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I. Introduction - Violence in the Congo

By PWPP - Christy Gillmore November, 12, 2010 02:24:00

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Flickr image by US Army Africa

Just about every organization working on human rights has dedicated significant time and resources to raising awareness and providing relief to the people caught in the midst of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The conflict has made headlines in most major global news sources. According to most sources, 5.5 million people have died since the beginning of the war in 1994 and brutal rape is used as a weapon of destruction as if it were an AK-47. To understand the devastating conflict, PWPP takes a look at the Congo’s historical, political, social and environmental context.

Based on the natural resources available, the Democratic Republic of Congo should be one of the richest places on earth. It has an estimated $300 billion worth in resources, including gold, diamonds, cobalt, timber, copper, tin, and coltan. Many of these minerals – namely tin, tantalum, and tungsten- are essential components in our electronic devices- from cell phones to NASA rockets. 80 percent of the world’s coltan reserves lie in Congo.(1)

Instead of prospering, however, the Congo is plagued by war and violence, with rebel and para-military groups committing atrocious crimes against civilians, especially women. Human rights groups have reported countless acts of violence. Kathleen Kern, of the Christian Peacemaker Team, describes a massacre in a village near Goma, where the Interahamwe (the group who had carried out the genocide in Rwanda in 1994) used machetes and burned their victims instead of shooting them so that the nearby United Nations (UN) peacekeeping team would not hear. Kern recounts the pictures she saw of “…women who had been shot in the vagina, who had had salt rubbed in their eyes until they were blind (and thus could not identify their assailants), who had been burned or had limbs amputated after being raped.”(2) The use of children as soldiers is also very prominent. A 2009 United Nations (UN) report found that from February 1 to April 29, 2009, there were 911 children found to have been taken or coerced to join militias like the FDLR (Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda) and Mai-Mai groups.(3) The UN has been overwhelmed by the atrocities in the Congo, and recently failed to stop the mass rape of women from a village 20 miles from a UN base. Bukavu, in eastern Congo, has been labeled the “rape capital” where the atrocities are seemingly out of control. More than 15,000 rapes were reported in the Congo in the last year.

References:

1. Sharife, Khadija
2008 DRCongo: the heavy price of the world's high-tech. New African, May. General OneFile.http://goddard40.clarku.edu:2742/gps/start.do?prodId=IPS&userGroupName=mlin_c_clarkunv, accessed November 27, 2009

2. Kern, Kathleen
2001 The Human Cost of Cheap Cell Phones. In A Game As Old As Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption. S. Hiatt, ed. Pp. 93-112. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

3. United Nations Security Council
2009 Interim Report of the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, May 11 2009. 27. United Nations.