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32 Colleen Freeman, phone and email interviews, December 2005-Janury 2006. Freeman worked with Friends of the Earth prior to taking a job with RAID. See also the report Five Years On: A Review of the OECD Guidelines and National Contact Points, September 22, 2005, www.oecdwatch.org/docs/OECD_Watch_5_Years_On.pdf. I contacted the US companies mentioned in the third UN report. Two of them, Cabot and Kemet, supplied links to web pages responding to charges that they had profited form illegally obtain coltan. Cabot’s page ha a link to a PDF file stating, “Cabot will no purchase any tantalum supplies from any unlawful source in any part of the world.” However, the 2001 UN Panel of Experts reports noted, “In fact, no coltan exits from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo without benefiting either the rebel group[s] or foreign armies.” During the period covered by the report, 60-70% of the coltan in eastern Congo was mined under the surveillance of the Rwandan military, using the forced labor of prisoners. George W. Bush’s Secretary of Energy (appointed in 2005), Samuel Bodman, was CEO and chair of Cabot Corp. in 1997-2001, when large quantities of illicit coltan from Congo hit the market and Cabot allegedly acquired them. 33 RAID, “Unanswered Questions” report, April 2004. Human Rights Watch echoes RAID’s final suggestion in the report, writing, “The international community may want to consider a permanent roster of experts who can investigate these issues throughout the world, rather than ad hoc panels.” Arvind Ganesan and Alex Vines, “Engine of War: Resources, Greed and the Predatory State,” www.hrw.org/wr2k4/14.htm. 34 For more on this point, see www.raid-uk.org/news.htm 35 Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib scandals in the American media, cited CPT as a source in his May 5, 2004, New Yorker article “Chain of Command.” After the kidnapping of four CPTers in Baghdad, Hersh told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman that the work of CPT was “cutting edge.” www.DemocracyNow.org/article.pl?sid=05//11/30/153252. Kathleen Kern has worked with Christian Peacemaker Teams since 1993. CPT provides organizational support to persons committed to faith-based nonviolent alternatives in situations where lethal conflict is an immediate reality or is supported by public policy (see www.cpt.org). However, teams in Haiti, Chiapas and other locations have found that once the risk of lethal physical violence ends, the economic violence cemented in place by the corporatocracy can cause as much, if not more, suffering. Kern has served on assignments in Haiti, Palestine, Chiapas, South Dakota, Colombia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She was a member of a fact-finding delegation to the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo in autumn 2005, where she gathered information that appears in this article. * * * * Reprinted with permission of the publisher. From A Game as Old as Empire: The secret world of economic hit men and the web of global corruption, © 2007 by Steven Hiatt, ed. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, CA. All rights reserved. www.bkconnection.com * * * * Notice of any transcription errors should be sent to Rady Ananda at j30rady@yahoo.com. Her blogs also address religious, gender, sexual and racial equality, as well as environmental issues; and are sprinkled with book and film reviews on various topics. She spent most of her working life as a legal investigator for private lawyers, and five years as an editor. She currently serves as a senior editor at OpEdNews.
Thanks GN Be sure to read DR Congo: Peace Accord Fails to End Killing of Civilians and take action. by
Rady Ananda (133 articles, 300 quicklinks, 38 diaries, 1222 comments)
on Thursday, July 24, 2008 at 11:07:16 PM
I have achieved nothing of consequence apart from raising children in a way that they would excel where I failed. And they are on good tracks.
The Entire Picture And Overall Costs? How about the damage to the environment, the massacre of wildlife, the rape of the planet. All of this for greed and nothing but greed. What are fututre generations going to think of us ? by
ramsheyi (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 641 comments)
on Friday, July 25, 2008 at 7:17:05 AM
Forget about wildlife think about the cost to women and children I am ready to take an AK57 to every one of my beloved gorillas if it would make it all STOP! Conservation is a front for the resource wars in DRC and elsewhere in Africa. by
Georgianne Nienaber (145 articles, 46 quicklinks, 13 diaries, 337 comments)
on Friday, July 25, 2008 at 10:20:09 AM
Thanks Georgianne and Rady! I've never had a cell phone but I do have a computer. How many people died so that I could post this comment? Well, it had better be a darned good comment then. I just joined Friends of the Congo and sent them a donation. I hope everyone reading this will do the same--it is the very least that we can do to begin to atone for the needless misery and death that fuels our materialistic lifestyles. Some animal rights activists say that anyone who wants to eat an animal should have to kill that animal themself. Maybe anyone who wants a cell phone should have to kill an African child themself before being allowed to buy it. There are some people on Care2 who constantly question why I describe myself as an anti-civilizationist. They should visit a few African villages untouched by war, and then visit the DRC to see what civilization brings with it. Anyone else remember a 1947 seven song from Danny Kaye and the Andrews Sisters called "Bongo Bongo Bongo"? Google it, read the lyrics, and listen to it again. They had it right. We've known it all along. by
Mark E. Smith (21 articles, 30 quicklinks, 100 diaries, 1325 comments)
on Friday, July 25, 2008 at 4:00:07 PM
Bongo bongo bongo, I don't wanna leave the Congo http://www.lyricstime.com/the-andrews-sisters-civilization-bongo-bongo-bongo-lyrics.html Civilization (Bongo, Bongo, Bongo) Bingo, bangle, bungle, he's so happy in the jungle, he refuse to go LISTEN to a version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MTGDncw5fo by
Rady Ananda (133 articles, 300 quicklinks, 38 diaries, 1222 comments)
on Friday, July 25, 2008 at 4:58:05 PM
Dian Fossey First, thanks for helping out Friends of Congo. Dian Fossey's favorite song was Bongo Bongo. She had an old reel-to-reel (battery powered) that she would crank up in her tent at Karisoke. Dian understood very well what was happening, and if you analyze her writings carefully, she predicts the current situation in Congo and elsewhere in Africa. Most people don't realize that conservation organizations of that time were in overdrive to discredit her, right up to the highest levels of the State Department. The movie, Gorillas in the Mist, is a complete fabrication, and National Geographic as well as conservation organizations "consulted" on the production to ensure that the truth was not told. Unfortunately, conservation organizations have wrapped themselves in her name and a distorted version of Dian's vision. Her biggest fear was that the gorillas would be brokered for multi-national interests. by
Georgianne Nienaber (145 articles, 46 quicklinks, 13 diaries, 337 comments)
on Friday, July 25, 2008 at 7:50:29 PM
The bottom-line problem... The bottom-line problem is not the that companies (multi- or single country) seek and mine coltan from areas of Congo and elsewhere in Africa, but rather that governments own or confiscate the land and then deal with the companies, or take over the mining operations themselves, sometimes even using forced rather than hired workers. There is no private property in that part of the world - or if there is it is only for those who are part of the government or friends of those who are part of it. There are no individuals as property owners negotiating with others who own companies, each for their own mutual benefit, with the coltan being the value sought by the companies and money or other trade value sought by the landowners. While the governments in industrialized countries are delayed a bit by trappings of legality before confiscating property they covet for some purpose, those in power in most of Africa just use assorted means of physical violence to accomplish the same thing. There is no free-market in this, or actually any, part of the world but its consequences are the most colorful here - if one thinks of the color of blood resulting from the inevitable violence of such a situation. by
Kitty Antonik Wakfer (24 articles, 6 quicklinks, 8 diaries, 136 comments)
on Friday, July 25, 2008 at 6:52:05 PM
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