lake Kivu (methane gas) and Lake Albert (oil)—and deep in the province of Equateur. And then there are the dark rainforest woods that sell by the thousands monthly for around $6000 to $12000 per log.

Without getting paid—unless looting and raping can be considered a paycheck, which they are—FARDC soldiers are still extremely patriotic. The Congolese soldiers—quick to be blamed by international experts, NGOs and western media—are also the victims of a rapacious international commerce that has descended on Congo.

“I love my country. I must protect my country, from all forces that can aggress my country,” said Major Chicko Tshitambue of FARDC’s “Charlie Brigade.”

“The fighting here in the East is just to protect the leadership in Rwanda,” said Chicko. “I think Nkunda is told by Rwanda. But Nkunda is a small man, he can’t do anything. He’s afraid of Major Chicko.”

Chicko ended his monologue of national pride, hubris and international intimidation by resting his pumping fists and writing his email address and, beneath this, the words: “Mercenary/Private Military => contact.” Chicko wants to be a mercenary and he imagined the white journalist he was talking to could make it all happen. (Nothing of the whereabouts or status of Major Chicko has been heard since the journalist departed Congo.)

The sad part is that Major Chicko would be better off fighting for a private militia company, meaning he would make more money at the very least. Mercenaries in Africa and especially the DRC are the most successful and efficient international organizations running. According to Vital Katembo, MONUC is one of the least efficient.

“They are a part of the whole game: no chaos equals no jobs. They have all the military skills but some have been advising those in the bush; they are helping Nkunda,” Katembo says.

While these allegations have not been proven, MONUC’s track record does not sit well with the Congolese people.

M’Hande Ladjouzi was once the chief of office for MONUC in North Kivu. Two members of the Civil Society, including president Thomas d’Aquin Muiti and a current employee of MONUC (who wishes to remain unnamed) who was already working there while Ladjouzi was, confirmed the rumours.

“It was at the level of conflict with Rwanda and the FDLR,” began Muiti. It is said Ladjouzi had a Rwandan girlfriend. Whether he actually had a girlfriend of Rwandese origin is unimportant. The term is slang: Rwandan interests were reportedly bribing Ladjouzi.

When the Civil Society approached MONUC with reports and testimony of Rwandese soldiers committing atrocities on Congolese people, Ladjouzi turned them away and sent reports to headquarters in Kinshasa that the allegations were untrue. After much lobbying by the North Kivu Civil Society, the UN eventually moved Ladjouzi to Kinshasa.

MONUC’s record continues to be stained. “We have met one soldier of MONUC that violated a young girl,” says Muiti. The Civil Society asked to take him to court in France and, according to Muiti, they did. But there are numerous other allegations that MONUC officials, both civilians and soldiers, have raped Congolese women.

MONUC’s media relations office also released press clippings reporting scandal from the Pakistani battalion of MONUC in the Orientale province. It reports soldiers trading guns for gold with militia leaders.

In May 2007 angry villagers in Kanyola, South Kivu, attacked UN officials and MONUC troops who arrived after at least 18 villagers were massacred. “There were barricades on the roads. There were angry crowds. Kids were throwing stones. They had to make a U-turn,” said one U.N. official, who asked not to be identified.

On October 2008, civilians in Goma and other places attacked MONUC troops and UN compounds; there are credible reports that MONUC troops shot and killed some civilians. Many civilian protests against the MONUC mission, and the MONUC retaliations, occur out of sight and without any media reporting.

Most every Congolese citizen will agree that the reason for the instability in Congo is the international influence within their borders. Some point their finger at mineral trafficking. Some point to tribal and historical ‘facts’. Others, like Vital Katembo, claim it is obvious that people are doing harm when they are not achieving what they claim to work for—speaking of the humanitarian aid and conservation sectors—especially when they have the needed resources to accomplish their missions.

No matter where you point your finger or for what reason, the DRC is an international playground filled with extremely dangerous toys and irresponsible playmates. Many times, knowing where to point is simply based on how dangerous it is to point that way.

Roxy Stasyszyn is a Canadian journalist who has worked in Tanzania, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She also writes a blog for [link:www.makepovertyhistory.ca/en/blog/roxannes|“Make Poverty History Canada,”] where commentary and insights about her work in Congo can also be found. [link:dissidentvoice.org/author/RoxanneStasyszyn/|Read other articles by Roxanne].
[/quote]

The clarity is penetrating.

The War The World Forgot

http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c395/chlamor/20000924mrCongo9M.jpg

A journey into the most savage war in the world

My travels in the Democratic Vacuum of Congo


This is the story of the deadliest war since Adolf Hitler’s armies marched across Europe. It is a war that has not ended. But is also the story of a trail of blood that leads directly to you: to your remote control, to your mobile phone, to your laptop and to your diamond necklace. In the TV series ‘Lost’, a group of plane crash survivors believe they are stranded alone on a desert island, until one day they discover a dense metal cable leading out into the ocean and the world beyond. The Democratic Republic of Congo is full of those cables, mysterious connections that show how a seemingly isolated tribal war is in reality something very different.

This war has been waved aside as an internal African implosion. In reality it a battle for coltan and diamonds and cassiterite and gold, destined for sale in London and New York and Paris. It is a battle for the metals that make our technological society vibrate and ring and bling, and it has already claimed four million lives in five years and broken a population the size of Britain’s. No, this is not only a story about them. This – the tale of a short journey into the long Congolese war we in the West have fostered, fuelled and funded – is a story about you.

http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=863


Cellphones fuel Congo conflict

Cellphones may have revolutionized the way we communicate, but in Central Africa their biggest legacy is war.

Nearly 3 million people have died in Congo in a four-year war over coltan, a heat-resistant mineral ore widely used in cellphones, laptops and playstations. Eighty percent of the world's coltan reserves are in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The mountainous jungle area where the coltan is mined is the battleground of what has been grimly dubbed "Africa's first World War," pitting Congolese forces against those of six neighbouring countries and numerous armed factions.

The victims are mostly civilians. Starvation and disease have killed hundreds of thousands and the fighting has displaced 2 million people from their homes.
Often dismissed as an ethnic war, the conflict is really over natural resources sought by foreign corporations -- diamonds, tin, copper, gold, but mostly coltan.
At stake for the multitude of heavily armed militias and governments is a cut of the high-tech boom of the 1990s, which sent the price of coltan skyrocketing to peak at US$400 per kilo. Coltan -- short for colombo-tantalite -- is refined into tantalum, a "magic powder" essential to many electronic devices.

The war started in 1998 when Congolese rebel forces, backed by Rwanda and Uganda, seized eastern Congo and moved into strategic mining areas, attacking villages along the way.

http://www.seeingisbelieving.ca/cell/kinshasa/

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It is a war for coltan. It is a massacre for technology. It is impossible for me to get anyone's attention on this. I have tried on discussion board's, leafletting, tabling and people just look away.

Noone wants to face the reality of how their daily habits fuel the slaughterhouse.

http://handcellphone.com/wp-content/themes/green-marinee/phonepic/Samsung-SGH-Z560-HDA-cell-phone-1.jpg

Who is calling you all the time, all day all night?

It is me calling you oh techno-man of the West wondering why you come to kill me. Why do you seem to think the thunder in my ground is for you to steal? Why do you think my life of fourteen-year-old prostitution-death-by-twenty is here to serve your need to know where you are all the time when you never know where you are any of the time? Is this okay for you to force me into servitude for your colonial consumerism? I know its long distance and collect but really who is paying the price here?

http://chlamor-deepintheheartofnowhere.blogspot.com/2007/12/war-world-forgot.html

[link:www.globalissues.org/article/442/guns-money-and-cell-phones|Guns, Money and Cell Phones]
By Kristi Essick

The Industry Standard Magazine
Issue Date: Jun 11 2001

The demand for cell phones and computer chips is helping fuel a bloody civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The offer turned up a few weeks ago on an Internet bulletin board called the Embassy Network. Among the postings about Dutch work visas and Italian pen pals lurked a surprisingly blunt proposal: "How much do you want to offer per kilogram? Please find me at least 100,000 U.S. dollars and I will deliver immediately."

The substance for sale wasn't cocaine or top-grade opium. It was an ore called Columbite-tantalite - coltan for short - one of the world's most sought-after materials. Refine coltan and you get a highly heat-resistant metal powder called tantalum. It sells for $100 a pound, and it's becoming increasingly vital to modern life. [link:www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/02/23/sm_mobilephone123.xml&page=3|For the high-tech industry, tantalum is magic dust, a key component in everything from mobile phones made by Nokia (NOK) and Ericsson and computer chips from Intel (INTC) to Sony (SNE) stereos and VCRs.]

http://www.covchurch.org/uploads/7W/n8/7Wn8tpJioVqKVrV6CdnK2Q/BabywithIV.jpg

Selling coltan is not illegal. Most of the worldwide tantalum supply - valued at as much as $6 billion a year - comes from legitimate mining operations in Australia, Canada and Brazil. But as demand for tantalum took off with the boom of high-tech products in recent years, a new, more sinister market began flourishing in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There, warring rebel groups - many funded and supplied by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda - are exploiting coltan mining to help finance a bloody civil war now in its third year. "There is a direct link between human rights abuses and the exploitation of resources in areas in the DRC occupied by Rwanda and Uganda," says Suliman Baldo, a senior researcher in the Africa division at Human Rights Watch, a New York-based nongovernmental organization that tracks human-rights abuses worldwide.

