Tabu Nyota Amisi
Francine Twaza Kwibe
Jeanne Rhusi Kahima
May God keep you and your families SAFE, AMEN.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
WE
We indulge while they starve
We shop while they beg
We laugh while they cry
We dance while they run
We live freely while they live in fear
We love freely while they are being raped
We celebrate our children while their babies are killed
We skip class while they fight to learn
We work and get paid while they are enslaved
BUT
We love God as do they
SO
We must take a stand before we become they.
We shop while they beg
We laugh while they cry
We dance while they run
We live freely while they live in fear
We love freely while they are being raped
We celebrate our children while their babies are killed
We skip class while they fight to learn
We work and get paid while they are enslaved
BUT
We love God as do they
SO
We must take a stand before we become they.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
by Langston Hughes
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
We are praying that this peace be restored in the DRC.
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
We are praying that this peace be restored in the DRC.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Praying for Haiti, mourning the loss of many lives, RIP Myriam Merlet, Magalie Marcelin and Anne Marie Coriolan
Women's movement mourns death of 3 Haitian leaders
By Jessica Ravitz, CNN
One returned to her Haitian roots, to give voice to women, honor their stories and shape their futures.
Another urged women to pack a courtroom in Haiti, where she succeeded in getting a guilty verdict against a man who battered his wife.
A third joined the others and helped change the law to make rape, long a political weapon in Haiti, a punishable crime.
Myriam Merlet, Magalie Marcelin and Anne Marie Coriolan, founders of three of the country's most important advocacy organizations working on behalf of women and girls, are confirmed dead -- victims of last week's 7.0 earthquake.
And their deaths have left members of the women's movement, Haitian and otherwise, reeling.
"Words are missing for me. I lost a large chunk of my personal, political and social life," Carolle Charles wrote in an e-mail to colleagues. The Haitian-born sociology professor at Baruch College in New York is chair of Dwa Fanm (meaning "Women's Rights" in Creole), a Brooklyn-based advocacy group. These women "were my friends, my colleagues and my associates. I cannot envision going to Haiti without seeing them."
Myriam Merlet was until recently the chief of staff of Haiti's Ministry for Gender and the Rights of Women, established in 1995, and still served as a top adviser. She died after being trapped beneath her collapsed Port-au-Prince home, Charles said. She was 53.
Merlet, an author as well as an activist, fled Haiti in the 1970s. She studied in Canada, steeping herself in economics, women's issues, feminist theory and political sociology.
In the mid-1980s, she returned to her homeland. In "Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance," published in 2001, she contributed an essay, "The More People Dream," in which she described what brought her back.
"While I was abroad I felt the need to find out who I was and where my soul was. I chose to be a Haitian woman," she wrote. "We're a country in which three-fourths of the people can't read and don't eat properly. I'm an integral part of the situation. I am not in Canada in a black ghetto, or an extraterrestrial from outer space. I am a Haitian woman. I don't mean to say that I am responsible for the problems. But still, as a Haitian woman, I must make an effort so that all together we can extricate ourselves from them."
She was a founder of Enfofamn, an organization that raises awareness about women through media, collects stories and works to honor their names. Among her efforts, she set out to get streets named after Haitian women who came before her, Charles said.
Dubbed a "Vagina Warrior," she was remembered Tuesday by her friend Eve Ensler, the award-winning playwright and force behind V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls.
"She was very bold," said Ensler, who at Merlet's insistence brought her play "The Vagina Monologues" to Haiti and helped establish safe houses for women in Port-au-Prince and Cap Haitien. "She had an incredible vision of what was possible for Haitian women, and she lifted their spirits. ... And we had such a wonderful time. I remember her dancing in the streets of New Orleans and just being so alive."
Magalie Marcelin, a lawyer and actress who appeared in films and on stage, established Kay Fanm, a women's rights organization that deals with domestic violence, offers services and shelter to women and makes microcredits, or loans, available to women working in markets, said Charles, the chair of Dwa Fanm.
Charles remembered a visit to Haiti about two years ago when Marcelin, believed to be in her mid-50s, called seeking help. Hoping to deflect the political clout of a defendant in court, she asked for women to come out in droves and pack the courtroom. Charles watched as the man on trial was convicted for battering his wife.
Her death has been reported through various media outlets, and was confirmed to CNN by Carribbean Radio Television based in Port-au-Prince. Her own daughter helped dig her body out from rubble in the aftermath of the quake, Charles said she learned when she got the call from Marcelin's cousin.
In an interview last year with the Haitian Times, Marcelin spoke of the image of a drum that adorned public awareness stickers.
"It's very symbolic in the Haitian cultural imagination," Marcelin said, according to the Haitian Times report. "The sound of the drum is the sound of freedom, it's the sound of slaves breaking with slavery."
With Merlet, Anne Marie Coriolan, 53, served as a top adviser to the women's rights ministry.
Coriolan, who died when her boyfriend's home collapsed, was the founder of Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen (Solidarity with Haitian Women, or SOFA), which Charles described as an advocacy and services organization.
Her daughter, Wani Thelusmon Coriolan, said in Haiti children bear only their father's surname, but her mother insisted on keeping her maiden name and making sure her two children shared it, too.
"She said my dad was not the only one who created me. She was involved, too," her 24-year-old daughter, who lives and is studying in Montreal, Quebec, said with a laugh.
Even though Wani and her brother no longer live in Haiti (he is in Paris, France), she said her mother was determined to make sure they were proud of their homeland.
"She loved her country. She never stopped believing in Haiti. She said that when you have a dream you have to fight for it," Wani said. "She wanted women to have equal rights. She wanted women to hold their heads high."
Coriolan was a political organizer who helped bring rape -- "an instrument of terror and war," Charles said -- to the forefront of Haitian courts.
Before 2005, rapes in Haiti were treated as nothing more than "crimes of passion," Charles explained. That changed because of the collective efforts of these women activists -- and others they inspired.
With the three leaders gone, there is concern about the future of Haiti's women and girls. Even with all that's been achieved, the struggle for equality and against violence remains enormous.
The chaos that's taken over the devastated nation heightens those worries, said Taina Bien-Aimé, the executive director of Equality Now, a human rights organization dedicated to women.
Before the disaster struck last week, a survey of Haitian women and girls showed an estimated 72 percent had been raped, according to study done by Kay Fanm. And at least 40 percent of the women surveyed were victims of domestic violence, Bien-Aimé said.
And humanitarian emergencies have been linked to increased violence and exploitation in the past, she said.
"From where we stand," Bien-Aimé wrote in an e-mail, "the most critical and urgent issue is what, if any, contingencies the relief/humanitarian agencies are putting in place not only to ensure that women have easy access to food, water and medical care, but to guarantee their protection."
Concerned women in the New York area plan to gather Wednesday to strategize their next steps, Ensler said.
And while they will certainly keep mourning, she and the others are hopeful that Haitian women, inspired by these fallen heros and leaders, will forge ahead -- keeping their fight and legacies alive.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/01/20/haitian.womens.movement.mourns/index.html?hpt=C1
By Jessica Ravitz, CNN
One returned to her Haitian roots, to give voice to women, honor their stories and shape their futures.
Another urged women to pack a courtroom in Haiti, where she succeeded in getting a guilty verdict against a man who battered his wife.
A third joined the others and helped change the law to make rape, long a political weapon in Haiti, a punishable crime.
Myriam Merlet, Magalie Marcelin and Anne Marie Coriolan, founders of three of the country's most important advocacy organizations working on behalf of women and girls, are confirmed dead -- victims of last week's 7.0 earthquake.
And their deaths have left members of the women's movement, Haitian and otherwise, reeling.
"Words are missing for me. I lost a large chunk of my personal, political and social life," Carolle Charles wrote in an e-mail to colleagues. The Haitian-born sociology professor at Baruch College in New York is chair of Dwa Fanm (meaning "Women's Rights" in Creole), a Brooklyn-based advocacy group. These women "were my friends, my colleagues and my associates. I cannot envision going to Haiti without seeing them."
Myriam Merlet was until recently the chief of staff of Haiti's Ministry for Gender and the Rights of Women, established in 1995, and still served as a top adviser. She died after being trapped beneath her collapsed Port-au-Prince home, Charles said. She was 53.
Merlet, an author as well as an activist, fled Haiti in the 1970s. She studied in Canada, steeping herself in economics, women's issues, feminist theory and political sociology.
In the mid-1980s, she returned to her homeland. In "Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance," published in 2001, she contributed an essay, "The More People Dream," in which she described what brought her back.
"While I was abroad I felt the need to find out who I was and where my soul was. I chose to be a Haitian woman," she wrote. "We're a country in which three-fourths of the people can't read and don't eat properly. I'm an integral part of the situation. I am not in Canada in a black ghetto, or an extraterrestrial from outer space. I am a Haitian woman. I don't mean to say that I am responsible for the problems. But still, as a Haitian woman, I must make an effort so that all together we can extricate ourselves from them."
She was a founder of Enfofamn, an organization that raises awareness about women through media, collects stories and works to honor their names. Among her efforts, she set out to get streets named after Haitian women who came before her, Charles said.
Dubbed a "Vagina Warrior," she was remembered Tuesday by her friend Eve Ensler, the award-winning playwright and force behind V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls.
"She was very bold," said Ensler, who at Merlet's insistence brought her play "The Vagina Monologues" to Haiti and helped establish safe houses for women in Port-au-Prince and Cap Haitien. "She had an incredible vision of what was possible for Haitian women, and she lifted their spirits. ... And we had such a wonderful time. I remember her dancing in the streets of New Orleans and just being so alive."
Magalie Marcelin, a lawyer and actress who appeared in films and on stage, established Kay Fanm, a women's rights organization that deals with domestic violence, offers services and shelter to women and makes microcredits, or loans, available to women working in markets, said Charles, the chair of Dwa Fanm.
Charles remembered a visit to Haiti about two years ago when Marcelin, believed to be in her mid-50s, called seeking help. Hoping to deflect the political clout of a defendant in court, she asked for women to come out in droves and pack the courtroom. Charles watched as the man on trial was convicted for battering his wife.
Her death has been reported through various media outlets, and was confirmed to CNN by Carribbean Radio Television based in Port-au-Prince. Her own daughter helped dig her body out from rubble in the aftermath of the quake, Charles said she learned when she got the call from Marcelin's cousin.
In an interview last year with the Haitian Times, Marcelin spoke of the image of a drum that adorned public awareness stickers.
"It's very symbolic in the Haitian cultural imagination," Marcelin said, according to the Haitian Times report. "The sound of the drum is the sound of freedom, it's the sound of slaves breaking with slavery."
With Merlet, Anne Marie Coriolan, 53, served as a top adviser to the women's rights ministry.
Coriolan, who died when her boyfriend's home collapsed, was the founder of Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen (Solidarity with Haitian Women, or SOFA), which Charles described as an advocacy and services organization.
Her daughter, Wani Thelusmon Coriolan, said in Haiti children bear only their father's surname, but her mother insisted on keeping her maiden name and making sure her two children shared it, too.
"She said my dad was not the only one who created me. She was involved, too," her 24-year-old daughter, who lives and is studying in Montreal, Quebec, said with a laugh.
Even though Wani and her brother no longer live in Haiti (he is in Paris, France), she said her mother was determined to make sure they were proud of their homeland.
"She loved her country. She never stopped believing in Haiti. She said that when you have a dream you have to fight for it," Wani said. "She wanted women to have equal rights. She wanted women to hold their heads high."
Coriolan was a political organizer who helped bring rape -- "an instrument of terror and war," Charles said -- to the forefront of Haitian courts.
Before 2005, rapes in Haiti were treated as nothing more than "crimes of passion," Charles explained. That changed because of the collective efforts of these women activists -- and others they inspired.
With the three leaders gone, there is concern about the future of Haiti's women and girls. Even with all that's been achieved, the struggle for equality and against violence remains enormous.
The chaos that's taken over the devastated nation heightens those worries, said Taina Bien-Aimé, the executive director of Equality Now, a human rights organization dedicated to women.
Before the disaster struck last week, a survey of Haitian women and girls showed an estimated 72 percent had been raped, according to study done by Kay Fanm. And at least 40 percent of the women surveyed were victims of domestic violence, Bien-Aimé said.
And humanitarian emergencies have been linked to increased violence and exploitation in the past, she said.
"From where we stand," Bien-Aimé wrote in an e-mail, "the most critical and urgent issue is what, if any, contingencies the relief/humanitarian agencies are putting in place not only to ensure that women have easy access to food, water and medical care, but to guarantee their protection."
