6 Degrees of Separation: Congo, Sexual Violence and You
Return of clash eludes hope of peace and prosperity in ravaged Congo
Freedom of Speech vs Freedom To Incite Violence (and Death)
Global Burden of Armed Violence
Children of Congo: From war to witches
One of the things we can appreciate when we start to see the world as one single interconnected whole is the sometimes uncanny way in which we are all fundamentally connected. A previous post on another blog ("Violence Against Women In Different Lights Around The World") discusses the omnipresence of sexual violence and abuse endured by women from all areas of this planet. In some recent online research I discovered a particularly tortuous and torturous path of connection between the ubiquitous mobile phone and what may well be some of the most extreme sexual violence being perpetrated against women at this time. Although we may perceive that any specific instance of such an injustice or crime is a single entity it is always an instantiation of the wider matrix of human psychological and sexual power-plays. This blog is an effort to focus on the wider connectivity of the problems but a general understanding is only truly facilitated by the study of specific instances and their unique signature of behaviour or activity. I hope to return at a later point to more the general psychological, cultural and sexual symmetries at play here but this article is on something of which I feel we should all be very, painfully, aware.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is surely one of the most beautiful places on earth - lush green jungles, fertile soils and an abundance of the impressive and exotic wildlife peculiar to Africa. The Congo is also the source of some of the most extreme sexual violence in the world. If you feel you can deal with these issues - please read the details in this article about the violence: Sexual Violence in Eastern Congo - (Author: JEFFREY GETTLEMAN Source: New York Times). That article was from October 2007 but the violence, vis-a-vis war, in that country is currently flaring up again and there is a serious humanitarian crisis unfolding. Listening to the Congo Crisis: BBC World Service late last night I was struck by the apparent heavy involvement of the Congolese army in the current wave of looting, rape and murder.
The great twist in this perhaps common human tale of warfare and cruelty is that the war is likely being fought over the rich mineral wealth of the Congo - diamonds, oil, gold and pretty well every mineral on the periodic table exist in abundance in the Congo. The clincher here for our tale of interconnection, mobile phones and human suffering is coltan, an ore from which minerals essential for mobile phones and some computer components are extracted. I consciously choose not to explore the politics and Machiavellian manoeuvres underlying this conflict's professed motivations as they appear to be predominantly lies and selfishness. The fact is that money from big business is funding the rebel force in this conflict, through backing from Rwanda and to the ends of capitalising the natural mineral wealth of the Congo. How serious is the war ? According to the Times Online, "the area is already deemed the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. Between 1998 and 2003 an estimated 3.8 million people lost their lives in the Second Congo War, and the region looks to be spiralling back into similar crisis".
You have to wonder how many people are aware that the world's insatiable desire for minerals for producing the hardware required for communication technologies (including those through which you are encountering this information here and now) are driving conflicts which harbour some of the most abhorrent sexual violence ever to have occurred. In a world without borders, where information and money flow fluidly across continents and we are all fundamentally connected in a more self-conscious way than ever before - just how should we feel about the fact that our interconnectivity may in some ways be at the price of the innocence and health of so many girls and women in a distant African conflict few of us would even have heard of before the last week's news reports ?
In a global economy where borders, perpetrators, spectators and motives all begin to merge and dissolve into one amorphous mass, responsibility remains and stands as one unquestionable thing that we all share. Ultimately, we are all responsible and if by this we mean "not guilty" we are all at least potentially tarred by the sin of reticence to acknowledge the existence of or act against such horror. If a mobile phone is a now an essential fashion accessory, it may now also be an accessory to rape and murder. Caveat Emptor.
Here is a photogallery from the New York Times showing some of the hospital patients and related scenes with information. The Panzi Hospital's website is located here. If there is some way you could possibly help them, please consider doing so. info@panzihospitalbukavu.com. Some of Medicin Sans Frontieres work in this area, located here. An organisation dedicated to this, and related, issues: Heal Africa. Human Rights Watch report on the sexual violence in Eastern Congo. Peacewomen.org's survivor testimonies (2002). UNICEF report on sexual violence against women and children in the Democratic Republic of Congo; UNICEF Child Alert on DRC. In Focus: Congo's Bloody Coltan (a short documentary on YouTube about the mining in DRC).
This article originally published here on Issues Beyond Borders group blog. (Photos: Hazel Thompson, Source: The New York Times)