The slaughter and misery in the Congo has not abated since the country's president, Laurent Kabila, was assassinated in January. (Kabila's son, Joseph, was quickly appointed the new head of state.) Human Rights Watch researchers, working with monitors in the Congo, estimate that at least 10,000 civilians have been killed and 200,000 people have been displaced in northeastern Congo since June 1999. Rebels have driven farmers off their coltan-rich land and attacked villages in a civil war raging, in part, over control of strategic mining areas. The Ugandan and Rwandan rebels "are just helping themselves," Baldo says. The mining by the rebels is also causing environmental destruction. In particular, endangered gorilla populations are being massacred or driven out of their natural habitat as the miners illegally plunder the ore-rich lands of the Congo's protected national parks.

The link between the bloodshed and coltan is causing alarm among high-tech manufacturers. Slowly they are beginning to grapple with the possibility that their products may contain the tainted fruits of civil war. A similar controversy, after all, wracked the diamond industry in the late 1990s, when global demand for the gems helped finance civil wars in Sierra Leone, Angola and Liberia. Since then, the international community has clamped down on the diamond trade, imposing tougher import and export regulations.

But with tantalum, such regulations may be difficult to enforce. The market for the metal is based on secretive and convoluted trade links subject to few international regulations, and the ore is not sold on regulated metals exchanges.

[hr]
Rape of the land
The first wake-up call to the high-tech industry came in April when the United Nations issued a damning report on the "illegal exploitation of natural resources and other forms of wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo." After six months of field investigations, a panel of experts in the region assembled by the U.N. Security Council reported its findings.

Among the most alarming of the report's allegations was that Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian rebels had looted and smuggled thousands of tons of coltan from the Congo into their countries to export to the global market, using the profits to finance their militias. Indeed, the official statistics provided by these countries' governments - which many human-rights observers believe hide large amounts of black-market trading - show that Uganda and Rwanda dramatically increased the export of coltan following their occupation of northeastern Congo. For example, Uganda reported 2.5 tons of coltan exports a year before the conflict broke out in 1997. In 1999, the volume exploded to nearly 70 tons.

The U.N. report documents the rebel groups' use of forced labor, illegal monopolies and civilian murder in their high-stakes game to extract this valuable resource. These accusations have not been taken lightly; several members of the U.N. panel that prepared the report have since received death threats. Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi have issued protests to the United Nations over the report, claiming it to be inaccurate and unfounded.

The pillaging of the Congo's natural resources is exacting a devastating human and economic toll, says Leonard She Okitundu, the Congo's minister for foreign affairs and international cooperation. He told the United Nations Security Council in early May that "a consensus was clearly emerging in the council and in the international community on the links between the shameless looting of Congolese natural wealth and the massacres of the Congolese people." The fighting, he reported, has led to "assassinations of civilians, deportations, torture, rape and deliberate spreading of HIV/AIDS," as well as the displacement of millions of refugees.

The U.N. report does not directly blame computer manufacturers and mobile phone makers for the bloody trade, citing instead the companies trading minerals as "the engine of the conflict in the DRC." But the high-tech industry's demand for tantalum clearly has fueled an increase in coltan mining worldwide - including in the Congo region. After all, the trading companies sell coltan to processing companies, which in turn sell to tantalum capacitor manufacturers - whose clients are none other than high-tech companies such as Ericsson, Intel and Nokia.

These companies deny any knowledge that tantalum originating in the Congo is used in their products. That's not surprising, considering how murky the supply chain out of the Congo is and how complicated the global trade in tantalum gets. The reality is that there's little way to prove that the tantalum used in our cell phones and laptops is or is not from the Congo. Still, 8 percent of the tantalum ore imported into the United States in 1999 came from the Congo, and that doesn't count the ore U.S. companies imported from Rwanda and Uganda that may have originated in neighboring Congo. And there is much more of the precious dirt where that came from. At the moment, about 15 percent of the world's supply of tantalum comes from Africa. (Australia is the biggest producer, accounting for about 70 percent of the global supply of tantalum-bearing ore.) But the Congo is sitting on a potential gold mine. The mineral-rich nation is tied with Canada in having the world's fourth-largest coltan reserve, according to research firm Roskill Information Services.

[hr]
Worth its Weight in Gold
Coltan - which is found in 3 billion-year-old soils, like those in the Rift Valley region of middle Africa, western Australia and central Asia - has become a critical raw material in high-tech manufacturing. The tantalum extracted from the ore is used mainly to make tantalum capacitors, tiny components that manage the flow of current in electronic devices. Many semiconductors also use a thin layer of tantalum as a protective barrier between other metal coatings. The metal, which is also found in other minerals and can be extracted as a byproduct of tin refining, is used in the airline, chemical, pharmaceutical and automotive industries as well.

The market for the material is huge. Last year, about 6.6 million pounds of tantalum was used around the world, 60 percent finding its way into the electronics industry, where it can be found in products like mobile phones, computers, game consoles and camcorders. (The United States is the largest consumer of tantalum in the world, accounting for 40 percent of global demand.)

In 2000, demand for tantalum capacitors exploded in tandem with the mobile phone and PC markets, causing a severe shortage. Tantalum ore prices shot up, with per-pound charges for refined powder climbing from less than $50 to a peak of over $400 at the end of last year. Today, with demand softening worldwide, prices have fallen to around $100 a pound.

In response to the increased demand, coltan miners all over the world increased production. In the Congo region, both legitimate and rogue coltan merchants joined the rush. The boom brought in as much as $20 million a month to rebel groups, as well as independent factions, who were trading coltan mined mostly from northeastern Congo, according to the U.N. report. That money helps fuel the war.

[hr]
Passing the Buck
Tracing the coltan supply chain through the Congo is no simple task. Ore originating in the Congo often passes through at least 10 hands before it winds up in a cell phone or a VCR. One thing is certain: Rebels are involved in just about every step of the process until the coltan leaves the DRC.

According to the U.N. report, most coltan mining in the Congo is done by peasants because the war has forced the once legitimate Congolese mining companies out of business. These novice miners sift for coltan in riverbeds or dig it out of abandoned mines. The rebel groups also are believed to mine coltan directly, using laborers (sometimes prisoners) to extract the ore, then smuggle it out of the country.

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/section002group3/files/child_labor_-_colta.jpg

Many coltan miners are children. Some estimates suggest that 30 percent of schoolchildren in the northeastern Congo have abandoned their studies to dig for coltan. While the promise of striking the mother lode may be tempting, most miners make a pittance. Fraud is rife, and collectors often cheat the miners out of their profits. "Mining coltan is in itself a terrible job," one miner told a researcher from the Pole Institute, a Goma, Congo-based nongovernmental organization, earlier this year. "But there is also the problem of armed bandits who steal our goods, as well as the danger of landslides and collapsing mines."

Nevertheless, the prospect of making a few dollars a day - big money in a poor country with an economy in shambles - remains irresistible to many people.

http://www.destructoid.com/elephant/ul/94893-minerali_coltan.jpg

Once the ore is extracted, it is collected by local traders - many of whom are suspected of being rebels - who pay between $5 and $10 a pound for the unprocessed coltan. The local traders then sell the coltan to larger regional traders, often located in neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. This is the most difficult part of the chain to trace, because five or six intermediaries can be involved before it reaches the larger regional traders, according to Judy Wickens, secretary general of the Tantalum-Niobium International Study Center, or TIC, based in Brussels, Belgium. Sometimes coltan convoys run by one rebel group are hijacked by enemy rebels, only to be resold to other traders.

At this point, the black-market coltan enters the global market. According to the United Nations, more than 20 international mineral trading companies import minerals from the Congo via Rwanda alone.

These imports, as well as others from Uganda and Burundi, end up in Asia, Europe and the United States. Sabena Airlines, Belgium's national carrier, regularly flies minerals out of the Congo, Uganda and Rwanda. American Airlines, in partnership with Sabena, also transports goods originating in the region throughout the United States. (Sabena says it transports coltan only from legitimate traders.) Tantalum is extracted from the ore by processing companies such as H.C. Starck, which produces 50 percent of the world's tantalum powder, and Cabot (CBT), the second-largest mineral processing company. These firms - which buy from international trading companies and also directly from large mines and local trading concerns - in turn sell refined tantalum powder to capacitor manufacturers - the largest of which are AVX (AVX), Epcos, Hitachi (HIT), Kemet, NEC (NIPNY) and Vishay. Their products go to the cream of the high-tech industry. Alcatel (ALA), Compaq, Dell, Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard (HWP), IBM, Lucent, Motorola (MOT), Nokia and Solectron (SLR) are all major buyers of tantalum capacitors. Chip firms such as AMD and Intel are also increasingly buying tantalum powder in its raw form to use in manufacturing semiconductors.

http://www.hudin.com/img/box/1082.jpg

[hr]
Chain Reaction
So far, high-tech companies have been reluctant to acknowledge they may be using materials originating from Congo rebels. That said, they can do little to prove they do not. "We first heard about this in April and immediately asked our suppliers if they used tantalum from the Congo," said Outi Mikkonen, communications manager for environmental affairs at Nokia. "All you can do is ask, and if they say no, we believe it."

And so it continues down the line. Tantalum capacitor makers place their faith in their suppliers. One of Nokia's main suppliers, for example, is Kemet of Greenville, S.C., the world's largest tantalum capacitor maker. "We have gone back to our suppliers to ascertain that the material we are buying is not obtained illegally from the Congo," says Harris Crowley Jr., a senior VP.

But tantalum suppliers can offer little assurance to capacitor manufacturers that their product doesn't come courtesy of the Congo rebels. "I'm not in favor of killing gorillas," says Dick Rosen, CEO of AVX, a tantalum capacitor maker in Myrtle Beach, S.C. But "we don't have an idea where (the metal) comes from. There's no way to tell. I don't know how to control it," he says.

http://discovery.blogs.com/quest/images/2007/08/03/blog01.jpg

Epcos, a tantalum capacitor manufacturer in Munich supplying the mobile phone industry, is also quick to place the responsibility on its suppliers - which include Cabot and H.C. Starck, as well as smaller processors in Europe and Japan. Heinz Kahlert, a spokesman for Epcos, pointed to a press release issued by H.C. Starck that states "we only purchase raw materials from established trading companies that have worked in various African countries for a long time and are headquartered in Europe or the United States." The press release goes on to claim: "These trading companies have confirmed that H.C. Starck is not being supplied with material from the crisis areas of central Africa."