Concerned women in the New York area plan to gather Wednesday to strategize their next steps, Ensler said.
And while they will certainly keep mourning, she and the others are hopeful that Haitian women, inspired by these fallen heros and leaders, will forge ahead -- keeping their fight and legacies alive.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/01/20/haitian.womens.movement.mourns/index.html?hpt=C1
Friday, October 23, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Monday, September 14, 2009
Hebrews 13:1-3, NLT
1 Keep on loving each other as brothers and sisters.
2 Don’t forget to show hospitality to strangers, for some who have done this have entertained angels without realizing it!
3 Remember those in prison, as if you were there yourself.
REMEMBER ALSO THOSE BEING MISTREATED, AS IF YOU FELT THEIR PAIN IN YOUR OWN BODIES.
2 Don’t forget to show hospitality to strangers, for some who have done this have entertained angels without realizing it!
3 Remember those in prison, as if you were there yourself.
REMEMBER ALSO THOSE BEING MISTREATED, AS IF YOU FELT THEIR PAIN IN YOUR OWN BODIES.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
We are Running for Congo Women! Join us!!!
Here are the specifics:
Date
Saturday, October 03, 2009 @ 9:00 AM
Address
Lincoln Park, Grove #13 Between Belmont and Diversey Harbors
141 W Diversey Pkwy
Registration Closing Date
Thursday, October 01, 2009 @ 9:00 AM
COST
$20
Brief Description
This event is a 5K run or walk with a finish line celebration!
Additional Information
Event Description:
When we Run for Congo Women, we are sending a simple message:
Congolese lives matter.
The lives of Congolese women are significant.
The lives of Congolese children are precious.
They have waited far too long.
They are worth our effort.
We are running to help.
Join us!
Run for Congo Women benefits Women for Women International's program in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 5.4 million people have died since 1998 in a conflict that has left Congo decimated. Women for Women International provides women survivors of war with rights awareness and job skills training, direct aid, small business development support and emotional support so they can move from victim to survivor to active citizen.
You can register on their website-
http://runforcongowomen.org/
If you can’t run or walk please make a donation in support of these women!
Date
Saturday, October 03, 2009 @ 9:00 AM
Address
Lincoln Park, Grove #13 Between Belmont and Diversey Harbors
141 W Diversey Pkwy
Registration Closing Date
Thursday, October 01, 2009 @ 9:00 AM
COST
$20
Brief Description
This event is a 5K run or walk with a finish line celebration!
Additional Information
Event Description:
When we Run for Congo Women, we are sending a simple message:
Congolese lives matter.
The lives of Congolese women are significant.
The lives of Congolese children are precious.
They have waited far too long.
They are worth our effort.
We are running to help.
Join us!
Run for Congo Women benefits Women for Women International's program in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 5.4 million people have died since 1998 in a conflict that has left Congo decimated. Women for Women International provides women survivors of war with rights awareness and job skills training, direct aid, small business development support and emotional support so they can move from victim to survivor to active citizen.
You can register on their website-
http://runforcongowomen.org/
If you can’t run or walk please make a donation in support of these women!
Friday, August 21, 2009
Psalm 103:6
'The Lord executeth righteousness and judgement for all that are oppressed.'
Lord, we thank you in advance for saving the Congo!
Amen.
Lord, we thank you in advance for saving the Congo!
Amen.
'What I Saw in Goma'
By Hillary Rodham Clinton
In 11 days of travel across Africa, I saw humanity at its worst – and at its best. In Goma last week, I saw both.
The Mugunga Internally Displaced Persons Camp sits in a land of volcanoes and great lakes on the edge of Goma, a provincial capital in the eastern Congo. The camp is now home to 18,000 people seeking refuge from a cycle of violent conflict that has left 5.4 million dead since 1998. Chased from their homes and villages by armed rebels and informal militias, these men, women and children walked for miles with little food or water until they reached this relatively safe haven.
Now they live in tents, one next to the other, row after row, some clinging to life, others hanging on to whatever glimmer of hope remains in a region plagued by years of brutality. Many of these people have been robbed of their homes, possessions, families and, worst of all, their dignity.
Women and girls in particular have been victimized on an unimaginable scale, as sexual and gender-based violence has become a tactic of war and has reached epidemic proportions. Some 1,100 rapes are reported each month, with an average of 36 women and girls raped every day.
I visited a hospital run by the organization Heal Africa and met a woman who told me that she was eight months' pregnant when she was attacked. She was at home when a group of men broke in. They took her husband and two of their children and shot them in the front yard, before returning into the house to shoot her other two children. Then they beat and gang-raped her and left her for dead. But she wasn't dead. She fought for life and her neighbors managed to get her to the hospital – 85 kilometers away.
I came to Goma to send a clear message: The United States condemns these attacks and all those who commit them and abet them. They are crimes against humanity.
These acts don't just harm a single individual, or a single family, or village, or group. They shred the fabric that weaves us together as human beings. Such atrocities have no place in any society. This truly is humanity at its worst.
But there is reason to hope. We have seen survivors summon the courage to rebuild their lives and their communities. We have seen civic leaders and organizations come together to combat this appalling scourge. And we have seen health care workers sacrifice comfortable careers so they can treat the wounded.
In Goma, I met doctors and advocates who work every day to repair the broken bodies and spirits of women who have been raped, often by gangs, and often in such brutal fashion that they can no longer bear children, or walk or work. Caregivers like Lyn Lusi, who founded Heal Africa in Goma, and Dr. Denis Mukwege, who founded the Panzi hospital in Bukavu, represent humanity at its best.
The United States will stand with these brave people. This week I announced more than $17 million in new funding to prevent and respond to gender and sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We will provide medical care, counseling, economic assistance and legal support. We will dedicate nearly $3 million to recruit and train police officers to protect women and girls and to investigate sexual violence. We will send technology experts to help women and front-line workers report abuse using photographs and video and share information on treatment and legal options. And we will deploy a team of civilian experts, medical personnel and military engineers to assess how we can further assist survivors of sexual violence.
While I was in the DRC, I had very frank discussions about sexual violence with President Kabila. I stressed that the perpetrators of these crimes, no matter who they are, must be prosecuted and punished. This is particularly important when they are in positions of authority, including members of the Congolese military, who have been allowed to commit these crimes with impunity.
Our commitment to survivors of sexual and gender-based violence did not begin with my visit to Goma, and it will not end with my departure.
We are redoubling our efforts to address the fundamental cause of this violence: the fighting that goes on and on in the eastern Congo. We will be taking additional steps at the United Nations and in concert with other nations to bring an end to this conflict.
There is an old Congolese proverb that says, "No matter how long the night, the day is sure to come." The day must come when the women of the eastern Congo can walk freely again, to tend their fields, play with their children and collect firewood and water without fear. They live in a region of unrivaled natural beauty and rich resources. They are strong and resilient. They could, if given the opportunity, drive economic and social progress that would make their country both peaceful and prosperous.
Working together, we will banish sexual violence into the dark past, where it belongs, and help the Congolese people seize the opportunities of a new day.
In 11 days of travel across Africa, I saw humanity at its worst – and at its best. In Goma last week, I saw both.
The Mugunga Internally Displaced Persons Camp sits in a land of volcanoes and great lakes on the edge of Goma, a provincial capital in the eastern Congo. The camp is now home to 18,000 people seeking refuge from a cycle of violent conflict that has left 5.4 million dead since 1998. Chased from their homes and villages by armed rebels and informal militias, these men, women and children walked for miles with little food or water until they reached this relatively safe haven.
Now they live in tents, one next to the other, row after row, some clinging to life, others hanging on to whatever glimmer of hope remains in a region plagued by years of brutality. Many of these people have been robbed of their homes, possessions, families and, worst of all, their dignity.
Women and girls in particular have been victimized on an unimaginable scale, as sexual and gender-based violence has become a tactic of war and has reached epidemic proportions. Some 1,100 rapes are reported each month, with an average of 36 women and girls raped every day.
I visited a hospital run by the organization Heal Africa and met a woman who told me that she was eight months' pregnant when she was attacked. She was at home when a group of men broke in. They took her husband and two of their children and shot them in the front yard, before returning into the house to shoot her other two children. Then they beat and gang-raped her and left her for dead. But she wasn't dead. She fought for life and her neighbors managed to get her to the hospital – 85 kilometers away.
I came to Goma to send a clear message: The United States condemns these attacks and all those who commit them and abet them. They are crimes against humanity.
These acts don't just harm a single individual, or a single family, or village, or group. They shred the fabric that weaves us together as human beings. Such atrocities have no place in any society. This truly is humanity at its worst.
But there is reason to hope. We have seen survivors summon the courage to rebuild their lives and their communities. We have seen civic leaders and organizations come together to combat this appalling scourge. And we have seen health care workers sacrifice comfortable careers so they can treat the wounded.
In Goma, I met doctors and advocates who work every day to repair the broken bodies and spirits of women who have been raped, often by gangs, and often in such brutal fashion that they can no longer bear children, or walk or work. Caregivers like Lyn Lusi, who founded Heal Africa in Goma, and Dr. Denis Mukwege, who founded the Panzi hospital in Bukavu, represent humanity at its best.
The United States will stand with these brave people. This week I announced more than $17 million in new funding to prevent and respond to gender and sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We will provide medical care, counseling, economic assistance and legal support. We will dedicate nearly $3 million to recruit and train police officers to protect women and girls and to investigate sexual violence. We will send technology experts to help women and front-line workers report abuse using photographs and video and share information on treatment and legal options. And we will deploy a team of civilian experts, medical personnel and military engineers to assess how we can further assist survivors of sexual violence.
While I was in the DRC, I had very frank discussions about sexual violence with President Kabila. I stressed that the perpetrators of these crimes, no matter who they are, must be prosecuted and punished. This is particularly important when they are in positions of authority, including members of the Congolese military, who have been allowed to commit these crimes with impunity.
Our commitment to survivors of sexual and gender-based violence did not begin with my visit to Goma, and it will not end with my departure.
We are redoubling our efforts to address the fundamental cause of this violence: the fighting that goes on and on in the eastern Congo. We will be taking additional steps at the United Nations and in concert with other nations to bring an end to this conflict.
There is an old Congolese proverb that says, "No matter how long the night, the day is sure to come." The day must come when the women of the eastern Congo can walk freely again, to tend their fields, play with their children and collect firewood and water without fear. They live in a region of unrivaled natural beauty and rich resources. They are strong and resilient. They could, if given the opportunity, drive economic and social progress that would make their country both peaceful and prosperous.
Working together, we will banish sexual violence into the dark past, where it belongs, and help the Congolese people seize the opportunities of a new day.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Clinton demands end to sexual violence in Congo
By MATTHEW LEE, Associated Press Writer Matthew Lee, Associated Press Writer – 28 mins ago
GOMA, Congo – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton toured an African refugee camp Tuesday crowded with victims of violence and malnutrition, pledging $17 million in American aid to help stem the tide of rampant sexual abuse that has staggered war-ravaged eastern Congo.
Clinton's voice cracked with emotion as she described an epidemic of rapes that has convulsed the Congo over 10 years of internecine conflict. "We say to the world that those who attack civilian populations using systematic rape are guilty of crimes against humanity," she said.
Clinton toured Magunga Camp, a dust-choked warren of tents and tin-lined huts in eastern Congo that is home to 18,000 men, women and children. Most were uprooted from their villages by the on-again, off-again conflict between Democratic Republic of Congo troops and rebel forces that killed more than 5 million people since 1998.
"We believe there should be no impunity for the sexual and gender-based violence committed by so many — that there must be arrests and prosecutions and punishment," she said during a press conference with Congolese Foreign Minister Alexis Thambwe Mwamba in the eastern city of Goma.
At least $10 million of the $17 million pledged by Clinton will be used to train doctors to treat victims of brutal sexual attacks. Some of the funds will also be aimed at preventing abuse.
She met with several residents of the camp, who told her that they are suffering from malnutrition, malaria, tuberculosis and diarrhea. The residents told Clinton that women and young girls and boys are often victimized by rape when they leave the camp to go into a nearby forest to gather wood for cooking.
One camp official said a young boy had been raped on Monday.
"We really want to return home, that's why we are asking America to help stop the fighting," Chantale Mapendo, who lives in the camp, told Clinton.
"That's why I'm here," Clinton replied. "I want you to be able to go home."