At some point though, the wall of plausible deniability starts to break down. While H.C. Starck is adamant it is not being supplied with black-market coltan, one of its own suppliers, U.K.-based trading company A&M Minerals and Metals, is less sure. A&M works mostly with Nigerian and Bolivian miners, but also buys up to 3 tons of tantalum-bearing ore a month from Uganda. "I couldn't tell you for 100 percent that this material [from Uganda] didn't come from the Congo," says managing director James McCombie. "It could have been smuggled across the border."

The company works with peasant producers and local traders, and McCombie admits that "once you get to that level, it is very difficult to check the provenance. It would be silly of us to try to pretend that we know the origin of every pound of [coltan] we get in our hands."

Then there's Brussels-based Sogem, another international trading company that sells the unrefined coltan it buys in the Congo and Rwanda to processing companies in the United States, Europe and Asia. It offers only a vague reassurance about the origins of the ore it resells. "We have been told that our money goes directly to the population," says Sogem spokeswoman Moniek Delvou. Sogem doesn't deal with rebel-backed traders and monopolies in the region, Delvou says. But she declines to name the mines and local trading companies that supply Sogem and admits she isn't 100 percent sure of the original source. "How can you be 100 percent sure of anything in life?" she asks.

With that kind of uncertainty creeping into public view, some high-tech manufacturers are worried that Congolese coltan will tarnish their reputations. Ericsson says it requires its suppliers to comply with company environmental, ethical and human-rights policies. "We are putting demands in place and will follow it up," says Mats Pellback-Scharp, environmental manager of consumer products. Meanwhile, Kemet says it will start requiring ore suppliers to certify that their tantalum does not come from the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi or Uganda. "If everybody takes a stance, maybe it will dry up," says Kemet's Crowley.

For its part, Intel has begun a review to determine the source of the tantalum it uses. "We'd like to be able to know the answer," says spokesman Chuck Mulloy. Compaq has issued a statement saying it "condemns the reported activities of illegal miners in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park and the Okapi Wildlife Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo." But, as spokesman Arch Currid says, "Most of the components that we get [come] from third-party providers, so where they get their raw goods is hard to determine."

Motorola also says it has asked its suppliers to ensure that no rebel-generated Congolese tantalum comes to them. "We deplore the activities alleged against illegal miners in the environmentally protected region of the Congo and fully support the efforts of relevant authorities to protect regions where the environment or wildlife is threatened," says the company. Hewlett-Packard officials also denounce the situation in the Congo and say the company intends to work with the Electronic Industries Alliance to ensure no tainted tantalum ends up in HP products.

Other high-tech companies such as AMD, Dell, PMC Sierra and Solectron were unable to provide procurement guidelines or did not return calls seeking comment.

[hr]
The Fight for an Embargo
The U.N. report calls for much more than guidelines. It proposes an all-out trade embargo on the import and export of coltan and other minerals from or to Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda "until those countries' involvement in the exploitation of the natural resources of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is made clear and declared so by the Security Council."

Trade groups, notably the TIC, say that would be unfair to the legitimate trading companies that do business in the region. "There have been exports from Zaire/Congo for 40 years," says the TIC's Wickens. "If there is an embargo, this will carry off the legitimate as well as illegitimate mining."

But given the problems in policing the coltan trade, Baldo of Human Rights Watch believes only an embargo will begin to reverse the tide of abuse in the Congo. "I would encourage the U.N. Security Council to adopt an embargo against Rwanda and Uganda, because they rely on international assistance," says Baldo. Sanctions imposed by foreign governments could thus have an immediate effect in the region. Rwandan and Ugandan rebels "are exploiting resources illegally and know sooner or later this will become unacceptable," add Baldo.

Implementing such an embargo is easier said than done. One member of a large, well-respected nongovernmental organization, which he didn't want to name because it is preparing a report on the Congo, says his group is "in support of sanctions and the withdrawal of all troops from the DRC." But the difficulty, he says, "is to come up with sanctions on minerals such as coltan that don't have an impact on the people."

It remains to be seen whether high-tech companies would go along with a U.N.-backed embargo. An Alcatel spokeswoman, for example, says that "once it is voted by the Security Council and becomes a resolution, yes, we would abide by it." But Ericsson is not in favor of dumping suppliers just because they might use some products from the Congo. "If we found out our suppliers were getting tantalum from the Congo, we wouldn't kick them out, that would not help," says the company's Pellback-Scharp. "We would rather try to influence them" to stop doing business there. But, he adds, "If there was a huge international boycott, we would support it."

http://l.yimg.com/jh/content/p/0/1231825/screen001.jpg

The demand for coltan is not going away. As global consumers continue to crave the newest cell phone and the latest computer, high-tech companies will continue to pay top dollar for tantalum capacitors, and their suppliers will continue to take tantalum from wherever it is available. Whether an unregulated industry can effectively police itself based on good faith and written assurances is questionable. But one thing is sure: The links between the cell phones and computers we use every day and the devastation taking place now in the Congo can no longer be ignored.

http://www.globalissues.org/article/442/guns-money-and-cell-phones






http://anunveiledface.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/congo-child.jpg

[div class=excerpt style=background:#FEFEFF]
"Congo's been bleeding to death for five centuries...

Fucked by the Arab slavers, fucked by their fellow Africans, fucked by the United Nations, the CIA, the Christians, the Belgians, the French, the Brits, the Rwandans, the diamond companies, the gold companies, the mineral companies, half the world's carpetbaggers, their own government in Kinshasa, and any minute now they're going to be fucked by the oil companies. Time they had a break, and we're the boys to give it to 'em.

-Maxie in The Mission Song by John le Carre
[/quote]

So much misery so we can talk on the phone while shopping :weep:


Here's the worst. The First World Nations are itching to have another "humanitarian" intervention in the Congo, but it's not to help the people, it's to prevent that native "rebel" groups from controlling those resources. Don't we ever get tired of fucking over people halfway around the world so we can steal their resources and protect "US interests"?


[hr]


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQIsLqkuATY

Congo: Three Cheers for Eve Ensler?
Written by keith harmon snow
Monday, 24 December 2007

http://towardfreedom.com/home/images/stories/Dec07/ksnow-6%20copy.gif
Mining in DRC, Photo: KH Snow

A major propaganda front has swept the Western media decrying the unprecedented sexual violence in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. As this story goes to press the war in Congo—claiming 1000 lives a day in the East and more than 7 million people since 1996—is escalating yet again. More than 1.2 million were reported displaced in June, with at least 8000 additional displaced persons on October 22 after fighting escalated—as Western-backed forces perpetrate genocide and terrorism to depopulate and secure the land for multinational mining interests.

Needing to explain away the failure of the 2006 “elections process” and the “peace” that never was, the propaganda system has embraced the theme of femicide. As always, the white champions of human rights and humanitarian concern in the end blame the black victims for their own suffering. While raising much needed awareness, the propaganda front serves a selective and expedient agenda, a tool used to pressure certain political groups and provide cover for the real terrorists.

On a visit to Eastern Congo in May 2007, Eve Ensler—the playwright and producer of the Vagina Monologues—was witness to the profound human suffering and unprecedented sexual violence.

“I have just returned from hell,” Ensler wrote, in Glamour Magazine in August. “I am trying for the life of me to figure out how to communicate what I have seen and heard in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. How do I convey these stories of atrocities without your shutting down, quickly turning the page or feeling too disturbed?”

Ensler came to see what those whose eyes are open cannot deny: the sexual violence and predation in Central Africa is unacceptable, unfathomable, and stoppable. And she has the courage and audacity to write and speak about it.

Three cheers for Eve Ensler!!

Or not?

Through her global campaign to end violence against women, called “V-Day,” and with a nine-page feature article in Glamour magazine in August, Ensler launched a campaign calling for an end to rape and sexual torture against women and girls in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. One of the voices she uses to tell the story is that of Christine Schuler Deschryver, described as a human rights activist in Congo. Ensler, Deschryver and the campaign have received a lot of press, with stories in Glamour, interviews on the BBC, PBS and Al Jezeera. The New York Times picked up the issue of rape in Eastern Congo in early October, and the Times story was followed the next day with a Democracy Now! interview with Christine Schuler Deschryver.

“Stop Raping Our Greatest Resource, Power To The Women And Girls Of The Democratic Republic Of Congo,” Ensler’s web site explains, “is being initiated by the women of Eastern DRC, V-Day and UNICEF on behalf of United Nations Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict. The campaign calls for an end to the violence and to impunity for those who commit these atrocities.” [1]

An end to impunity for those who commit these atrocities?

Ensler’s Glamour article is an apt documentary of human suffering and courage. The doctors working to save and heal the survivors of sexual brutality are heroes. The women and girls who have survived are themselves portraits of courage and human dignity. The issue demands international condemnation and action. However, in her nine-page portrait of heroism and suffering, there is a single half paragraph that ostensibly addresses the roots of the problem.

“The perpetrators include the Interahamwe,” Ensler writes, “the Hutu fighters who fled neighboring Rwanda in 1994 after committing genocide there; the Congolese army; a loose assortment of armed civilians; even U.N. peacekeepers.” [2]

THE GLAMOUROUS GENOCIDE

Who is responsible for the brutality?

According to Glamour and Vanity Fair, it is always those rag-tag Rwandan genocidaires who fled justice in Rwanda, or those ruthless Congolese soldiers from the heart of darkness, and the loose assortments of obviously “loose” civilians, and even the U.N. peacekeepers who, in the United Nations Observers Mission in Congo (MONUC), are men from India, Uruguay, Nepal, Pakistan… and in Darfur, Sudan, it is those damned Janjaweed—Arabs on horseback, you know, the usual dark-skinned subjects.

And there is no mention whatsoever of the deeper realities and responsibilities of white people and predatory capitalism. Where is the discussion of the backers behind this warfare? Who sells the weaponry? Who produces it? Who photographs the UNICEF poster children and peddles the images of suffering in the Western press for billion dollar profit-driven campaigns that do not in the end uplift the people who they claim to care about?

Why are there gala UNICEF “fundraising” benefits—the Annual Snowflake Ball—in New York hotels with white-tie U.S. Presidents as honorary ambassadors and state department officials from the National Security Council—and $10,000 tickets—held by and for officials who remain silent about genocide in Ethiopia or northern Uganda or the U.S.-backed coup d’etat that occurred in Rwanda in 1994 or Zaire (Congo) in 1996? [3]

What we know to be true is that Eve Ensler was lucky to get this article in Glamour at all. The magazine is a travesty of violence against women—cosmetics, luxury aids, “health” and “beauty” products, liposuction, breast implants and sexually seductive advertising peddling the “perfect” female body and great American culture of sexual violence—and yet Glamour offers a platform for Ensler’s message about sexual brutality of unprecedented human proportions.

What’s going on here? There is a reason these stories proliferate and it is not about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Glamour’s publishers do not care about the suffering of black people. It is pure Western white supremacist propaganda serving to underscore the accepted narratives of Central Africa and assist in the consolidation of power over the region, but this is neither seen nor appreciated by white “news” consumers.

What Eve Ensler and Glamour have not addressed are the warlords behind the warlords, the corporations and white collar crime which is never—or selectively, now and then expeditiously, if ever—reported on the pages of Glamour, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, or the other promoters of popular propaganda brought to us by the Conde Naste corporate empire.

Behind the warfare always blamed on Africans, behind the warlords’ deadly battles, are other warlords and corporations from Western countries. The reason people—U.S. and Canadian citizens—are unaware of the issues involved is because of publications like Glamour and the corporations that control them. Ensler’s article begins to look like an advertisement for UNICEF and the so-called “humanitarian” AID industry, which is itself part of the problem, because it remains silent about corporate plunder, “humanitarian” organizations partnering with the corporate exploiters, shared directorships with mining, defense, petroleum and other multinational interests. UNICEF and “not-for-profit” organizations like it are in the business of perpetuating their own survival, the vanguard of transnational capital.

Asked what to do, Ensler points to UNICEF: “Right now, [the best thing to do is] to give to the V-Day UNICEF campaign at vday.org/congo.”

In the end Ensler’s article—like the few racialized articles about rape in Rwanda, Congo and Darfur that have appeared in Ms. Magazine [4]—is a compelling portrait that serves a narrow political agenda of which Ensler appears not to be conscious. Such articles—appearing in gendered white spaces of privilege like Glamour or Ms. or Cosmopolitan—blame the very (African) victims of an international system of oppression that revolves around permanent warfare economies—U.S., Canada, Britain, Belgium, Israel, France, Canada, Australia—and they serve to promote the interests of these by never challenging the perpetrators of chaos and terrorism that are directly aligned with the predominant military-intelligence establishment. When reporting on rape in Central Africa, articles in Conde Naste group publications—as with almost all publications—have never challenged the governments of either Rwanda or Uganda, soldiers of which have committed massive sexual atrocities, crimes against humanity and other war crimes. [5]

How does it happen that a notorious “dictator” and “cannibal” like Uganda’s legendary dictator Idi Amin could live out his life in splendor in Saudi Arabia? Far more people have suffered terrorism under President Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, than under Idi Amin, yet Museveni remains the West’s golden boy in the old Pearl of Africa. It was Paul Kagame—“the Butcher of Kigali”—who in the early years—circa 1981 to 1988—wielded the iron fist of terror in Uganda. Kagame was Museveni’s director of Military Intelligence and is now President of Rwanda. Taban Amin, Idi Amin’s eldest son, is today in charge of the Uganda’s dreaded Internal Security Organization, the private terror instrument of President Yoweri Museveni. While Ugandan troops are perpetrating atrocities in Eastern Congo at this writing, no one says anything about them. Uganda remains near the top of the list for AID to ARMS scandals, even as Museveni visits with George W. Bush at the White House (October 30). Similarly, the Kagame government always gets away with murder because Kagame has friends in high places.

An end to impunity for those who commit these atrocities?

Indeed, it turns out that Eve Ensler is collaborating with certain powerful interests whose involvement in Central Africa has never come under scrutiny. In a September 17, 2007 interview with Ms. Magazine journalist Michele Kort, broadcast by PBS, Ensler was joined in a dialog about sexual violence in Eastern Congo by Christine Schuler Deschryver, described by PBS as “from Bukavu in the Congo, who is an activist against the sexual violence.” [6] This is the same “human rights activist from Congo” interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!

Who is Christine Schuler Deschryver?

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF RAPE REPORTING

Jumping on the bandwagon, on October 8, 2007, Democracy Now! ran an interview between Amy Goodman and Christine Schuler Deschryver about sexual violence in Congo. [7] Deschryver claimed that studies were done that show that sixty percent of the sexual violence in Eastern Congo is committed by “these people who did the genocide in Rwanda, by Hutu’s who made the genocide in their country.”

Christine Schuler Deschryver describes the process where militias enter a village, kill all the men, and sexually assault and brutalize the women. [8]

This is “femicide” says Deschryver, a charge repeated by Eve Ensler and echoed by Amy Goodman. “People can help me first of all being an Ambassador and talking about the problem going on in Congo because it’s a silent war. They are killing, they are raping babies… It’s like Darfur: Darfur started four years ago. But Congo started almost eleven years ago and nobody’s talking about this femicide, this holocaust. It’s a femicide because they are just destroying the female species…”

Femicide? Congolese women sexually traumatized, Congolese men killed? It is a process of depopulation and ethnic cleansing.

Speaking from the Democracy Now! studios in New York City, Christine Schuler Deschryver describes a war involving African countries outside Congo, but she does not name Western interests involved.

Christine Schuler Deschryver describes her personal sacrifice to help the victims of Congo’s wars. She states that she works in “administration, in her office…” Until 2002, at least, Christine Schuler Deschryver was known for gorilla conservation, not human rights, in Congo.

Christine Schuler Deschryver is married to Carlos Schuler, a Swiss German working for decades in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park in South Kivu. Carlos Schuler and Christine Schuler Deschryver both work for GTZ— Deutsche Gesellschaft für technische Zusammenarbeit—a “German technological cooperation agency.” Carlos negotiates with warlords for “conservation.” Because of his gorilla conservation interests, Schuler has been described as “Dian Fossey’s successor.” Schuler has maintained very private relations with all military forces in the region, and there are questions about mineral plunder and military collaboration and GTZ’s role in structural violence and warfare in Congo.

GTZ is a German government institution with a corporate structure. The GTZ Supervisory Board has representatives of four Federal [German] Ministries: the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), Federal Foreign Office, Federal Ministry of Finance, and Federal Ministry of Economics and Labour. Since 1998 the Supervisory Board Chairman has been State Secretary Erich Stather from the BMZ.

GTZ’s involvement in Eastern Congo is notable, given the German links to the Lueshe mine in North Kivu, and the German embassy’s role in exploitation, depopulation and genocide in Congo. One top GTZ executive appears to be linked to German corporate interests seeking to control the Lueshe mine, now controlled by their U.S./German competitors (see below). The German government has been understandably mute about plunder in Congo, and the presentation of Christine Schuler Deschryver’s—a GTZ agent in Bukavu—as a champion of human rights is a perfect example of the twisted “charity” and “philanthropy” dumped on the Congolese people.

Like the rest of Congo, Kahuzi-Biega is rich in minerals coveted by corporations and governments that include German multinationals like Bayer—subsidiary H.C. Starck—involved in coltan in Congo.

But the interests of Carlos Schuler and Christine Deschryver run much deeper than “gorilla conservation” and “human rights” activism in Eastern Congo. The Deschryver family is one of the elite families in Belgium. Christine’s father, Adrian Deschryver, was one of the first “rangers” of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park. [9] The Deschryver family worked with the Mobutu dictatorship. The great patriarch was August Deschryver, Belgium’s Minister to the Congo at transition, in 1960, a likely candidate involved in undermining and destroying the Patrice Lumumba government, and assassinating the man, in the twilight of Congo’s Independence.

The Kahuzi-Biega National Park began as a Zoological and Forest Reserve gazetted in 1937 after over-hunting threatened to wipe Congo’s big game off the map. Adrien Deschryver helped found the Kahuzi-Biega Park in 1970. [10] One of the first actions was to forcibly displace the huge pygmy population from the park. The pygmies were consulted only to find locations of elephants and gorillas, and then they were removed: they were lured, tricked, forcibly driven out, and some died refusing to leave. This is exactly what is happening in other parts of Congo today, involving USAID, GTZ, and big “conservation” and “humanitarian” interests like CARE International. [11] Five pygmy groupements—groups of villages spread over large geographical areas—were destroyed. GTZ and UNESCO, the United Nations Scientific and Cultural Organization, got involved in the 1980s, after UNESCO designated Kahuzi-Biega a “World Heritage Site”—clearly another mechanism designed by Western interests to establish cultural and geographic control over people and landscapes. When the GTZ sought to implement “community development” they did not consult with the pygmies to determine their true needs, or wants. The result was armed violence and death. There was no compensation, and the pygmies—forced out of their universe of knowing, the forest—were left homeless and destitute in a world they did not understand. In 2000 era discussions involving some “440 stakeholders” under the new mantra of participatory involvement, there were only two people of pygmy origin, but these were lauded as representation of all the pygmy peoples.