Clinton appeared visibly moved when she was shown a four-year-old child, held in his mother's arms, who was suffering from extreme malnutrition. Belly distended, eyes hollow, the skeletal boy weighed less than 15 pounds.
"We're proud to help you," Clinton said.
Picking her way through a path littered with volcanic rock, Clinton said she "wanted to see for myself what was happening here."
Clinton flew to came to Goma, the regional capital of war-pocked of the eastern Congo, aboard a U.N. plane over the objections of some top aides who worried about her security and logistics for the visit. Clinton is the first U.S. secretary of state to visit the city, according to the State Department historian's office.
The United Nations has recorded at least 200,000 cases of sexual violence against women and girls in the region since conflict erupted in 1996, something Clinton deplored as "one of mankind's greatest atrocities" before she arrived.
The figures, Clinton told a group university students in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa on Monday, are "astonishing and horrible." She urged the youth of Congo to mount nationwide protests against such abuses and said she would push the government hard on the issue.
Clinton said Tuesday that the people of eastern Congo were still suffering from a "reign of violence" at the hands of rebel groups and the national army, which in January launched a U.N.-backed campaign to pacify the region.
Rights groups have called for a suspension of the operation, which has displaced some 800,000 people from their homes and left hundreds of civilians dead.
Clinton said the U.S. is "very concerned about the civilian casualties, both deaths and rapes and other injuries, from the military action."
But she also said the U.S. supported efforts to eliminate the threat from insurgents and said the U.S. wants the Congolese military professionalized to prevent abuses from the government.
Earlier in the day, Clinton delivered a strong message to Congolese President Joseph Kabila when they met in a tent at a compound in Goma, on the shore of Lake Kivu. Goma is the epicenter of an epidemic of gang rapes and other sexual crimes amid continuing fighting between the army and rebel groups.
After meeting with Kabila, Clinton said impunity for the perpetrators "runs counter to peace and stability for the Congolese people."
She said the U.S. will send a team of legal and financial and other technical experts to come up with specific recommendations for overcoming Congo's problems with corruption. She said Kabila had accepted that offer.
"We do support the efforts to end the militias and the violence they have visited so terribly on the people of the eastern Congo," Clinton said. But she added: "We believe that a disciplined, paid army is a more effective fighting force. We believe that more can be done to protect civilians while you are trying to kill and capture insurgents."
Although fighting has eased since a 2003 peace deal, the army and rebel groups, fighting over eastern Congo's vast mineral wealth, are still attacking villages, killing civilians and committing brutal atrocities.
Members of Kabila's armed forces are accused of taking part in the brutality, including gang rapes that have led to unwanted pregnancies, serious injuries and death to tens of thousands of women and girls.
Earlier this month, a leading human rights group demanded that Congo crack down on sexual violence often perpetrated by military generals and other top officers. It cited U.N. data showing that 7,703 cases of sexual violence by soldiers were reported last year.
Human Rights Watch said the Congolese authorities have failed to prevent the attacks and called on the U.N. Security Council to take tough steps, including travel bans, against individuals or governments that commit or condone sexual violence in Congo and elsewhere.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090811/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/af_clinton_africa
GOMA, Congo – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton toured an African refugee camp Tuesday crowded with victims of violence and malnutrition, pledging $17 million in American aid to help stem the tide of rampant sexual abuse that has staggered war-ravaged eastern Congo.
Clinton's voice cracked with emotion as she described an epidemic of rapes that has convulsed the Congo over 10 years of internecine conflict. "We say to the world that those who attack civilian populations using systematic rape are guilty of crimes against humanity," she said.
Clinton toured Magunga Camp, a dust-choked warren of tents and tin-lined huts in eastern Congo that is home to 18,000 men, women and children. Most were uprooted from their villages by the on-again, off-again conflict between Democratic Republic of Congo troops and rebel forces that killed more than 5 million people since 1998.
"We believe there should be no impunity for the sexual and gender-based violence committed by so many — that there must be arrests and prosecutions and punishment," she said during a press conference with Congolese Foreign Minister Alexis Thambwe Mwamba in the eastern city of Goma.
At least $10 million of the $17 million pledged by Clinton will be used to train doctors to treat victims of brutal sexual attacks. Some of the funds will also be aimed at preventing abuse.
She met with several residents of the camp, who told her that they are suffering from malnutrition, malaria, tuberculosis and diarrhea. The residents told Clinton that women and young girls and boys are often victimized by rape when they leave the camp to go into a nearby forest to gather wood for cooking.
One camp official said a young boy had been raped on Monday.
"We really want to return home, that's why we are asking America to help stop the fighting," Chantale Mapendo, who lives in the camp, told Clinton.
"That's why I'm here," Clinton replied. "I want you to be able to go home."
Clinton appeared visibly moved when she was shown a four-year-old child, held in his mother's arms, who was suffering from extreme malnutrition. Belly distended, eyes hollow, the skeletal boy weighed less than 15 pounds.
"We're proud to help you," Clinton said.
Picking her way through a path littered with volcanic rock, Clinton said she "wanted to see for myself what was happening here."
Clinton flew to came to Goma, the regional capital of war-pocked of the eastern Congo, aboard a U.N. plane over the objections of some top aides who worried about her security and logistics for the visit. Clinton is the first U.S. secretary of state to visit the city, according to the State Department historian's office.
The United Nations has recorded at least 200,000 cases of sexual violence against women and girls in the region since conflict erupted in 1996, something Clinton deplored as "one of mankind's greatest atrocities" before she arrived.
The figures, Clinton told a group university students in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa on Monday, are "astonishing and horrible." She urged the youth of Congo to mount nationwide protests against such abuses and said she would push the government hard on the issue.
Clinton said Tuesday that the people of eastern Congo were still suffering from a "reign of violence" at the hands of rebel groups and the national army, which in January launched a U.N.-backed campaign to pacify the region.
Rights groups have called for a suspension of the operation, which has displaced some 800,000 people from their homes and left hundreds of civilians dead.
Clinton said the U.S. is "very concerned about the civilian casualties, both deaths and rapes and other injuries, from the military action."
But she also said the U.S. supported efforts to eliminate the threat from insurgents and said the U.S. wants the Congolese military professionalized to prevent abuses from the government.
Earlier in the day, Clinton delivered a strong message to Congolese President Joseph Kabila when they met in a tent at a compound in Goma, on the shore of Lake Kivu. Goma is the epicenter of an epidemic of gang rapes and other sexual crimes amid continuing fighting between the army and rebel groups.
After meeting with Kabila, Clinton said impunity for the perpetrators "runs counter to peace and stability for the Congolese people."
She said the U.S. will send a team of legal and financial and other technical experts to come up with specific recommendations for overcoming Congo's problems with corruption. She said Kabila had accepted that offer.
"We do support the efforts to end the militias and the violence they have visited so terribly on the people of the eastern Congo," Clinton said. But she added: "We believe that a disciplined, paid army is a more effective fighting force. We believe that more can be done to protect civilians while you are trying to kill and capture insurgents."
Although fighting has eased since a 2003 peace deal, the army and rebel groups, fighting over eastern Congo's vast mineral wealth, are still attacking villages, killing civilians and committing brutal atrocities.
Members of Kabila's armed forces are accused of taking part in the brutality, including gang rapes that have led to unwanted pregnancies, serious injuries and death to tens of thousands of women and girls.
Earlier this month, a leading human rights group demanded that Congo crack down on sexual violence often perpetrated by military generals and other top officers. It cited U.N. data showing that 7,703 cases of sexual violence by soldiers were reported last year.
Human Rights Watch said the Congolese authorities have failed to prevent the attacks and called on the U.N. Security Council to take tough steps, including travel bans, against individuals or governments that commit or condone sexual violence in Congo and elsewhere.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090811/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/af_clinton_africa
Girl, 9, details rape in Congo to photographer
By Wayne Drash
CNN
(CNN) -- The young girl whispered in a hushed tone. She looked down as she spoke, only glancing up from her dark round eyes every now and then. She wanted to tell more, but she was too ashamed. She was just 9 years old when, she says, Congolese soldiers gang-raped her on her way to school.
The young girl on the right says she was raped by Congolese soldiers. She was just 9 when it happened.
"These two soldiers nabbed her, put a bag over her head and pulled her into the bushes. She explains it as, 'They got me,' " says Sherrlyn Borkgren, who spent a month in the Democratic Republic of the Congo late last year.
Borkgren, a wedding photographer and freelance journalist, traveled to the war-torn region of eastern Congo after being awarded the ShootQ Grant, a $10,000 award to free photographers from everyday life to pursue a project that raises awareness of an important global issue.
Borkgren pauses when she speaks of meeting the girl. "She was obviously very traumatized to repeat this out loud, and I don't think she had repeated it to anyone." The young girl lied to her about her age when they first spoke.
"She said she was 15 when she was raped," Borkgren says. "I figured she probably wanted to say she was 15 because it's more acceptable than to say, 'I was 9 when they raped me.' "
The United Nations estimates 200,000 women and girls have been raped in Congo over the last 12 years, when war broke out with Rwanda and Uganda backing Congolese rebels seeking to oust then-Congo President Laurent Kabila. Rape became a weapon of war, aid groups say.
"It is one of the worst places in the world to be a woman or girl," says Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch who has spent the last 10 years focusing on Congo. "These are often soldiers and combatants deliberately targeting women and raping them as a strategy of war, either to punish a community, to terrorize a community or to humiliate them."
Most times, the women are raped by at least two perpetrators. "Sometimes, that is done in front of the family, in front of the children," Van Woudenberg says. She sighs, "What causes men to rape -- I wish I had an answer to that."
Against this backdrop, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, one of the world's strongest voices for women's rights, traveled to Congo as part of her whirlwind trip to Africa.
Clinton arrived in Goma in eastern Congo Tuesday where she is to meet with rape victims during her visit. "I hope that here in the [Congo] there will be a concerted effort to demand justice for women who are violently attacked, and to make sure that their attackers are punished," Clinton said Monday after a tour of a Kinshasa hospital.
Human rights groups are eager to see if Clinton pressures Joseph Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the son of Laurent Kabila, to do more to pursue charges against top army commanders accused of rape.
"Soldiers have committed gang rapes, rapes leading to injury and death, and abductions of girls and women," a report released last month by Human Rights Watch says. "Their crimes are serious violations of international humanitarian law. Commanders have frequently failed to stop sexual violence and may themselves be guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity as a consequence."
Van Woudenberg says punishment, unfortunately, is all too rare for sex crimes. "If you rape, you get away with it," she says.
According to the United Nations, there were 15,996 new cases of sexual violence registered throughout Congo in 2008. Nearly two out of every three rapes were carried out against children, most of them adolescent girls, the Human Rights Watch report says.
A paltry 27 soldiers were convicted in military courts last year. Under the current court system, the military handles accusations of rape against its soldiers -- something aid groups say must be changed for real accountability.
Since January of this year, aid organizations say there's been a surge of violence against civilians as a result of Congolese operations against Rwandan Hutu rebels, some of whom are believed to have participated in 1994's Rwandan genocide. The fighting has left more than 1.8 million people displaced in the volatile region, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Aid groups have started to see an uptick of rapes of men this year, although women and girls remain the primary targets. "The brutality has increased on a huge scale," Van Woudenberg says.
She says she interviewed one 15-year-old girl who was held in a hole for five months and gang-raped nearly every day. She had gone out shopping when soldiers approached.
"They asked me to take off my clothes, and I did. There wasn't much I could do," the girl told her. "They took me into the bush. I stayed for five months with these people, and when I came back, I was five months pregnant."
Van Woudenberg adds, "Gosh, the brutality against the women and girls is unimaginable."
Congo has taken some measures to try to curb the sexual violence. In 2006, its parliament passed a law criminalizing rape, with penalties ranging from five to 20 years. Penalties are doubled under certain circumstances, including gang-rape and if the perpetrator is a public official. Kabila's wife, Olive Lemba Kabila, has launched a public campaign speaking out against rapes of the nation's women and girls.
The army has also started a zero-tolerance campaign in which commanders have emphasized to troops that they must respect human rights and protect civilians from harm, according to the U.N.
In May, the United Nations handed over the names of five top military officers accused of rape. Two of the senior officers are now detained in the capital of Kinshasa and the three others must report to authorities under close observation. "It's expected that a trial could happen soon," said U.N. spokesman Yves Sorokobi. "It certainly is a big development. ... It's important. It's significant."
Still more must be done, aid groups say, starting with the establishment of a special court made up of Congolese and international judges and prosecutors to investigate rape allegations.