As one Congolese consultant wrote, “Over the two-month period of research into the situation of the Bambuti Pygmies and the protected areas in North and South Kivu—the Kahuzi-Biega National Park—none of the indigenous Bambuti, Barwa, Batwa and Babuluko [people] displayed any enthusiasm for or awareness of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park conservation project. This project has left them worse off than before it was introduced and implemented. The Pygmies have been expelled and driven out with neither indemnity nor other compensation. They have been cast aside. They belong nowhere.” [12]

This is genocide.

Genocide is the congregation of femicide and homocide, the destruction of an entire people, and that is what is happening to people in Central Africa, regardless of their ethnicity.

The human rights of the pygmies in Eastern Congo are the most violated of the most violated on earth, thanks to the Belgian family Deschryver, UNESCO and the GTZ.

The Amy Goodman report ends with a plea by Christine Schuler Deschryver for funds to put a roof on a house for survivors of sexual violence. How to help? Give to UNICEF, she says, or to Eve Ensler’s international organization “V-Day”.

The Democracy Now! report about rape in Congo followed in rather interesting coincidence with a New York Times feature. Goodman opens her report noting that she interviewed Deschryver “last month” [September] in New York. But the Democracy Now! report appeared on October 8, 2007.

On October 7, 2007, in “Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War,” Jeffrey Gettleman reported on rape in Congo for the New York Times.

If Amy Goodman was shocked and horrified about Christine Schuler Deschryver’s descriptions of the scale and nature of sexual violence in Congo, why did she wait so long to run the interview? Why did the Democracy Now! report follow one day after the New York Times feature? Coincidence? Or is the Democracy Now! report just another expedient piece of a coordinated propaganda strategy?

The Gettleman report was a travesty of deception in classic New York Times form. “Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence,” Gettleman writes, “and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen here.”

In fact, the situation in Central Africa has been one steady “convulsion of violence” since, at least, the Rwandan Patriotic Front invasion of Rwanda from Uganda in 1990. Zaire exploded in 1996, and the killing and raping has never stopped. This author has consistently and repeatedly reported on massive rape, sexual mutilation, and slavery as weapons of war and depopulation in Central Africa since at least 2001, and these were widely reported by others before that. Now, barely a year after the “historic national elections” that brought President Joseph Kabila to power in October 2006, The New York Times is doing damage control.

“The days of chaos in Congo were supposed to be over,” wrote Gettleman. “Last year, this country of 66 million people held a historic election that cost $500 million and was intended to end Congo’s various wars and rebellions and its tradition of epically bad government.”

Things don’t just fall apart in Congo. “Epically bad government” and “chaos” are typically manufactured to serve powerful interests—the “shock doctrine” defined by Naomi Klein [13]—and are the result of epically bad reporting and the impunity that is insured by Western disinformation and propaganda campaigns. Hundreds of millions of dollars pumped into the 2006 electoral process, and much was stolen. But the elections exercise was not even a band-aid on the festering war in Congo. To describe the ongoing warfare in Eastern DRC as the most recent convulsion of violence is to feed the Western stereotype of the hopeless African condition and run cover for multinational plunder and depopulation, backing warlords, on and on.

Gettleman’s choice of sources and experts is very interesting. One of these, also referenced by Amy Goodman, is Sir John Holmes, a British diplomat with a long history of support for predatory imperialism.

“The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” said John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, to the New York Times.

Holmes provides a tidy commentary about African savagery. What we don’t learn from the New York Times is that Holmes previously worked for the British security firm Thomas De La Rue, one of the top companies in the world that prints money, security documents (e.g. passports) and postage stamps for 150 countries; currency instruments are used to entrench and maintain structural violence. Thomas De La Rue prints money for the Isle of Man, an offshore tax haven connected to money laundering and mercenaries Tony Buckingham and Simon Mann, and they have printed special currency notes for war-torn Sierra Leone. More significantly perhaps, Holmes was the British Ambassador in Lisbon, Portugal from 1999 to 2001, the period of war in Congo where Congolese warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba, partnered with Uganda, a close British ally, launched the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC) rebellion. Bemba has a villa in Portugal, and his criminal syndicate involves his brother-in-law, blood diamonds and mercenary partner Antony Teixeira, a Portuguese tycoon living in South Africa. Bemba’s troops committed massive rape and sexual violence in DRC, and the Effacer Le Tableau campaign was a genocide campaign against pygmies, but Bemba has never been held to account.[14] U.N. Under Secretary General John Holmes is selectively used by the New York Times to legitimize their propaganda, but Holmes himself should be deposed about his role as an economic hit-man supporting plunder and money laundering.

“The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling,” says John Holmes, in empty platitudes.

A PORNOGRAPHY OF VIOLENCE

Jeffrey Gettleman goes on to attribute violence to “one of the newest groups to emerge” called “the Rastas, a mysterious gang of dreadlocked fugitives who live deep in the forest, wear shiny tracksuits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys and are notorious for burning babies, kidnapping women and literally chopping up anybody who gets in their way.” In fact, the Rastas have been operating in Eastern Congo for at least three years, have previously committed atrocities, and are not a “new group to emerge.” Gettleman has to explain away the violence in African terms, never the white multinational corporations, arms dealers, criminal Western syndicates or “conservation” organizations (they fund) occupying the soils of North or South Kivu provinces on vast tracts of land.

Further, these feature articles express some very white supremacist thinking about rape in Congo. “Because there has been no justice,” Eve Ensler states, “because so few perpetrators have been held accountable for the crimes that they're committing, it's becoming as Christine [Schuler Deschryver] said to me when we were there, like a country sport: rape.”

So, according to this description, Congolese men are universally castigated for “rape as sport,” no matter that this is committed by armed forces backed, armed, and licensed by the West to commit massive sexual atrocities, or that Congolese men are killed outright when militias enter villages. As shown below, the Congolese militias and National Army serve a deeper, hidden, Western corporate agenda: organized white-collar crime. They are paid in kind for services provided to maintain and insure natural resource plunder and the acquisition and control of vast tracts of Congolese territory.

Eve Ensler’s privilege and white supremacy here is illuminated by her feminist perspective, her feminist crusade, and it becomes acceptable for Eve Ensler—and Ms., Glamour, PBS, The Washington Post, Newsweek, etc.—to label all Congolese men as sexual predators. This, of course, is the chorus of the Western media to begin with—Africans are sexually licentious, they copulate like monkeys—only it transcends boundaries and becomes an African condition. Isn’t that why they [those savages] are all HIV/AIDS positive?

Jeffrey Gentleman took it a step further with a direct quote by a Congolese doctor that describes men in Congo as primates. “There used to be a lot of gorillas in there,” he said. “But now they’ve been replaced by much more savage beasts.” Such language would not be tolerated by the New York Times to describe rape elsewhere. Rape as a weapon of war is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq, committed by US soldiers, but the depiction of savagery would never be applied. But here the propaganda system knowingly reduces the issue to sub-human animal behavior by black savages.

There are extensive case studies analyzing and exploring the systematization of sexual violence and the wounds it inflicts in warfare in Eastern Congo. [15] Institutions like Columbia and University of Denver have studied rape and war in eastern Congo for years—funded by private foundations and the euphemistically named United States Institute for Peace.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNIFEM and other UN agencies have huge budgets dedicated to “humanitarian” reporting and research. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), alone, has a 2007 budget of $US 686,591,107, “roughly the same level as in 2006,” with an additional $40,000,000 infusion announced by MONUC on October 22, 2007. OCHA merely coordinates 126 organizations, including 10 United Nations agencies and 50 international agencies.

The “humanitarian” misery industry is part of a system perpetuating, supporting, and facilitating a permanent state of emergency in Eastern Congo.

People know about sexual atrocities in Congo and they have known about it at the highest levels for years. The New York Times shares culpability in the proliferation of war in Central Africa; the Western media merely generates war propaganda.

WHERE IS ANDERSON COOPER (360)?

It is well known that orders come from military officers. The orders given call for mass rape and sexual violence as a means of terrorizing and destroying communities, with permanent psychological and physical effects on survivors. The chain of command determines what soldiers do and don’t do. There are hierarchies, and soldiers include young boys and men conscripted into terror networks. To disobey orders is certain death in these militias, and escape is a deadly proposition. For thousands of men and boys in Central Africa the “least dangerous place to be” is in the military—be it a militia or national army. For thousands of women and girls in Central Africa the “least dangerous place to be” is wedded to a soldier or taken “captive” by him. Becoming a soldier, or “marrying” one, is a necessary and positive choice for many people. [16] The agency of Congolese men and boys and women and girls is therefore rendered invisible and neutralized by such generalizations and stereotypes pronounced by western elites both in and out of the “humanitarian” business sector. Further, by castigating all Congolese men, or all soldiers, the blame and responsibility are shifted away from officers and civil authorities who run these criminal networks, and who give orders to rape and plunder as policy. All of the rape stories in the recent propaganda front characterize rape as wanton sexual chaos, rather than weapons and instruments of warfare and social disintegration.

It is the standard message: African chaos, savagery, sexual licentiousness, and primitive, sub-human brutalization. This is the heart of darkness, after all, a place in the “middle of nowhere, a primeval jungle landscape where it is every man for himself, every woman for any man.

Eve Ensler further demonstrates the arrogance of whiteness and ignorance of events by effectively stating that the United States has said nothing about rape in Congo, because we are allies with Rwanda and Uganda, who suffered genocide and saw the so-called genocidaires flood into Congo, who graciously accepted them. In fact, the U.S. overthrew the government of Rwanda in 1994, and the when Rwandan and Ugandan forces shelled refugee camps in Eastern Congo (1996) they followed this with a campaign of extermination where hundreds of thousands of women and children were hunted, raped, and massacred. This genocide has not been named. Howard French, New York Times bureau chief in Nairobi in the 1990’s, tried to name it, and he comes close in his lukewarm treatise on Western plunder—Africa: A Continent for the Taking—but his efforts were too little. French moved on to become bureau chief in China, leaving Africa behind, with no commitment to act on what he learned. Everyone has tried to bury the truth with the skeletons. The recent thrusts by the Clinton Foundation in Rwanda—dumping millions of dollars into “humanitarian” programs—are a perfect example.

The U.S. factions—the Rwanda Patriotic Front and Uganda People’s Defense Forces that backed their invasion of Rwanda—committed massive rapes in Rwanda as well. From 1990 to 1994 the Ugandan/RPF invaders in Rwanda raped as policy, and Human Rights Watch covered it with their reports of mass rape attributed, universally and solely, to the Hutu genocidiares. This is the political economy of rape and genocide.

Eve Ensler and Christine Schuler Deschryver regurgitate the accepted narratives and blame the victims of corporate and military plunder aligned with Anglo-American-Israeli interests. To her credit, Eve Ensler mentions SONY Playstation and cellphones as culprits, and she suggests action should be taken against corporations, but she blames the illegal mineral trade on the genocidal murderers from Rwanda, the Interahamwe (just as all violence in Darfur is blamed on Janjaweed, and all violence in Afghanistan is blamed on Taliban). But she states that “we don’t know who” is involved behind or beside these. This cultural reductionism feeds the mainstream media discourses that perpetuate oppressions and consolidate Western power.

Many of the criminals involved were named in the United Nations Panel of Experts reports on illegal extraction of natural resources from Congo. Countless others have been named by numerous independent journalists, including this author, over, and over and over.

John Bredenkamp. Billy Rautenbach. George Forrest. Louis Michel. Paul Kagame. Yoweri Museveni. Salim Saleh. James Kabarebe. Walter Kansteiner. Maurice Tempelsman. Philippe de Moerloose. Dan Gertler. Étienne Viscount Davignon. Bill Clinton. Simon Village. Ramnik Kotecha. Jean-Pierre Bemba. Romeo Dallaire.

Nothing is ever done. After the production of the United Nations Panel of Experts reports on the plunder of Congo’s natural resources, nothing was done. Criminal syndicates lobbied to have their names cleared and the United Nations bucked under. Emboldened by toothless international legal instruments and spineless international leaders, the corporations and their criminal syndicates stepped up their operations. Plunder, depopulation, rape, sexual slavery—anything goes.

And the media provided its smokescreens: Anderson Cooper “360”.

Eve Ensler has no idea what she is talking about and, on a certain level, like all the rest of us, Eve Ensler is another Mazungu whitey who has no business being in Central Africa at all, because she has no idea what has happened, or is happening, or why. Her white skin and feminist crusade act as a badge of credibility and insures her privileged access to Western media corporations that benefit from “chaos” and depopulation. When “peace” is discussed it revolves around Western “charity” and “goodwill,” yet more than 100 years of Western involvement in Africa have culminated in permanent slaughter and depopulation across the continent. The raw materials continue to leave.

Christine Schuler Deschryver represents another face of privilege. When times got hard in 1996 she packed her suitcase and left with her two children for Belgium. She flies to New York and is interviewed on Democracy Now! Listeners in the U.S. believe she is a Congolese native, but she is a Belgian expatriate whose family is a mainstay of colonialism and neocolonialism in Congo. And the Congolese women are never allowed to fly to New York or to tell the deeper story of deracination in “the middle of nowhere,” in Congo. What is the Deschryver family relationship to Philippe De Moerloose or Louis Michel or Étienne Viscount Davignon or the other principal interlocutors in the Belgian money and power syndicates involved behind the scenes in Congo today?

To get a sense of what Glamour does not report—what the New York Times, Ms., Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, The Nation, BBC, National Public Radio and CNN’s Anderson Cooper “360” will not tell us—take a look behind the scenes in eastern Congo and juxtapose the unreported realities with the personal stories of trauma and recovery told by Eve Ensler in Glamour magazine. While the mainstream corporate media always reduces these stories to a few simple facts, and a panoply of supposedly unfathomable black-on-black violence, there are always some skeletons to be found lurking in the shadows of white society.

THERE’S GOLD IN THEM (BLOODY) HILLS

The North and South Kivu provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo remain awash in blood. Over the past decade hundreds of thousands of women have suffered sexual violence in these provinces as a weapon of war meant to terrorize local populations and gain control of natural resources. Sexual violence includes mutilations, rape and other forms of torture.

Rwandan-backed General Laurent Nkunda has occupied eastern DRC for several years, and was involved in atrocities, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Congo during the first (1996-1997) and second (1998-2004) Congo occupations by Uganda and Rwanda.

The United Nations Observers Mission in DRC (MONUC) makes possible the occupation of Congo by General Laurent Nkunda today. Nkunda is backed by the military regime of President Paul Kagame in Rwanda and by the baby-faced Jean-Pierre Bemba, the rebel warlord from DRC’s Equateur province whose interests and ties in DRC go back to his dark alliance with the dictator Joseph Mobutu and his Western backers.

The U.S. and European interests backing General Laurent Nkunda run deeper than the blood in the fields and rivers of eastern Congo. The German Embassy in the Democratic Republic of Congo is involved in shady business deals, backing militias and plundering raw materials from Congo, and behind them is U.S. involvement. This has partially occurred through the military control of a mine called Lueshe, located in a village called Lueshe, in North Kivu, some 170 kilometers northwest of Goma. But it also involves coltan, cassiterite, diamonds and gold, and the economic benefits that accrue to those who control land and taxes.

One gold mining firm with vast landholdings in South Kivu province is Canada’s Banro Corporation. Banro has control of four major properties, 27 exploration permits and 5730 square kilometers of gold mining concessions. [17] Banro operates only in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the blood-drenched South Kivu province. Look at the size of their landholdings: <http://www.banro.com/s/Properties.asp>. When we talk about International Criminal Tribunals, who are the real war criminals? What about Simon Village, Peter Cowley, Arnold Kondrat, John Clarke, Bernard van Rooyen, Piers Cumberlege and Richard Lachcik—the directors of Banro Corporation? [18] What is the definition of “white collar” crime? How does a company of white executives like Banro from Canada gain control of such vast concessions? Through bloodshed and depopulation with black people pulling the triggers.

What has changed since King Leopold’s era?

NIOBIUM & THE POLITICS OF SCARCITY

In North Kivu province the Lueshe mine provides a well-documented example of the kinds of nefarious activities that all Western governments are involved with in Congo, and in Africa more generally, and these activities certainly apply to Banro and other corporations—this is how the system works, and who works it. The Lueshe Niobium mining scandal merely provides an excellent case study where the thief has been caught red-handed with his hands in the illegal minerals pot.

The Lueshe Niobium mine has been under the control of pro-Rwandan forces for the past eight to ten years, first under the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) rebels allied with Rwanda and Uganda and Jean-Pierre Bemba, and now under the “protection” of General Laurent Nkunda. But Lueshe’s history is deeply rooted in the controlling interests of the German government and its U.S. and European partners.

The rare earth metal, niobium or “niob” for short, formerly also known as Columbium, is found there, together with tantalum, in the mineral Pyrochlore. Niobium became extremely important within the last twenty years because of its enlarged range of application for aerospace and defense purposes. Niobium is mainly used as an alloying addition in the production of high quality steel used in the aircraft and space industries, as well as in medicine. It is also widely used in basic applications of machinery and construction and in quite large quantities in the production of stainless steel. Niob, like tantalum and columbium-tantalite or “coltan,” is also coveted for the emerging and secretive “nanotechnology” sector—also pivotal to state-of-the-art and futuristic aerospace, defense, communications and biotechnology applications.

There are three principal niobium deposits in the world, all controlled by a company named Arraxa: one in Brazil, one in Canada and the Lueshe mine in DRC. The owner of Arraxa is the U.S. based company Metallurg Inc., N.Y. Mettalurg Inc. is itself a subsidiary of Mettalurg Holdings of Wayne, Pennsylvania, and Mettalurg Holdings is one of many companies in the investment portfolio of Safegaurd International Investment Fund of (Philadelphia) Pennsylvania, Frankfurt and Paris. [19]

In 1982 Metallurg signed a mining convention with the Republic of Zaire, enabling them to exclusively extract all Pyrochlore at the Lueshe niobium deposit for the next twenty years. A company named SOMIKIVU (Societè Miniere du Kivu) was established. Metallurg ´s 100% subsidiary, the German company GfE Nuremberg (Gesellschaft fuer Elektrometallurgie GmbH), became a 70 % shareholder.

By 1990, SOMIKIVU stopped all production, which was never much at all, because it was apparently insured by HERMES AG, backed by the German Government, to prevent production from the Lueshe mine in order to drive up and control the price of niobium mined and processed at the other sites outside of Congo/Zaire. It was also important to prevent any competitive venture from acquiring the mining rights and subsequently from actually operating the Lueshe mine.

According to available documents, employees of the German Embassy have personally benefiting from, and are involved in, the business of GfE/Metallurg. This involvement has included complicity in extortion, assault, murder, war crimes and crimes against humanity. This involvement includes complicity in sexual atrocities committed by the paid agents of white, Western corporations.