Borkgren, the photographer from Eugene, Oregon, says she went to the Congo after having a dream in which two women yelled at her to "come over here." She won the grant and traveled there for four weeks, beginning in November of last year. She hitchhiked her way around the country, something she now admits was "a little bit stupid."
She says she once came face-to-face with soldiers when she was shopping at a market by herself. One of the men said he wanted to "take me up to his camp." She still can't shake the looks of the local women who were there.
"That was interesting," she says. "When the soldiers were harassing me, the women looked ashamed of the soldiers. And when they saw me tell them, 'No, go away,' the women looked at me quite surprised."
Eventually, she found the girl who touched her heart -- "the great, great kid." Borkgren first spoke with her father, who was initially reluctant to introduce her to his daughter. He explained that the family had gone to authorities, only to be ignored.
Borkgren says that when she met the girl, they got along instantly. At times, the young child didn't know how to describe what happened. "She would say, 'I don't understand what it is, and I don't know what words to use.' "
"It just turned my heart to think that here's this little girl who doesn't even have the words to describe what happened to her, and has to live her life having had this violence put upon her. Just this thoughtless violence that she didn't deserve or ask for. It's so inhumane."
Her images capture a glimpse into that world, of savagery and lost innocence. The soldiers and rebels carrying out the rapes, she says, are misguided people who need help.
Caught in the middle are the innocents: women, girls and fathers struggling to get justice.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/08/11/congo.rape/index.html
CNN
(CNN) -- The young girl whispered in a hushed tone. She looked down as she spoke, only glancing up from her dark round eyes every now and then. She wanted to tell more, but she was too ashamed. She was just 9 years old when, she says, Congolese soldiers gang-raped her on her way to school.
The young girl on the right says she was raped by Congolese soldiers. She was just 9 when it happened.
"These two soldiers nabbed her, put a bag over her head and pulled her into the bushes. She explains it as, 'They got me,' " says Sherrlyn Borkgren, who spent a month in the Democratic Republic of the Congo late last year.
Borkgren, a wedding photographer and freelance journalist, traveled to the war-torn region of eastern Congo after being awarded the ShootQ Grant, a $10,000 award to free photographers from everyday life to pursue a project that raises awareness of an important global issue.
Borkgren pauses when she speaks of meeting the girl. "She was obviously very traumatized to repeat this out loud, and I don't think she had repeated it to anyone." The young girl lied to her about her age when they first spoke.
"She said she was 15 when she was raped," Borkgren says. "I figured she probably wanted to say she was 15 because it's more acceptable than to say, 'I was 9 when they raped me.' "
The United Nations estimates 200,000 women and girls have been raped in Congo over the last 12 years, when war broke out with Rwanda and Uganda backing Congolese rebels seeking to oust then-Congo President Laurent Kabila. Rape became a weapon of war, aid groups say.
"It is one of the worst places in the world to be a woman or girl," says Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch who has spent the last 10 years focusing on Congo. "These are often soldiers and combatants deliberately targeting women and raping them as a strategy of war, either to punish a community, to terrorize a community or to humiliate them."
Most times, the women are raped by at least two perpetrators. "Sometimes, that is done in front of the family, in front of the children," Van Woudenberg says. She sighs, "What causes men to rape -- I wish I had an answer to that."
Against this backdrop, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, one of the world's strongest voices for women's rights, traveled to Congo as part of her whirlwind trip to Africa.
Clinton arrived in Goma in eastern Congo Tuesday where she is to meet with rape victims during her visit. "I hope that here in the [Congo] there will be a concerted effort to demand justice for women who are violently attacked, and to make sure that their attackers are punished," Clinton said Monday after a tour of a Kinshasa hospital.
Human rights groups are eager to see if Clinton pressures Joseph Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the son of Laurent Kabila, to do more to pursue charges against top army commanders accused of rape.
"Soldiers have committed gang rapes, rapes leading to injury and death, and abductions of girls and women," a report released last month by Human Rights Watch says. "Their crimes are serious violations of international humanitarian law. Commanders have frequently failed to stop sexual violence and may themselves be guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity as a consequence."
Van Woudenberg says punishment, unfortunately, is all too rare for sex crimes. "If you rape, you get away with it," she says.
According to the United Nations, there were 15,996 new cases of sexual violence registered throughout Congo in 2008. Nearly two out of every three rapes were carried out against children, most of them adolescent girls, the Human Rights Watch report says.
A paltry 27 soldiers were convicted in military courts last year. Under the current court system, the military handles accusations of rape against its soldiers -- something aid groups say must be changed for real accountability.
Since January of this year, aid organizations say there's been a surge of violence against civilians as a result of Congolese operations against Rwandan Hutu rebels, some of whom are believed to have participated in 1994's Rwandan genocide. The fighting has left more than 1.8 million people displaced in the volatile region, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Aid groups have started to see an uptick of rapes of men this year, although women and girls remain the primary targets. "The brutality has increased on a huge scale," Van Woudenberg says.
She says she interviewed one 15-year-old girl who was held in a hole for five months and gang-raped nearly every day. She had gone out shopping when soldiers approached.
"They asked me to take off my clothes, and I did. There wasn't much I could do," the girl told her. "They took me into the bush. I stayed for five months with these people, and when I came back, I was five months pregnant."
Van Woudenberg adds, "Gosh, the brutality against the women and girls is unimaginable."
Congo has taken some measures to try to curb the sexual violence. In 2006, its parliament passed a law criminalizing rape, with penalties ranging from five to 20 years. Penalties are doubled under certain circumstances, including gang-rape and if the perpetrator is a public official. Kabila's wife, Olive Lemba Kabila, has launched a public campaign speaking out against rapes of the nation's women and girls.
The army has also started a zero-tolerance campaign in which commanders have emphasized to troops that they must respect human rights and protect civilians from harm, according to the U.N.
In May, the United Nations handed over the names of five top military officers accused of rape. Two of the senior officers are now detained in the capital of Kinshasa and the three others must report to authorities under close observation. "It's expected that a trial could happen soon," said U.N. spokesman Yves Sorokobi. "It certainly is a big development. ... It's important. It's significant."
Still more must be done, aid groups say, starting with the establishment of a special court made up of Congolese and international judges and prosecutors to investigate rape allegations.
Borkgren, the photographer from Eugene, Oregon, says she went to the Congo after having a dream in which two women yelled at her to "come over here." She won the grant and traveled there for four weeks, beginning in November of last year. She hitchhiked her way around the country, something she now admits was "a little bit stupid."
She says she once came face-to-face with soldiers when she was shopping at a market by herself. One of the men said he wanted to "take me up to his camp." She still can't shake the looks of the local women who were there.
"That was interesting," she says. "When the soldiers were harassing me, the women looked ashamed of the soldiers. And when they saw me tell them, 'No, go away,' the women looked at me quite surprised."
Eventually, she found the girl who touched her heart -- "the great, great kid." Borkgren first spoke with her father, who was initially reluctant to introduce her to his daughter. He explained that the family had gone to authorities, only to be ignored.
Borkgren says that when she met the girl, they got along instantly. At times, the young child didn't know how to describe what happened. "She would say, 'I don't understand what it is, and I don't know what words to use.' "
"It just turned my heart to think that here's this little girl who doesn't even have the words to describe what happened to her, and has to live her life having had this violence put upon her. Just this thoughtless violence that she didn't deserve or ask for. It's so inhumane."
Her images capture a glimpse into that world, of savagery and lost innocence. The soldiers and rebels carrying out the rapes, she says, are misguided people who need help.
Caught in the middle are the innocents: women, girls and fathers struggling to get justice.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/08/11/congo.rape/index.html
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Clinton's trip to Africa her biggest yet
By Jill Dougherty
CNN Foreign Affairs Correspondent
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is embarking on her biggest international trip yet: Africa. Seven countries in 11 days. Issues as diverse as economic entrepreneurship and gender-based violence.
Hillary Clinton's trip to Africa will be her biggest international yet as secretary of state.
The trip comes just three weeks after President Obama's trip to Accra, Ghana. She will highlight many of the themes he struck.
The State Department notes it is the earliest trip by a secretary of state and a president to Africa of any previous U.S. administration. In an administration that prides itself on a plethora of "priorities," officials say they are putting Africa toward the top of the list.
The secretary opens her Africa trip in Nairobi, Kenya, at the U.S.-Sub-Saharan Africa Trade and Economic Cooperation Forum, delivering a speech Wednesday at the forum's ministerial opening ceremony.
In Kenya, she plans to meet with President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga, encouraging them to proceed with their intention to rewrite the country's constitution. The East Africa country was hit with a wave of violence a year and a half ago following flawed presidential elections.
Also in Kenya, she will meet briefly with Somalia's president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed. His country is under intense pressure from Islamist extremist movements affiliated with al Qaeda, al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam.
On her next stop, South Africa, she will meet with the country's new leader, President Jacob Zuma, and the foreign minister. At the top of the agenda for the country, under severe economic pressure, are the crisis in neighboring Zimbabwe and the battle against HIV/AIDS.
The State Department describes her next destination, Angola, as a country with "enormous economic potential." Angola, in southern Africa, is one of the largest energy producers south of the Sahara and is a major supplier of both petroleum and liquified natural gas to the U.S. market.
There are some trouble spots on the secretary's trip, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa is one of them. For more than 15 years, eastern Congo was torn by civil strife and massive use of rape. Clinton will meet with some of the victims of that violence to underscore the United States' commitment ending gender-based violence.
In Nigeria, Secretary Clinton will see what the State Department calls "probably the most important country in sub-Saharan Africa." With 140 million people, it is a major source of petroleum imports for the United States. The secretary will discuss security in West Africa, democratic development, fighting corruption and promoting economic development with the Nigerian government.
In Liberia, founded by slaves from the United States, Clinton will reaffirm U.S. support for President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the only female African president. Besieged by violent conflict for 20 years, the West African nation, still fragile, now is strengthening its democracy, and Clinton will highlight development assistance.
Last stop: Cape Verde, which the State Department calls "an African success story." The island nation, off the coast of West Africa, is democratically run and well-managed.
In its briefings for reporters on Clinton's African trip, the State Department has not specifically stressed human rights although, as with other parts of the world, it links development and human rights.
Amnesty International Executive Director Larry Cox, in a letter to Clinton, is urging her to discuss human-rights concerns with the African leaders she will meet this week.
"Failure to discuss human rights abuses in a meaningful way," he says, "would send the wrong signal about the seriousness with which the United States views the human rights situation in those countries."
China has launched a broad economic outreach to Africa. Asked whether Clinton's trip is a way of sending a message to Beijing, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson said, "Our presence there has nothing to do with anyone else's operations on the continent. The mention of our colleagues from Asia is a Cold War paradigm, not a reflection of where we are today."
Evaluating the prospects for Clinton's African trip, J. Stephen Morrison of the Center for Strategic & International Studies said Clinton "may be signaling through the scope and timing of her trip that Africa has graduated into a mainstream U.S. foreign policy priority and that she intends to guide U.S. policy. That would be a significant shift."
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/08/03/clinton.africa.trip/index.html
CNN Foreign Affairs Correspondent
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is embarking on her biggest international trip yet: Africa. Seven countries in 11 days. Issues as diverse as economic entrepreneurship and gender-based violence.
Hillary Clinton's trip to Africa will be her biggest international yet as secretary of state.
The trip comes just three weeks after President Obama's trip to Accra, Ghana. She will highlight many of the themes he struck.
The State Department notes it is the earliest trip by a secretary of state and a president to Africa of any previous U.S. administration. In an administration that prides itself on a plethora of "priorities," officials say they are putting Africa toward the top of the list.
The secretary opens her Africa trip in Nairobi, Kenya, at the U.S.-Sub-Saharan Africa Trade and Economic Cooperation Forum, delivering a speech Wednesday at the forum's ministerial opening ceremony.
In Kenya, she plans to meet with President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga, encouraging them to proceed with their intention to rewrite the country's constitution. The East Africa country was hit with a wave of violence a year and a half ago following flawed presidential elections.
Also in Kenya, she will meet briefly with Somalia's president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed. His country is under intense pressure from Islamist extremist movements affiliated with al Qaeda, al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam.
On her next stop, South Africa, she will meet with the country's new leader, President Jacob Zuma, and the foreign minister. At the top of the agenda for the country, under severe economic pressure, are the crisis in neighboring Zimbabwe and the battle against HIV/AIDS.
The State Department describes her next destination, Angola, as a country with "enormous economic potential." Angola, in southern Africa, is one of the largest energy producers south of the Sahara and is a major supplier of both petroleum and liquified natural gas to the U.S. market.
There are some trouble spots on the secretary's trip, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa is one of them. For more than 15 years, eastern Congo was torn by civil strife and massive use of rape. Clinton will meet with some of the victims of that violence to underscore the United States' commitment ending gender-based violence.
In Nigeria, Secretary Clinton will see what the State Department calls "probably the most important country in sub-Saharan Africa." With 140 million people, it is a major source of petroleum imports for the United States. The secretary will discuss security in West Africa, democratic development, fighting corruption and promoting economic development with the Nigerian government.
In Liberia, founded by slaves from the United States, Clinton will reaffirm U.S. support for President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the only female African president. Besieged by violent conflict for 20 years, the West African nation, still fragile, now is strengthening its democracy, and Clinton will highlight development assistance.
Last stop: Cape Verde, which the State Department calls "an African success story." The island nation, off the coast of West Africa, is democratically run and well-managed.
In its briefings for reporters on Clinton's African trip, the State Department has not specifically stressed human rights although, as with other parts of the world, it links development and human rights.
Amnesty International Executive Director Larry Cox, in a letter to Clinton, is urging her to discuss human-rights concerns with the African leaders she will meet this week.
"Failure to discuss human rights abuses in a meaningful way," he says, "would send the wrong signal about the seriousness with which the United States views the human rights situation in those countries."
China has launched a broad economic outreach to Africa. Asked whether Clinton's trip is a way of sending a message to Beijing, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson said, "Our presence there has nothing to do with anyone else's operations on the continent. The mention of our colleagues from Asia is a Cold War paradigm, not a reflection of where we are today."
Evaluating the prospects for Clinton's African trip, J. Stephen Morrison of the Center for Strategic & International Studies said Clinton "may be signaling through the scope and timing of her trip that Africa has graduated into a mainstream U.S. foreign policy priority and that she intends to guide U.S. policy. That would be a significant shift."
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/08/03/clinton.africa.trip/index.html
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
First Blood Diamonds, Now Blood Computers?
By ELIZABETH DIAS Elizabeth Dias – Sat Jul 25, 12:45 pm ET
When the film Blood Diamond came out in 2006, people were startled at the alleged origins of the precious stones from areas of bloody conflict and began asking whether the jewels on their fingers cost a human life. Will consumers soon find themselves asking similar questions about their cell phones and computers?
In a report released earlier this week, Global Witness claims that multinational companies are furthering a trade in minerals at the heart of the hi-tech industry that feeds the horrendous civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). (Global Witness is the same nongovernmental organization that helped expose the violence that plagues many of the sources of diamonds.) However, the accused companies, with varying degrees of hostility, deny any culpability, saying Global Witness oversimplifies a complex economic process in a chaotic geopolitial setting.
The provinces of North and South Kivu in the eastern DRC are filled with mines of cassiterite, wolframite, coltan and gold - minerals needed to manufacture everything from lightbulbs to laptops, from MP3 players to Playstations. Over the past 12 years of armed conflict in the region, control of these valuable natural resources has allegedly become a lucrative way for warring parties to purchase munitions and fund their fighting. The Global Witness report claims to have followed the supply chain of these minerals from warring parties to middlemen to international buyers.
By the time metals reach electronics companies, they may have changed hands as many as seven times. This means that without a clear supply history, when a consumer sets her cell phone to vibrate, a function enabled through the mineral wolframite, it is virtually impossible for her to know whether she is using wolframite mined in the eastern DRC, the site of horrific fighting and killing. More than 5 million people have been killed since the conflict began in 1996, some through direct abuse, others through the political and economic chaos that the conflict has created. Armed groups frequently force civilians to mine the minerals, extorting taxes and refusing to pay wages. The report quotes one miner from South Kivu: "We are their meat, their animals. We have nothing to say."
According to Global Witness, although the Congolese army and FDLR rebel groups have been warring on opposite sides for years, they are collaborators in the mining effort, at times providing each other with road and airport access and even sharing their spoils. Researchers say they found evidence that the mineral trade is much more extensive and profitable than previously suspected: one Congolese government official reported that at least 90% of all gold exports from the country were undeclared. And the report charges that the failure of foreign governments to crack down on illicit mining and trade has undercut development endeavors undertaken by the international community in the war-torn region.
The study, Faced with a Gun, What Can You Do?, raises questions about the involvement of nearly 240 companies spanning the mineral, metal and technology industries. It specifically fingers four main European and Asian companies as open buyers in this trade: Thailand Smelting and Refining Corp. (owned by British Amalgamated Metal Corp.), British Afrimex, Belgian Trademet and Traxys. And it questions the role of others further down the manufacturing chain, including prominent electronics companies Hewlett-Packard, Nokia, Dell and Motorola. Even though the companies may be acting legally, Global Witness criticizes their lack of due diligence and transparency standards at every level of their supply chain.
British Amalgamated Metal Corp. (AMC) firmly denies the accusations, citing its standing objective to improve visibility so that warring parties do not benefit from trade. "We are disappointed with the number of inaccuracies and omissions in the report and are concerned that all the facts should be properly represented in a balanced way," AMC said. The company statement went on to say, "We are concerned that Global Witness' approach will lead to a de facto ban on the trade which we do not believe is in either the short term or the long term interests of the Congo either economically, politically or socially."
Traxys CEO Mark Kristoff told TIME that his company suspended trade in the DRC in May 2009 until there is a clearer road map for cooperation among companies, the U.N. and governments for a plan of social action. He added that Traxys' $50 million in trade in the DRC is equivalent to 1% of the company's total business. Afrimex told TIME via e-mail that its last shipment from the DRC took place in September 2008 and all such transactions have since ceased. "Any link between Afrimex's past mineral-trading and armed groups remain wholly unfounded," the statement said. "We remain at a loss to understand why Afrimex is still being mentioned by Global Witness." Global Witness spokesperson Amy Barry said, "Just because they have claimed to stop sourcing at this point doesn't change the fact that they were sourcing during our research. So we still think that the evidence we uncovered is worth bringing to the public's attention."
Other companies were less confrontational. In a statement, Hewlett-Packard said, "We are helping to address this serious concern through voluntary measures. Ensuring that electronics manufacturing does not contribute to human-rights violations in the DRC takes co-operation and commitment within every layer of the supply base."
Some of the companies named in the report defend their business in the DRC by noting that their practices abide by the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct or the ethical principles of the International Tin Research Institute. Global Witness calls for higher standards in these industry guidelines to successfully monitor trade systems in conflict areas. "I don't think there's an obvious or easy answer" to the supply-chain problem, says Global Witness spokesperson Barry. "We are absolutely not calling for companies to pull out because we acknowledge it is a legitimate source of livelihood." The group's chief Congo researcher, Carina Tertsakian, puts it this way: "This is a question of will. If the companies are serious about trading in a way that is clean, they have the means to do it."
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1912594,00.html
When the film Blood Diamond came out in 2006, people were startled at the alleged origins of the precious stones from areas of bloody conflict and began asking whether the jewels on their fingers cost a human life. Will consumers soon find themselves asking similar questions about their cell phones and computers?
In a report released earlier this week, Global Witness claims that multinational companies are furthering a trade in minerals at the heart of the hi-tech industry that feeds the horrendous civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). (Global Witness is the same nongovernmental organization that helped expose the violence that plagues many of the sources of diamonds.) However, the accused companies, with varying degrees of hostility, deny any culpability, saying Global Witness oversimplifies a complex economic process in a chaotic geopolitial setting.
The provinces of North and South Kivu in the eastern DRC are filled with mines of cassiterite, wolframite, coltan and gold - minerals needed to manufacture everything from lightbulbs to laptops, from MP3 players to Playstations. Over the past 12 years of armed conflict in the region, control of these valuable natural resources has allegedly become a lucrative way for warring parties to purchase munitions and fund their fighting. The Global Witness report claims to have followed the supply chain of these minerals from warring parties to middlemen to international buyers.
By the time metals reach electronics companies, they may have changed hands as many as seven times. This means that without a clear supply history, when a consumer sets her cell phone to vibrate, a function enabled through the mineral wolframite, it is virtually impossible for her to know whether she is using wolframite mined in the eastern DRC, the site of horrific fighting and killing. More than 5 million people have been killed since the conflict began in 1996, some through direct abuse, others through the political and economic chaos that the conflict has created. Armed groups frequently force civilians to mine the minerals, extorting taxes and refusing to pay wages. The report quotes one miner from South Kivu: "We are their meat, their animals. We have nothing to say."
According to Global Witness, although the Congolese army and FDLR rebel groups have been warring on opposite sides for years, they are collaborators in the mining effort, at times providing each other with road and airport access and even sharing their spoils. Researchers say they found evidence that the mineral trade is much more extensive and profitable than previously suspected: one Congolese government official reported that at least 90% of all gold exports from the country were undeclared. And the report charges that the failure of foreign governments to crack down on illicit mining and trade has undercut development endeavors undertaken by the international community in the war-torn region.
The study, Faced with a Gun, What Can You Do?, raises questions about the involvement of nearly 240 companies spanning the mineral, metal and technology industries. It specifically fingers four main European and Asian companies as open buyers in this trade: Thailand Smelting and Refining Corp. (owned by British Amalgamated Metal Corp.), British Afrimex, Belgian Trademet and Traxys. And it questions the role of others further down the manufacturing chain, including prominent electronics companies Hewlett-Packard, Nokia, Dell and Motorola. Even though the companies may be acting legally, Global Witness criticizes their lack of due diligence and transparency standards at every level of their supply chain.
British Amalgamated Metal Corp. (AMC) firmly denies the accusations, citing its standing objective to improve visibility so that warring parties do not benefit from trade. "We are disappointed with the number of inaccuracies and omissions in the report and are concerned that all the facts should be properly represented in a balanced way," AMC said. The company statement went on to say, "We are concerned that Global Witness' approach will lead to a de facto ban on the trade which we do not believe is in either the short term or the long term interests of the Congo either economically, politically or socially."
Traxys CEO Mark Kristoff told TIME that his company suspended trade in the DRC in May 2009 until there is a clearer road map for cooperation among companies, the U.N. and governments for a plan of social action. He added that Traxys' $50 million in trade in the DRC is equivalent to 1% of the company's total business. Afrimex told TIME via e-mail that its last shipment from the DRC took place in September 2008 and all such transactions have since ceased. "Any link between Afrimex's past mineral-trading and armed groups remain wholly unfounded," the statement said. "We remain at a loss to understand why Afrimex is still being mentioned by Global Witness." Global Witness spokesperson Amy Barry said, "Just because they have claimed to stop sourcing at this point doesn't change the fact that they were sourcing during our research. So we still think that the evidence we uncovered is worth bringing to the public's attention."
Other companies were less confrontational. In a statement, Hewlett-Packard said, "We are helping to address this serious concern through voluntary measures. Ensuring that electronics manufacturing does not contribute to human-rights violations in the DRC takes co-operation and commitment within every layer of the supply base."
Some of the companies named in the report defend their business in the DRC by noting that their practices abide by the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct or the ethical principles of the International Tin Research Institute. Global Witness calls for higher standards in these industry guidelines to successfully monitor trade systems in conflict areas. "I don't think there's an obvious or easy answer" to the supply-chain problem, says Global Witness spokesperson Barry. "We are absolutely not calling for companies to pull out because we acknowledge it is a legitimate source of livelihood." The group's chief Congo researcher, Carina Tertsakian, puts it this way: "This is a question of will. If the companies are serious about trading in a way that is clean, they have the means to do it."
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1912594,00.html
Friday, June 19, 2009
Silence=Rape
By Jan Goodwin
Last May, 6-year-old Shashir was playing outside her home near Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), when armed militia appeared. The terrified child was carried kicking and screaming into the bush. There, she was pinned down and gang-raped. Sexually savaged and bleeding from multiple wounds, she lay there after the attack, how long no one knows, but she was close to starving when finally found. Her attackers, who'd disappeared back into the bush, wiped out her village as effectively as a biblical plague of locusts.
"This little girl couldn't walk, couldn't talk when she arrived here. Shashir had to be surgically repaired. I don't know if she can be mentally repaired," says Faida Veronique, a 47-year-old cook at Doctors on Call for Service (DOCS), a tented hospital in the eastern city of Goma, who took in the brutalized child.