In 1999, after years of inactivity and lost incomes to the Congolese state—a very minority partner manipulated into a position of exploitation as usual—the Lueshe niobium mine was expropriated from its owners by Congo’s new president Laurent Kabila and turned over to the firm E. Krall Investment Uganda (Edith Krall), under a Congolese subsidiary company E. Krall Metal Congo. Nonetheless, with the military backing of Rwanda, RCD rebels operated the mine from 1999-2005 with the help of German Embassy (Kinshasa) affiliate Karl Heinz Albers, also a close business partner of the Rwandan Patriotic Front Government of Paul Kagame. It is also alleged that mercenaries have been involved in securing the mine.

The new owners of E. Krall Metal Congo reportedly tried to visit their new mine in 2000, amidst some of the most serious and brutal fighting in the entire war. The officials were arrested by RCD military who immediately called Karl Heinz Albers, then a permanent resident in Kigali, Rwanda. According to documents provided by Krall, Albers explained that the RCD should not ask questions but “eliminate” the Krall group—kill them on the spot. The RCD Goma secret service chief apparently refused to execute this order and released the people of the Krall group. This action helped the Krall delegation to escape to Uganda but made the RCD secret service chief in Congo subject to assassination attempts by killers from Kigali. The RCD chief only saved his life by immediate emigration to Uganda, where he was nonetheless also subject to several assassination attempts reportedly ordered by Karl Heinz Albers.

Albers was reportedly selling coltan from the Krall concessions to the German firm H.G. Starck. From August 2000 to October 2001 Somikivu shipped some 669 tons of Pyrochlore concentrate to Rotterdam harbor in Amsterdam. After October 2001 shipments went to A&M Minerals in London, a company on the U.N. Panel of Experts blacklist who are alleged to have purchased illegally some 2,246 tons of Pyrochlore concentrate before 2004.

Dr. Johannes Wontka, German citizen and technical director of SOMIKIVU, informed the members of Krall Métal that while Krall may have the legal titles from Kinshasa to operate Lueshe, the SOMIKIVU (Karl Heintz Albers) gang had the power to do so, therefore they should in their own physical interest “disappear”. Dr. Wontka reportedly requested a Major of the RCD army to kill the chief of the “Syndicate Global” the labor union leader of the workers in Lueshe who were on strike due to months of non-payment of salaries. Dr. Wontka reportedly requested that the RCD Major shoot the “whites” that would come soon to Lueshe—the technical delegation of Krall Métal who were on their way—and promised money for the job. By chance the RCD Major was the brother-in-law of the trade union leader whom he was tasked to shoot and therefore he neither shot him nor the ”whites” he was meant to kill, but reported the case to the police.

The general prosecutor of North Kivu eventually confiscated the passport of Dr. Wontka, and Wontka, who tried to flee Congo with his family, was arrested at the border and brought to Goma, DRC. And then the German Embassy in Kinshasa cranked into gear.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AMBASSADORSHIPS

The German Ambassador to Kinshasa, Mrs. Doretta Loschelder, informed the public by giving press statements that German investors will not invest in Congo projects and that economic support by Germany will not be transferred to Congo if the authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo are going to treat investors in the way authorities in Goma were treating the SOMIKIVU agent Dr. Wontka. Under this pressure, Dr. Wontka was released from prison and within 30 minutes fled Congo against orders of the police and immigration officials.

Mrs. Johanna König, employed at the ministry of foreign affairs of Germany until 2001, and serving at the German embassy in Kigali as Ambassador of Germany in Kigali, was until February 2004 a member of the board of KHA International AG, the holding parent company of the Karl Heinz Albers companies. Konig apparently visited the Lueshe mine with Rwandan military protection. The RCD were also operating the Lueshe mine under forced labor conditions, at one time reportedly involving prisoners from Rwanda accused of genocide by the Kagame regime.

The Krall complaints—well documented—have been brought to officials in Holland, Germany, Switzerland, England and the U.S., all of which have some financial interest or some link in the chain of exploitation. No action has been taken anywhere, and officials of the German Embassy in Kinshasa reportedly continue to benefit from the illegal exploitation of the Lueshe mine. The multinational firm PricewaterhouseCoopers is also invested in the companies exploiting Lueshe and profiting from war, slavery and depopulation in Congo.

At this time, the Karl Heinz Albers may have transferred his “rights” to Lueshe to one Julien Boilloit, a businessman in Kigali who has a big office in Goma and operates behind militias in the Kivus. Julien Boillot’s partners reportedly include Mode Makabuza—a Congolese businessman with multiple interests in Goma. The governor of North Kivu has certainly been paid off.

The recent spate of “news” reports and broadcasts on sexual violence in Eastern Congo are part of a coordinated campaign. It is interesting that sexual violence became an issue when it did. Sexual violence is off the charts, but the appearance, slant, framing and timing of reportage suggests is being used to manipulate public sentiment to serve the interests of certain powerful actors at the expense of others. It is certainly a lever used against the Congolese government of President Joseph Kabila, and it may be that it is coordinated in response to Kabila’s recent deals with China. After all, it has now been reported by the BBC that the Kabila government is working with the Hutu genocidaires, the FDLR—Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda—the ultimate evildoers. It doesn’t matter that the Paul Kagame government’s military and corporate machine has dealt with FDLR all along, when it serves their interests, to import terror and export raw materials. This is all very well-documented.

The Western public is unaware of these greater readings, and merely gobble up the news reports as examples of an equitable and humane Western media system that is attuned to tragedies, even if they were late to decry and report them. Western feminists are all over the rape story, but where should the outrage be directed?

Rape was off the agenda at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) until Hillary Clinton showed up in Arusha, Tanzania—the city that became the economic beneficiary of the lucrative ICTR boondoggle—and pledged $600,000 to be paid after the first ICTR rape conviction. And then they had to find someone to pin rape charges on—but the RPF who committed the rapes were never at risk. It was Bill and Hillary’s blood money, and another financial incentive used to whitewash the Clinton’s role in genocide and covert operations in Central Africa. The Rwandan Patriotic Front led by Paul Kagame committed massive sexual atrocities from 1990 to 1994 in Rwanda, and throughout the RPF campaign in Congo, but these were covered up by Western reporters at the time and later blamed, universally, on the Hutus. [20] The establishment narrative on rape in Rwanda was dictated from the start by Human Rights Watch with their pro-RPF treatise Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence During the Rwanda Genocide, published in 1996. [21]

Who should help the victims of sexual violence in Congo? How about the German multinational corporation Bayer AG—whose subsidiary H.C. Starck was directly involved in the coltan plunder by the RPF. How about GTZ, involved in Congo (Zaire) since 1980 and the expropriation and exclusion of the pygmy’s way of life. How about Nokia. Intel. Sony. Barrick Gold Corporation. Anglo-American Corp. Banro. Moto Gold. Belgian Philippe de Moerloose and his Damavia Airlines. Bill and Hillary Clinton and their diamond buddy, Maurice Tempelsman, and De Beers. Tempelsman and DeBeers have plundered Congo for more than fifty years. And how about Royal/Dutch Shell, another backer of the Kagame regime.

Add sexual violence to the list, sure, but Eve Ensler and the Western media propaganda campaign for “an end to sexual violence in Congo” must be placed in its proper context: white supremacy and the shock doctrine of global corporate plunder. In this context rape and depopulation are permanent conditions, the real killers get away with murder, and there is endless, brutal revenge by the victors. The victims get all the blame, and their suffering never ends. ~

NOTES:

[1] <http://www.vday.org/contents/drcongo>.

[2] Eve Ensler, “Women Left For Dead—and the Man Who’s Saving Them,” Glamour, August 2007.

[3] UNICEF’s Snowflake Ball.

[4] See Stephanie Nolan, “‘Not Women Anymore…’: The Congo’s rape survivors face pain, shame and AIDS,” Ms. Magazine, Spring 2005; Femke van Zeijl, “The Agony of Darfur: Again, rape surfaces as an international war crime,” Ms. Magazine, Winter 2006.

[5] keith harmon snow worked for UNICEF in Ethiopia in 2006. See addendum pages in Livelihoods and Vulnerabilities Study, Gambella Region Ethiopia, UNICEF Report, December 13, 2006, <http://www.allthingspass.com/journalism.php?catid=13>.

[6] “A Conversation with Eve Ensler: Femicide in Congo,” PBS, <http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2007/lumo/special_ensler.html>.

[7] The Deschryver family name is of Belgian descent and multiple spellings can be found for the same people: Adrien Deschryver, Adrien De Schryver and Adrien de Schryver.

[8] “ ‘They Are Destroying the Female Species in Congo:’ Congolese Human Rights Activist Christine Schuler Deschryver on Sexual Terrorism and Africa's Forgotten War,” Democracy Now!, October 8, 2007, <http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/08/1340255 >.

[9] UNESCO is today deeply connected to “conservation” in Eastern Congo; from 1982-1985, at least, one Hubert Deschryver sat on the executive board. See: <http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0005/000518/051897E.pdf >.

[10] Kapupu Diwa Mutimanwa, The Bambuti-Batwa and the Kahuzi-Biega National Park:
the Case of the Barhwa and Babuluko People, May 2001.

[11] See the series KING KONG: Scoping in on the Curious Activities of the International Money Business in Central Africa, by keith harmon snow and Georgianne Nienaber published in its entirety at <http://www.allthingspass.com/journalism.php?catid=45>.

[12] Kapupu Diwa Mutimanwa, The Bambuti-Batwa and the Kahuzi-Biega National Park:
the Case of the Barhwa and Babuluko People, May 2001.

[13] Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 2007.

[14] See: keith harmon snow, “A People’s History of Congo’s Jean-Pierre Bemba,” Toward Freedom, September 18, 2007, <http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1123/1/>.

[15] See, for example, Sara Gieseke, Rape as a Tool of War in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver, April 13, 2007.