"Why do they rape a child?" asks Marie-Madeleine Kisoni, a Congolese counselor who works with raped women and children. "We don't understand. There's a spirit of bestiality here now. I've seen 2- and 3-year-olds raped. The rebels want to kill us, but it's more painful to kill the spirit instead."
In the Congo today, age is clearly no protection from rape. A woman named Maria was 70 when the Interahamwe, the Hutu militia that led Rwanda's 1994 genocide and now number between 20,000 and 30,000 of the estimated 140,000 rebels in the DRC, came to her home. "They grabbed me, tied my legs apart like a goat before slaughter, and then raped me, one after the other," she told me. "Then they stuck sticks inside me until I fainted." During the attack Maria's entire family--five sons, three daughters and her husband--were murdered. "War came. I just saw smoke and fire. Then my life and my health were taken away," she says. The tiny septuagenarian with the sunken eyes was left with a massive fistula where her bladder was torn, causing permanent incontinence. She hid in the bush for three years out of fear that the rebels might return, and out of shame over her constantly soiled clothes. Yet Maria was one of the more fortunate ones. She'd finally made it to a hospital. Two months before we met, she had undergone reconstructive surgery. The outcome is uncertain, however, and she still requires a catheter.
Rape has become a defining characteristic of the five-year war in the DRC, says Anneke Van Woudenberg, the Congo specialist for Human Rights Watch. So, too, has mutilation of the victims. "Last year, I was stunned when a 30-year-old woman in North Kivu had her lips and ears cut off and eyes gouged out after she was raped, so she couldn't identify or testify against her attackers. Now, we are seeing more and more such cases," she says. As the rebels constantly seek new ways to terrorize, their barbarity becomes more frenzied.
I, too, was sickened by what I saw and heard. In three decades of covering war, I had never before come across the cases described to me by Congolese doctors, such as gang-rape victims having their labia pierced and then padlocked. "They usually die of massive infection," I was told.
Based on personal testimonies collected by Human Rights Watch, it is estimated that as many as 30 percent of rape victims are sexually tortured and mutilated during the assaults, usually with spears, machetes, sticks or gun barrels thrust into their vaginas. Increasingly, the trigger is being pulled. About 40 percent of rape victims, usually the younger ones, aged 8 to 19, are abducted and forced to become sex slaves. "The country is in an utter state of lawlessness; it's complete anarchy," says Woudenberg. "In this culture of impunity, people know they can get away with anything. Every armed group is equally culpable."
In the Congo, rape is a cheaper weapon of war than bullets. Experts estimate that some 60 percent of all combatants in the DRC are infected with HIV/AIDS. As women rarely have access to expensive antiretroviral drugs, sexual assaults all too often become automatic death sentences. Médecins Sans Frontières operates five health clinics offering antiretrovirals in the conflict zone of northeastern DRC, but many women don't know about the drugs and cannot travel safely to the centers. Moreover, according to Helen O'Neill, a nurse who set up MSF's sexual-violence treatment program, such drugs must be taken within forty-eight to seventy-two hours of the rape to prevent infection. If a woman has been exposed to the virus, the treatment is 80 percent effective. But in the Congo, rape victims who are not captive sex slaves must walk for days or weeks, often with massive injuries, and risk new capture by roving rebel bands, before reaching assistance.
"So far, 30 percent of rape victims being treated at our hospital are infected with HIV/AIDS," says Dr. Denis Mukwege, the French-trained medical director of the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu. "And nearly 50 percent are infected with venereal diseases like syphilis that greatly increase their chances of contracting HIV."
Rape as a weapon of war is as old as war itself. What has changed recently is that sexual violence is no longer considered just a byproduct of conflict but is being viewed as a war crime, says Jessica Neuwirth, president of Equality Now, a New York-based international women's human rights organization. "Rape as a violation of war was codified in the Geneva Convention, but only now is it being taken seriously. But it is still not effectively prosecuted, not proportional to the extent that sexual violence takes place," she says. Armed forces now have a legal obligation to stop rape and hold the offenders accountable. "This is a major shift in consciousness. But it needs to be followed by a major shift in conduct," says Neuwirth.
In the DRC, rape is used to terrorize, humiliate and punish the enemy. Frequently husbands, fathers and children are forced to watch and even participate. Women sexually assaulted by members of one rebel organization are accused of being the wives of that group and raped again as punishment when a new militia takes over the area. "It's happened repeatedly to the women of Shabunda in the far east of the Congo, every time the region has changed hands," says Woudenberg.
Even the camps for internally displaced people are not safe. The barbed-wire encampment in Bunia is home to more than 14,000 people, but enemy militia infiltrate at night. Shortly before I arrived, an 11-year-old girl was dragged off and gang-raped, a not uncommon occurrence. There are more than 3 million internally displaced people made homeless by the war, many of whom have been forced to flee over and over again. UN officers admit they have nowhere near the numbers they need to be effective, or even to stay safe themselves.
"The rebels are all around us here. We don't feel secure and we've seen what these guys do to people, especially to women and girls. Our own people have been killed, after they were horribly tortured," a European UN major told me. "The DRC is the size of Western Europe. We're supposed to have 8,500 troops here, but we've only got 5,000! I was in Bosnia, which is a fraction of the size of the Congo, and we had 68,000 NATO troops, and even that wasn't enough." Patrols of MONUC, the UN's peacekeeping force in the DRC, have refused to pick up wounded rape victims and escort them to medical care when they were afraid they would be outnumbered by nearby rebels.
"People denounce the rapes but do nothing to bring the rebels to justice," says Woudenberg. "There isn't the political will, domestically or internationally, to make it happen. I've never seen anything like this, when war has become this horrible, and human life so undervalued."
Trevor Lowe, spokesperson for the UN World Food Program, echoes this view. "The nature of sexual violence in the DRC conflict is grotesque, completely abnormal," he says. "Babies, children, women--nobody is being spared. For every woman speaking out, there are hundreds who've not yet emerged from the hell. Rape is so stigmatized in the DRC, and people are afraid of reprisals from rebels. It's a complete and utter breakdown of norms. Like Rwanda, only worse." Adds his colleague Christiane Berthiaume, "Never before have we found as many victims of rape in conflict situations as we are discovering in the DRC."
Yet where is the international media coverage? The outrage? The demand for justice?
During the Rwanda genocide, rape as a war crime received extensive international media coverage. Despite initial reports of 250,000 women being sexually assaulted (a third more than there were Tutsi women living in the country at the time), evidence later suggested the total number was closer to one-fifth of that.
In Bosnia, where the European Community Investigative Mission concluded there were some 20,000 victims, reports of systematic rape by the Serbs first made international headlines one year into the war, and remained a major news focus for the remaining three years of the conflict. It was only after the Bosnia war, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague in 1997, that rape was first prosecuted as a crime against humanity. A year later, at the Rwanda tribunal, rape was found to be a form of genocide.
Everyone I spoke with in the DRC and in the international UN, NGO and human rights community said they believe the incidence of rape there greatly exceeds that in both Bosnia and Rwanda, although it will be years before precise figures are available. The systematic nature of the assaults has been amply documented by the UN, humanitarian agencies and human rights organizations. Yet for the most part the media look the other way. As one editor of a national newspaper told me, "It's just another horror in the horror that is Africa." One has to ask, Does this kind of cynicism merely reflect public opinion or help create it?
Says Lowe, "Look at the square footage of Bosnia, a country that is dwarfed by the Congo, and look at the enormous number of reporters who covered Bosnia compared to the DRC. Clearly, Africa doesn't get the same coverage as Europe. The reasons are racial, geopolitical interests, ease of access, etc. The DRC conflict is an extremely dangerous one, which is one reason the press is not there. Selling Africa, and being part of an agency that does it all the time, is difficult. Africa is clearly not a place where the major powers have a lot of interest. The Congo is not on the geopolitical map. And the major-league press follows that geopolitical map." There is also media faddishness, what Lowe refers to as the CNN factor. "If CNN shows up, then other reporters become interested," he says.
Another factor is the complexity of the Congo conflict. In Rwanda, the media were able to present the issues as clear-cut, with the good guys and the bad clearly defined. "People consider the Congo conflict confusing; they label it tribal or ethnic, which is totally wrong," says Woudenberg. "The war in the DRC has been an international war, involving a number of different countries."
Conduct a straw poll among Americans who are usually well informed and few know of the vicious campaign of sexual violence against women in the DRC. Many are even unaware that the country is six years into a brutal conflict, in which up to 4.7 million people have died--the highest number of fatalities in any conflict since World War II. Or that six countries--Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia--have been fighting proxy wars in the DRC, and helping to plunder the country's tremendous mineral wealth to fill their coffers.
The indifference, according to Woudenberg, extends to the arms of government that should be most deeply concerned with the DRC's crisis. "In November I tried to raise the issue with the US Mission to the UN in New York, and they told me fairly point-blank that they were aware rape was going on in the Congo, and it was just not high on their priorities," she says. "I had a similar response from the US State Department."
Meanwhile, a UN Security Council panel has cited eighty-five multinational corporations, including some of the largest US companies in their fields, for their involvement in the illegal exploitation of natural resources from the DRC. The commerce in these "blood" minerals, such as coltan, used in cell phones and laptops, cobalt, copper, gold, diamonds and uranium (Congolese uranium was used in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), drives the conflict. The brutality of the militias--the sexual slavery, transmission of HIV/AIDS through rape, cannibalism, slaughter and starvation, forced recruitment of child soldiers--has routinely been employed to secure access to mining sites or insure a supply of captive labor.
If that isn't enough to awaken the international community's interest, one would think it would be of concern that "blood" business practices also fund terrorism. Lebanese diamond traders benefiting from illegal concessions in the Congo have been tied to the Islamic extremist groups Amal and Hezbollah. According to a UN report, the Lebanese traders, who operate licensed diamond businesses in Antwerp, purchased diamonds from the DRC worth $150 million in 2001 alone. Such linkage between African rebel groups and global terrorist movements is not new. Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front reportedly sold diamonds to Al Qaeda, thus helping to finance both organizations.
The lobbies of the two luxury hotels in Kinshasa, the DRC's capital, are full of elegant, $5,000-a-day corporate lawyers from New York, London and Geneva, and scruffier diamond dealers from Tel Aviv and Antwerp, as they while away the hours waiting for government ministers and senior representatives of armed groups to smooth their way. These institutional fortune-makers are 1,800 miles away from the nightmares of northeastern Congo. Yet they are not so far removed from the atrocities perpetrated there. Rape is a crime of the war they are fueling with their greed.
Today's conflict profiteers are not the first to sponsor a campaign to ransack, rape, pillage and plunder in the Congo. A century ago, Belgium's King Leopold II amassed a fabulous fortune this way. During the monarch's genocidal reign of terror, when villagers couldn't meet his impossibly high quotas harvesting rubber or mining ore, their hands were amputated and women were taken as slaves. By the time he was finished, an estimated 10 million Congolese, half the population, were dead.
Kinshasa's policy-makers, who serve in a government with four vice presidents in a misguided attempt to appease various factions, now claim a new political beginning after the so-called peace accord last year. But there is a "huge and dangerous gap" between what is happening in Kinshasa and what is going on in the northeast, says Irene Khan, Amnesty International's secretary general. "In Kinshasa there is talk of peace and political progress, of regional harmony and democratic elections. But while the newly appointed members of government are wrangling for power and privilege in Kinshasa, in the Kivus and Ituri people are confronted daily with death, plunder and carnage. Mutilations and massacres continue. Rape of women and girls has become a standard tactic of warfare. It is absolutely outrageous that many of the senior members of the government and the political parties they represent are closely linked to the armed groups who are committing these abuses."
At the time of King Leopold's predatory rule, an international Congo reform movement was formed with the support of Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Conrad. It was Conrad who described what was being done as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience." He would recognize what is happening now.
For the sake of 6-year-old Shashir and tens of thousands of girls and women who have been infected with HIV/AIDS, forcibly impregnated or so badly damaged internally they will never be able to have children, and who are so psychologically traumatized they may never recover, we can only hope that a similarly prominent group of today's social commentators will find its conscience and its voice soon.
This article appeared in the March 8, 2004 edition of The Nation.
Last May, 6-year-old Shashir was playing outside her home near Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), when armed militia appeared. The terrified child was carried kicking and screaming into the bush. There, she was pinned down and gang-raped. Sexually savaged and bleeding from multiple wounds, she lay there after the attack, how long no one knows, but she was close to starving when finally found. Her attackers, who'd disappeared back into the bush, wiped out her village as effectively as a biblical plague of locusts.
"This little girl couldn't walk, couldn't talk when she arrived here. Shashir had to be surgically repaired. I don't know if she can be mentally repaired," says Faida Veronique, a 47-year-old cook at Doctors on Call for Service (DOCS), a tented hospital in the eastern city of Goma, who took in the brutalized child.
"Why do they rape a child?" asks Marie-Madeleine Kisoni, a Congolese counselor who works with raped women and children. "We don't understand. There's a spirit of bestiality here now. I've seen 2- and 3-year-olds raped. The rebels want to kill us, but it's more painful to kill the spirit instead."
In the Congo today, age is clearly no protection from rape. A woman named Maria was 70 when the Interahamwe, the Hutu militia that led Rwanda's 1994 genocide and now number between 20,000 and 30,000 of the estimated 140,000 rebels in the DRC, came to her home. "They grabbed me, tied my legs apart like a goat before slaughter, and then raped me, one after the other," she told me. "Then they stuck sticks inside me until I fainted." During the attack Maria's entire family--five sons, three daughters and her husband--were murdered. "War came. I just saw smoke and fire. Then my life and my health were taken away," she says. The tiny septuagenarian with the sunken eyes was left with a massive fistula where her bladder was torn, causing permanent incontinence. She hid in the bush for three years out of fear that the rebels might return, and out of shame over her constantly soiled clothes. Yet Maria was one of the more fortunate ones. She'd finally made it to a hospital. Two months before we met, she had undergone reconstructive surgery. The outcome is uncertain, however, and she still requires a catheter.
Rape has become a defining characteristic of the five-year war in the DRC, says Anneke Van Woudenberg, the Congo specialist for Human Rights Watch. So, too, has mutilation of the victims. "Last year, I was stunned when a 30-year-old woman in North Kivu had her lips and ears cut off and eyes gouged out after she was raped, so she couldn't identify or testify against her attackers. Now, we are seeing more and more such cases," she says. As the rebels constantly seek new ways to terrorize, their barbarity becomes more frenzied.
I, too, was sickened by what I saw and heard. In three decades of covering war, I had never before come across the cases described to me by Congolese doctors, such as gang-rape victims having their labia pierced and then padlocked. "They usually die of massive infection," I was told.
Based on personal testimonies collected by Human Rights Watch, it is estimated that as many as 30 percent of rape victims are sexually tortured and mutilated during the assaults, usually with spears, machetes, sticks or gun barrels thrust into their vaginas. Increasingly, the trigger is being pulled. About 40 percent of rape victims, usually the younger ones, aged 8 to 19, are abducted and forced to become sex slaves. "The country is in an utter state of lawlessness; it's complete anarchy," says Woudenberg. "In this culture of impunity, people know they can get away with anything. Every armed group is equally culpable."
In the Congo, rape is a cheaper weapon of war than bullets. Experts estimate that some 60 percent of all combatants in the DRC are infected with HIV/AIDS. As women rarely have access to expensive antiretroviral drugs, sexual assaults all too often become automatic death sentences. Médecins Sans Frontières operates five health clinics offering antiretrovirals in the conflict zone of northeastern DRC, but many women don't know about the drugs and cannot travel safely to the centers. Moreover, according to Helen O'Neill, a nurse who set up MSF's sexual-violence treatment program, such drugs must be taken within forty-eight to seventy-two hours of the rape to prevent infection. If a woman has been exposed to the virus, the treatment is 80 percent effective. But in the Congo, rape victims who are not captive sex slaves must walk for days or weeks, often with massive injuries, and risk new capture by roving rebel bands, before reaching assistance.
"So far, 30 percent of rape victims being treated at our hospital are infected with HIV/AIDS," says Dr. Denis Mukwege, the French-trained medical director of the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu. "And nearly 50 percent are infected with venereal diseases like syphilis that greatly increase their chances of contracting HIV."
Rape as a weapon of war is as old as war itself. What has changed recently is that sexual violence is no longer considered just a byproduct of conflict but is being viewed as a war crime, says Jessica Neuwirth, president of Equality Now, a New York-based international women's human rights organization. "Rape as a violation of war was codified in the Geneva Convention, but only now is it being taken seriously. But it is still not effectively prosecuted, not proportional to the extent that sexual violence takes place," she says. Armed forces now have a legal obligation to stop rape and hold the offenders accountable. "This is a major shift in consciousness. But it needs to be followed by a major shift in conduct," says Neuwirth.
In the DRC, rape is used to terrorize, humiliate and punish the enemy. Frequently husbands, fathers and children are forced to watch and even participate. Women sexually assaulted by members of one rebel organization are accused of being the wives of that group and raped again as punishment when a new militia takes over the area. "It's happened repeatedly to the women of Shabunda in the far east of the Congo, every time the region has changed hands," says Woudenberg.
Even the camps for internally displaced people are not safe. The barbed-wire encampment in Bunia is home to more than 14,000 people, but enemy militia infiltrate at night. Shortly before I arrived, an 11-year-old girl was dragged off and gang-raped, a not uncommon occurrence. There are more than 3 million internally displaced people made homeless by the war, many of whom have been forced to flee over and over again. UN officers admit they have nowhere near the numbers they need to be effective, or even to stay safe themselves.
"The rebels are all around us here. We don't feel secure and we've seen what these guys do to people, especially to women and girls. Our own people have been killed, after they were horribly tortured," a European UN major told me. "The DRC is the size of Western Europe. We're supposed to have 8,500 troops here, but we've only got 5,000! I was in Bosnia, which is a fraction of the size of the Congo, and we had 68,000 NATO troops, and even that wasn't enough." Patrols of MONUC, the UN's peacekeeping force in the DRC, have refused to pick up wounded rape victims and escort them to medical care when they were afraid they would be outnumbered by nearby rebels.
"People denounce the rapes but do nothing to bring the rebels to justice," says Woudenberg. "There isn't the political will, domestically or internationally, to make it happen. I've never seen anything like this, when war has become this horrible, and human life so undervalued."
Trevor Lowe, spokesperson for the UN World Food Program, echoes this view. "The nature of sexual violence in the DRC conflict is grotesque, completely abnormal," he says. "Babies, children, women--nobody is being spared. For every woman speaking out, there are hundreds who've not yet emerged from the hell. Rape is so stigmatized in the DRC, and people are afraid of reprisals from rebels. It's a complete and utter breakdown of norms. Like Rwanda, only worse." Adds his colleague Christiane Berthiaume, "Never before have we found as many victims of rape in conflict situations as we are discovering in the DRC."
Yet where is the international media coverage? The outrage? The demand for justice?
During the Rwanda genocide, rape as a war crime received extensive international media coverage. Despite initial reports of 250,000 women being sexually assaulted (a third more than there were Tutsi women living in the country at the time), evidence later suggested the total number was closer to one-fifth of that.
In Bosnia, where the European Community Investigative Mission concluded there were some 20,000 victims, reports of systematic rape by the Serbs first made international headlines one year into the war, and remained a major news focus for the remaining three years of the conflict. It was only after the Bosnia war, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague in 1997, that rape was first prosecuted as a crime against humanity. A year later, at the Rwanda tribunal, rape was found to be a form of genocide.
Everyone I spoke with in the DRC and in the international UN, NGO and human rights community said they believe the incidence of rape there greatly exceeds that in both Bosnia and Rwanda, although it will be years before precise figures are available. The systematic nature of the assaults has been amply documented by the UN, humanitarian agencies and human rights organizations. Yet for the most part the media look the other way. As one editor of a national newspaper told me, "It's just another horror in the horror that is Africa." One has to ask, Does this kind of cynicism merely reflect public opinion or help create it?
Says Lowe, "Look at the square footage of Bosnia, a country that is dwarfed by the Congo, and look at the enormous number of reporters who covered Bosnia compared to the DRC. Clearly, Africa doesn't get the same coverage as Europe. The reasons are racial, geopolitical interests, ease of access, etc. The DRC conflict is an extremely dangerous one, which is one reason the press is not there. Selling Africa, and being part of an agency that does it all the time, is difficult. Africa is clearly not a place where the major powers have a lot of interest. The Congo is not on the geopolitical map. And the major-league press follows that geopolitical map." There is also media faddishness, what Lowe refers to as the CNN factor. "If CNN shows up, then other reporters become interested," he says.
Another factor is the complexity of the Congo conflict. In Rwanda, the media were able to present the issues as clear-cut, with the good guys and the bad clearly defined. "People consider the Congo conflict confusing; they label it tribal or ethnic, which is totally wrong," says Woudenberg. "The war in the DRC has been an international war, involving a number of different countries."
Conduct a straw poll among Americans who are usually well informed and few know of the vicious campaign of sexual violence against women in the DRC. Many are even unaware that the country is six years into a brutal conflict, in which up to 4.7 million people have died--the highest number of fatalities in any conflict since World War II. Or that six countries--Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia--have been fighting proxy wars in the DRC, and helping to plunder the country's tremendous mineral wealth to fill their coffers.
The indifference, according to Woudenberg, extends to the arms of government that should be most deeply concerned with the DRC's crisis. "In November I tried to raise the issue with the US Mission to the UN in New York, and they told me fairly point-blank that they were aware rape was going on in the Congo, and it was just not high on their priorities," she says. "I had a similar response from the US State Department."
Meanwhile, a UN Security Council panel has cited eighty-five multinational corporations, including some of the largest US companies in their fields, for their involvement in the illegal exploitation of natural resources from the DRC. The commerce in these "blood" minerals, such as coltan, used in cell phones and laptops, cobalt, copper, gold, diamonds and uranium (Congolese uranium was used in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), drives the conflict. The brutality of the militias--the sexual slavery, transmission of HIV/AIDS through rape, cannibalism, slaughter and starvation, forced recruitment of child soldiers--has routinely been employed to secure access to mining sites or insure a supply of captive labor.
If that isn't enough to awaken the international community's interest, one would think it would be of concern that "blood" business practices also fund terrorism. Lebanese diamond traders benefiting from illegal concessions in the Congo have been tied to the Islamic extremist groups Amal and Hezbollah. According to a UN report, the Lebanese traders, who operate licensed diamond businesses in Antwerp, purchased diamonds from the DRC worth $150 million in 2001 alone. Such linkage between African rebel groups and global terrorist movements is not new. Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front reportedly sold diamonds to Al Qaeda, thus helping to finance both organizations.
The lobbies of the two luxury hotels in Kinshasa, the DRC's capital, are full of elegant, $5,000-a-day corporate lawyers from New York, London and Geneva, and scruffier diamond dealers from Tel Aviv and Antwerp, as they while away the hours waiting for government ministers and senior representatives of armed groups to smooth their way. These institutional fortune-makers are 1,800 miles away from the nightmares of northeastern Congo. Yet they are not so far removed from the atrocities perpetrated there. Rape is a crime of the war they are fueling with their greed.
Today's conflict profiteers are not the first to sponsor a campaign to ransack, rape, pillage and plunder in the Congo. A century ago, Belgium's King Leopold II amassed a fabulous fortune this way. During the monarch's genocidal reign of terror, when villagers couldn't meet his impossibly high quotas harvesting rubber or mining ore, their hands were amputated and women were taken as slaves. By the time he was finished, an estimated 10 million Congolese, half the population, were dead.
Kinshasa's policy-makers, who serve in a government with four vice presidents in a misguided attempt to appease various factions, now claim a new political beginning after the so-called peace accord last year. But there is a "huge and dangerous gap" between what is happening in Kinshasa and what is going on in the northeast, says Irene Khan, Amnesty International's secretary general. "In Kinshasa there is talk of peace and political progress, of regional harmony and democratic elections. But while the newly appointed members of government are wrangling for power and privilege in Kinshasa, in the Kivus and Ituri people are confronted daily with death, plunder and carnage. Mutilations and massacres continue. Rape of women and girls has become a standard tactic of warfare. It is absolutely outrageous that many of the senior members of the government and the political parties they represent are closely linked to the armed groups who are committing these abuses."
At the time of King Leopold's predatory rule, an international Congo reform movement was formed with the support of Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Conrad. It was Conrad who described what was being done as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience." He would recognize what is happening now.
For the sake of 6-year-old Shashir and tens of thousands of girls and women who have been infected with HIV/AIDS, forcibly impregnated or so badly damaged internally they will never be able to have children, and who are so psychologically traumatized they may never recover, we can only hope that a similarly prominent group of today's social commentators will find its conscience and its voice soon.