[16] See: Carolyn Nordstrom, “Backyard Front,” In The Paths to Domination, Resistance and Terror, Carolyn Nordstrom and JoAnn Martin, eds., 1992: p.271

[17] Banro Corporation, <http://www.banro.com/s/Properties.asp>.

[18] Banro Corporation, <http://www.banro.com/s/Directors.asp>.

[19] See: <http://www.metttalurg.com> & <http://www.safeguardintl.com/portfolio.html>.

[20] See: Donatella Lorch, “Rwanda Rebels: Army of Exiles Fights for a Home,” New York Times, June 9, 1994: 10; “Rwanda Rebels' Victory Attributed To Discipline,” New York Times, July 19, 1994: 6; Raymond Bonner, “How Minority Tutsi Won the War,” New York Times, September 6, 1994: 6; Bonner, “Rwandan Refugees Flood Zaire as Rebel Forces Gain,” New York Times, July 15, 1994: 1; Judith Matloff, “Rwanda Copes With Babies of Mass Rape,” Christian Science Monitor, March 27, 1995: 1; Donatella Lorch, “Wave of Rape Adds New Horror to Rwanda's Trail of Brutality,” New York Times, May 15, 1995; James C. McKinley Jr., “Legacy of Rwanda Violence: The Thousands Born of Rape,” New York Times, September 23, 1996: 1.

[21] See Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence During the Rwandan Genocide, Human Rights Watch, 1996.

http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1201/1/

Thursday, July 30, 2009
The Rape of Africa: Designed in California, Made in China

At the celebration of all things capital known as the D conference, put on by the Wall Street Journal, Vagina Monologuist Eve Ensler raised the topic of the coltan trade in the Congo. It was a classic piece of "awareness raising" in the Southern California celebrity cause tradition, where a bit of conscience was paraded out to the crowd of venture capitalists and technology acolytes but no conclusions drawn or consequences demanded. During the discussion with the Journal's Kara Swisher, Ensler brought up widespread sexual assault in the Eastern Congo as part of ongoing regional warfare.

http://www.duke.edu/web/soc142/team7/gross.jpg

Rather than calling for a boycott of the minerals from the region, which help power almost every device shilled by Walt Mossberg in his WSJ columns, Ensler suggested that giving women the very cellphones the country prostitutes its natural resources to provide the developed world with might help. Also? Companies could be more vigilant in their sourcing of raw materials—and then market their electronics as "rape-free."

Ensler, for one, would happily pay a premium. In the audience, the head of the Consumer Electronics Association said that these are "complex" issues and couldn't be simply solved the way Ensler was suggesting.

Go ahead, take a moment to let the nausea-inducing vertigo of cognitive dissonance pass. How in the hell did we get to a point where advertising a mobile phone as "rape-free" was even necessary? Much less something for which you might have to pay extra? The answers lie in the dark hearts of the paragons of business virtue who profit from Africa's prostration, sunning themselves that May day in Carlsbad, California

Metallurgy stretches back thousands of years in Central Africa, with iron smelting having been developed independently thousands of years ago by Bantu-speakers from West Africa. But the real fun begins with the arrival of Europeans. In the late 19th century, King Leopold II established the Congo Free State as his own private colony, and distinguished himself as by far the most brutal of European colonial rulers in Africa—literally cutting the population in half in a matter of decades in order to capitalize on the rubber trade, thereby establishing an awful precedent of cheap life and labor in the region's economics.

In the 1960s, leftist nationalists lead by Patrice Lumumba managed to wrest control of the country away from Brussels, only to be betrayed by the United States, who supported a coup by Joseph Mobutu in the grand tradition of favoring fascist dictators and kleptocrats over democratically elected leaders with even the faintest blush of red. By providing arms, training and troops, the U.S. and Belgium collaborated to make sure that the free flow of cheap minerals from the region continued, and Mobutu saw to it that corporations didn't need to concern themselves with labor or environmental protections.

By the time Mobutu fled the country in 1997, it was rumored that the balance of his Swiss bank accounts neatly matched the national debt.

In the wake of the Rwandan genocide, armed and experienced Hutu interahamwe militias crossed into the Congo. They established bases in North and South Kivu in order to attack the now Tutsi-led Rwanda. But the new Rwandan government of Paul Kagame, seeing an opportunity, made common cause with Mobutu detractors like Laurent Kabila, and along with Ugandan-backed forces, used the cover of deposing Congo's strongman in order to send troops into the country and wrest control of its mineral wealth. All of which has left an alphabet soup of warring factions in the eastern part of the country, and an estimated 5.4 million dead. (In a British documentary, one such warlord, General Laurent Nkunda, speaks of having met with "Rebels of God" from America—leaving one to wonder if he wasn't supported by... The Family?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OWj1ZGn4uM&


Simultaneously, an explosion in demand for a mineral used in small, powerful capacitors for electronics like cell phones and laptops stoked the conflict. Tantalum, appropriately enough named after the tortured Tantalus—birthed by the Greek goddess of mines, Plouto, and punished for the sin of boiling his own offspring in cannibalistic sacrifice—became a hot commodity. In 2000, with the release of the Sony Playstation 2, the price of tantalum rose as much as 800 percent.

As it happens, 80 percent of the world's supply of the mineral, in the form of columbite-tantalite ore (known colloquially as coltan) lays in the hills of eastern Congo.

http://www.ousferrats.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/2-final-bandeau-coltan-copie.png

Slave labor proliferated, with the ore becoming a form of currency, not to mention arms purchases by warring factions. Here, rape played a role as a form of inter-ethnic terror alongside the pillage. Slavery involved the sale of women to miners as camp stewards and warm company. The Tantalum-Niobium International Study Center promised to take a stand at a meeting in Brussels in 2001. But eight years later, little has changed.

The ore is handled by multiple layers of unaccountable middlemen within the country, then exported to South Africa or China for further processing. Once the ore is refined into powder or ingot, it's largely untraceable. The electronic components are themselves simply cheap commodity products produced in factories along the Pearl River.

A telling statistic is provided by the annual United States Geological Survey report on tantalum supplies (PDF): while Australia, Brazil and other countries are listed as producers, the vast majority (46 percent) imported is simply listed as "other." And you can guess where "other" sources are found.

While reportedly Apple has said that it doesn't source Congolese tantalum, there is no statement that effect on its site or anywhere else and the company generally refuses to discuss the topic. Like most American companies, Apple doesn't like to ask too many questions of its suppliers and fabricators in China beyond "how much will it cost," so chances are the favored technology brand of the awareness-riddled cultural elite (including yours truly) is chock full of the stuff.

http://mywretchedconsciousness.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/congo-rape.jpg

Also chock full: hybrid and electric cars, solar energy systems and almost any other technology that technophiles promise will save the developed world from the external costs of industrial commerce (at least those that might actually drown our lovely waterfront property). In fact, tantalum-based "ultra-capacitors" are being researched as possible replacements for batteries on much larger scales than cell phones, such as "smart grid" distributed energy storage and the power trains of electric cars—Tesla Motors' Elon Musk was working on such technology while at Stanford.

In a telling moment, Susan Wojcicki (of the Google Wojcickis) stepped forward at the Ensler discussion to ask if money couldn't be made by selling rape-free components. Google is, of course, entering the cell phone and portable computing market themselves, though it can add another layer of unaccountability by arguing that it merely supplies the software and server-side applications for these devices. It (Google) also holds close to its heart the philosophy that humanitarian and environmental issues can not only be solved, but profitably solved. In abject injustice, commercial opportunity!

http://capitanemo.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/google-phone-1.jpg

To illustrate the arguments against upsetting business as usual, take for example the language of trade groups that argue against boycotts or sanctions. For one, they call for more observers on the ground, because we all know how effective handfuls of well-meaning white people have been in stopping injustice and humanitarian horrors in Africa.

On the other hand, nobody wants to take agency and opportunity away from the "artisanal miners"—a neat turn of phrase suggesting traditional craftspeople trying to hold onto their unique cultural legacies. Instead of children forced into backbreaking labor at gunpoint.

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/section002group3/files/child_labor_-_colta.jpg

And of course the injustice doesn't end in Africa, but continues straight through China (where an employee of a fabricator who lost a prototype iPhone recently committed suicide after being beaten, and pesky allegations of sweat-shop conditions imposed by Apple suppliers persist) and ultimately returns there in the form of electronics recycling—one of the potential "rape-free" sources of tantalum, unless you consider the poisoning of whole communities a form of rape.

The thing is, I'm not going to suggest that you can somehow make personal decisions that would have an impact—such thinking is fallacious, if comforting. Because even as information technology abounds, informed decisions seem harder to come by. "Awareness" proves at best a form of rationalizing behavior on the individual level that in the aggregate remains tragic. Americans and Congolese alike are so tightly woven into the fabric of global capitalism, there's no real choice but complicity.


Jackson West figures most folks would be happy if Silicon Valley threw some press releases and maybe NGO donations at the problem.

http://www.theawl.com/2009/07/the-rape-of-africa-designed-in-california-made-in-china





Also [b]please] see Naja's thread: [link:www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=81332#top|5.4 million dead in the Congo]

Some of "us" women have our priorities ass-backwards. We get offended about 4 letter words and confuse that as feminism. What about these women? The real victims of obscene words & concepts?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oGGpulYsZY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbZIK9Ce0yM

The technology in our hybrid cars, the diamond rings we wearm, that i-phone, the video console are all linked to this horror.

Related threads here:

[link:www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=81332#top|5.4 million dead in the Congo]

[link:www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=158&topic_id=2288|Guns, Money and Cell Phones]


http://brysonburke.com/mining_boy_without_hands.jpg


http://www.greenoptimistic.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/uganda_poor_people.jpg