This article appeared in the March 8, 2004 edition of The Nation.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Monday, June 15, 2009
Sponsor a Woman in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
With Your Help Today Women for Women International Can Continue Its Success in the DR Congo
We are making enormous strides in DR Congo, but our work is far from done. The women are filled with hope that you will help them continue to rebuild their lives. You're not only changing the course of one woman's life – you're support and generosity improves entire villages and communities!
In the last two years, we have expanded our program to reach remote villages and have now served over 24,000 women and 113,756 family and community members since our start. Women for Women International program in DR Congo is working:
88% report having improvement in personal and family health
86% report having improved their economic situation
88% of women expressed increased self-confidence
83% report having a greater knowledge of their rights
88% expressed being more active in their community
87% report being more active in family decision making.
It is only $27/month to change the life of a Congolese sister!
So, how is the $27 used?
$10=monthly cash for sponsored sister
$7=vocational training (educational classes, basket weaving etc.)
$5=savings account for sponsored sister
$5=administrative costs
SPONSOR A SISTER TODAY!
We are making enormous strides in DR Congo, but our work is far from done. The women are filled with hope that you will help them continue to rebuild their lives. You're not only changing the course of one woman's life – you're support and generosity improves entire villages and communities!
In the last two years, we have expanded our program to reach remote villages and have now served over 24,000 women and 113,756 family and community members since our start. Women for Women International program in DR Congo is working:
88% report having improvement in personal and family health
86% report having improved their economic situation
88% of women expressed increased self-confidence
83% report having a greater knowledge of their rights
88% expressed being more active in their community
87% report being more active in family decision making.
It is only $27/month to change the life of a Congolese sister!
So, how is the $27 used?
$10=monthly cash for sponsored sister
$7=vocational training (educational classes, basket weaving etc.)
$5=savings account for sponsored sister
$5=administrative costs
SPONSOR A SISTER TODAY!
Friday, June 12, 2009
A Congo Journey by Makeda Crane
Her father taught his students to ‘value, study and honor their collective history,’ and his daughter to follow her heart. That legacy took the author on a journey to the Congo, where six million have died without shocking western sensibilities. ‘I vowed that when I returned home I would talk and write about the Congo in as many public forums as possible. To advocate for the Congolese, I must teach friends, family and others that the deaths of millions is a global issue that cannot be ignored.’
‘How many Congolese lives had been sacrificed to produce the coltan in my cell phone?’
On the weekend after Thanksgiving, I went home to Brooklyn, N.Y., to visit my father - the man whose height and stature always felt like a wall of protection between me and the world. As I sat beside his hospital bed in these last few months of his life, I had watched the body of this once robust, 6-foot-2, 240-pound man slowly transform into a wilted flower.
Now he was down to about 130 pounds. I whispered in his ear, ‘Daddy, do you remember me telling you that I’m going to the Congo’? He nodded back, but I wasn’t sure if it was a mere nod of recognition or true comprehension.
My personal connection to the Congo had been forged by my father, Ernest Crane. Born and raised in Harlem, he would often say, ‘I feel like a walking history book,’ as he recalled the important moments he participated in and lived through: Jim Crow, the March on Washington, Vietnam, Watergate. He often credited ‘Mama Lilla,’ his grandmother, with giving him a love of history. She would tell him bedtime stories of her parent’s lives as slaves - this was the root of his interest in his African ancestors.
It is no wonder that he was a lifelong student of liberation movements in America and abroad, and an avid reader of African history. Later, as a professor of psychology and African-American history, he taught students to value, study and honor their collective history.
‘How can 6 million people die and the world stands by, in silence?’
I had never been to the Congo but had been transplanted there by my father’s accounts of its history. He spoke of the Congo as a beautiful, lush country that had been sought after, first by Portugal and Belgium, then by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. I recall him saying, ‘The Congo is one of the most underreported massacres in history, how can 6 million people die and the world stands by, in silence?’ He spoke of the courage of Patrice Lumumba, a personal hero of his, who stood up against Belgian colonial rule.
I got closer to the Congo after watching a news program on which a guest spoke about the plight of the Congolese people. Later, flipping through the channels on my TV, I accidentally turned to a program about the systematic rape of women in Eastern Congo. I found myself drawn to stories about the area, and even though these were coincidences, there were too many for me to ignore the call.
I felt compelled to act and battled with myself about how - and if - I could make a difference from thousands of miles away. It was increasingly difficult to continue living the awful cliche of the sympathizing American who talks about the world’s suffering over a chai latte, but goes home and does nothing.
‘As I met the eyes of an armed soldier, I felt my stomach drop.’
Instinctively, I realized the hidden message in my father’s words: ‘Makeda, always follow your heart.’ It was his love of freedom and dignity that compelled me to ask 150 people for $33 so I could go to Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, as an independent journalist through Friends of the Congo, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization.
My father passed away on Jan. 3, and two days later, I left for the Congo. As I crossed the border into Goma and met the eyes of an armed soldier, I felt my stomach drop, as if I were on a roller coaster that had just made a sharp plunge. The nearly 6 million people who had died in the 12 years of conflict seemed to loom over the dusty streets of Goma and its people.
At Goma’s main hospital, I looked into the pupils of a woman who represented the hundreds of thousands of women who had been systematically raped by foreign troops and Congolese militiamen; I sought evidence that she still had breath in her body. I felt a bond with her that surpassed sympathy; I knew her struggle was my own.
I listened like an empty vessel to a Congolese trader of coltan (a mineral vital to cell phones and other electronics) say, ‘The voice of a poor man doesn’t have any importance.’ He spoke of U.S., Britain, Rwandan and Ugandan companies profiting from the unregulated mining and selling of Congo’s vast mineral deposits, and I wondered: How many Congolese lives had been sacrificed to produce the coltan in my cell phone?
At refugee camps, I witnessed the inadequate food rations dispensed to the refugees, while in the distance were vast green forests. When I asked children whose villages had been destroyed in the conflict how long they had been in the camps, many couldn’t recall living anywhere else.
‘He spoke of U.S., Britain, Rwandan and Ugandan companies profiting from the unregulated mining and selling of Congo’s vast mineral deposits.’
As I walked through the last refugee camp on the line of conflict between Rwandan troops and Congolese rebels, I again felt the uneasiness that had accompanied my first steps onto Congo soil. I pulled out my father’s picture and looked at his smile, which assured me that I was protected.
Someone once told me: ‘People rarely take risks because they want to, but they take a leap of faith because of the persistent yearning that can only be resolved through action.’ I knew this trip was the start of an intimate relationship with the Congo.
Paying the highest tribute to my father, I vowed that when I returned home I would talk and write about the Congo in as many public forums as possible. To advocate for the Congolese, I must teach friends, family and others that the deaths of millions is a global issue that cannot be ignored. And people must be told that the root cause of the conflict is not ethnic division between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes, but control of the Congo’s natural resources.
I will continue to act on behalf of those who have been silenced, grabbing the torch that was given to me, and keeping my father’s legacy in front of me as a guide in creating my own.
—
Makeda Crane, who works in The Baltimore Sun’s editorial department, is a graduate of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She plans to pursue a law degree, specializing in human rights and international advocacy issues.
Source: blackagendareport.com
This article originally appeared in the Baltimore Sun 25 February, 2009
.
‘How many Congolese lives had been sacrificed to produce the coltan in my cell phone?’
On the weekend after Thanksgiving, I went home to Brooklyn, N.Y., to visit my father - the man whose height and stature always felt like a wall of protection between me and the world. As I sat beside his hospital bed in these last few months of his life, I had watched the body of this once robust, 6-foot-2, 240-pound man slowly transform into a wilted flower.
Now he was down to about 130 pounds. I whispered in his ear, ‘Daddy, do you remember me telling you that I’m going to the Congo’? He nodded back, but I wasn’t sure if it was a mere nod of recognition or true comprehension.
My personal connection to the Congo had been forged by my father, Ernest Crane. Born and raised in Harlem, he would often say, ‘I feel like a walking history book,’ as he recalled the important moments he participated in and lived through: Jim Crow, the March on Washington, Vietnam, Watergate. He often credited ‘Mama Lilla,’ his grandmother, with giving him a love of history. She would tell him bedtime stories of her parent’s lives as slaves - this was the root of his interest in his African ancestors.
It is no wonder that he was a lifelong student of liberation movements in America and abroad, and an avid reader of African history. Later, as a professor of psychology and African-American history, he taught students to value, study and honor their collective history.
‘How can 6 million people die and the world stands by, in silence?’
I had never been to the Congo but had been transplanted there by my father’s accounts of its history. He spoke of the Congo as a beautiful, lush country that had been sought after, first by Portugal and Belgium, then by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. I recall him saying, ‘The Congo is one of the most underreported massacres in history, how can 6 million people die and the world stands by, in silence?’ He spoke of the courage of Patrice Lumumba, a personal hero of his, who stood up against Belgian colonial rule.
I got closer to the Congo after watching a news program on which a guest spoke about the plight of the Congolese people. Later, flipping through the channels on my TV, I accidentally turned to a program about the systematic rape of women in Eastern Congo. I found myself drawn to stories about the area, and even though these were coincidences, there were too many for me to ignore the call.
I felt compelled to act and battled with myself about how - and if - I could make a difference from thousands of miles away. It was increasingly difficult to continue living the awful cliche of the sympathizing American who talks about the world’s suffering over a chai latte, but goes home and does nothing.
‘As I met the eyes of an armed soldier, I felt my stomach drop.’
Instinctively, I realized the hidden message in my father’s words: ‘Makeda, always follow your heart.’ It was his love of freedom and dignity that compelled me to ask 150 people for $33 so I could go to Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, as an independent journalist through Friends of the Congo, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization.
My father passed away on Jan. 3, and two days later, I left for the Congo. As I crossed the border into Goma and met the eyes of an armed soldier, I felt my stomach drop, as if I were on a roller coaster that had just made a sharp plunge. The nearly 6 million people who had died in the 12 years of conflict seemed to loom over the dusty streets of Goma and its people.
At Goma’s main hospital, I looked into the pupils of a woman who represented the hundreds of thousands of women who had been systematically raped by foreign troops and Congolese militiamen; I sought evidence that she still had breath in her body. I felt a bond with her that surpassed sympathy; I knew her struggle was my own.
I listened like an empty vessel to a Congolese trader of coltan (a mineral vital to cell phones and other electronics) say, ‘The voice of a poor man doesn’t have any importance.’ He spoke of U.S., Britain, Rwandan and Ugandan companies profiting from the unregulated mining and selling of Congo’s vast mineral deposits, and I wondered: How many Congolese lives had been sacrificed to produce the coltan in my cell phone?
At refugee camps, I witnessed the inadequate food rations dispensed to the refugees, while in the distance were vast green forests. When I asked children whose villages had been destroyed in the conflict how long they had been in the camps, many couldn’t recall living anywhere else.
‘He spoke of U.S., Britain, Rwandan and Ugandan companies profiting from the unregulated mining and selling of Congo’s vast mineral deposits.’
As I walked through the last refugee camp on the line of conflict between Rwandan troops and Congolese rebels, I again felt the uneasiness that had accompanied my first steps onto Congo soil. I pulled out my father’s picture and looked at his smile, which assured me that I was protected.
Someone once told me: ‘People rarely take risks because they want to, but they take a leap of faith because of the persistent yearning that can only be resolved through action.’ I knew this trip was the start of an intimate relationship with the Congo.
Paying the highest tribute to my father, I vowed that when I returned home I would talk and write about the Congo in as many public forums as possible. To advocate for the Congolese, I must teach friends, family and others that the deaths of millions is a global issue that cannot be ignored. And people must be told that the root cause of the conflict is not ethnic division between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes, but control of the Congo’s natural resources.
I will continue to act on behalf of those who have been silenced, grabbing the torch that was given to me, and keeping my father’s legacy in front of me as a guide in creating my own.
—
Makeda Crane, who works in The Baltimore Sun’s editorial department, is a graduate of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She plans to pursue a law degree, specializing in human rights and international advocacy issues.
Source: blackagendareport.com
This article originally appeared in the Baltimore Sun 25 February, 2009
.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Titus 3:14
For our people should not live unproductive lives.
They must learn to do good by helping others who have urgent needs.
THE CONGO NEEDS YOUR HELP TODAY!!!
DONATE NOW!
They must learn to do good by helping others who have urgent needs.
THE CONGO NEEDS YOUR HELP TODAY!!!
DONATE NOW!
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