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General News    H2'ed 7/24/08

The Human Cost of Cheap Cell Phones

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For many Congolese women, rape is only the beginning of their trauma. Their assailants infect from one-fourth to one-third of the women with HIV, and often rape the women in front of their husbands and children. The husbands or husbands’ families then view the women as ‘contaminated,’ even when they do not contract a disease, and drive them and their children out of the village. Sometimes they tell us the women that may stay if they kill children born of the rape. Those not killed often become street children, an unknown phenomenon in this area before 1996, several Congolese told us.

Deprived of their social supports, many women become burden-bearers in order to feed themselves and their children. We saw them in every community we visited: bent double, carrying loads of produce or building materials supported by straps that cut deep grooves into their foreheads.

Congolese churches and civic groups have attempted to provide medical care, counseling, and job training for the rape survivors and to challenge social practices that marginalize them. But the staggering numbers of raped and displaced women overwhelm these efforts. The UN Fund for Women and human rights groups estimate that hundreds of thousands of women and girls have been raped since 1998, altho the vast majority of rapes have gone unreported because of the social stigma. The head of a women’s organization in Bukavu told us that in 2004 a small grant from the Danish Lutheran church had enabled her to help 1200 women in the area who had been raped. She had to stop the program when funds ran out and now lacks the means even to document the rapes.

The use of rape as a weapon of war has had broader ramifications for the people of eastern Congo. Since armed groups often attack women when they are working in the fields, many women are afraid to leave their homes. Thus, in fertile lands with a year-round growing season, people are going hungry.

Violence perpetrated by armed groups has also led to an increase in violence among the civilian population. “Something in our society is unhinging,” reported Jeanne Muliri-Kabekatyo, the head of the Protestant Women’s Society of North Kivu. Her organization documents stories of rape and sexual assault unheard of before the wars. She told us of girls some as young as eighteen months – raped by neighbors, brothers, taxi drivers, and teachers. Her organization has responded by training 36,000 children to resist rapes and teaching parents never to let their daughters go anywhere alone or be along with a man, even a teacher.

Some stories seem especially to haunt her. One young woman delivered a stillborn baby the day after her 3-year-old child died. The cadaver of the newborn was still in the room when five armed men entered the house and her husband fled. She was too weak to move, let alone resist the men who gang raped her. She needed five operations and will never have more children. The husband married someone else.

Then there was the girl raped by two brothers and their father. When her mother saw she was pregnant, she sent her daughter to the men who had raped her, saying it was their job to take care of her. “She is mentally ill now and cannot stand to be touched,” Muliri-Kabekatyo told us. “We can’t bring a case against the rapists because she has stopped speaking. She is in a deplorable state.”

After relating these stories, she paused and said, “You can get sick yourself.”

With so many millions of people dead of starvation and disease, with massacres continuing despite the presence of 15,000 UN peacekeeping troops, with government employees having received no wages for ten years, these hundreds of thousands of rapes get lost in the chaos.

Western Complicity in Congo’s Wars 

Westerners telling stories like these need to be mindful that we have benefited from a colonialism that stereotyped Africans as savages. For too long, people in the First World have known about Africa chiefly through atrocities such as the Rwandan genocide or ‘famine pornography’ – fly-covered children with bloated bellies.

We asked the pastors, human rights workers, and women activists who were working with rape victims how they wanted these stories told. Most agreed that the situation was so dire that spreading the news was more important than other considerations. “Christ said to keep telling the truth even up to the death,” said the director of a women’s organization in Goma. However, she told us, if we wanted to provide balance, we ought to publicize how Western countries are facilitating and profiting from Congo’s misery. “We are treated like the wastebasket of the world,” she said, referring to the enormous numbers of weapons being dumped in the region. The Rwandan government uses the military aid it receives from the US to fund the Congolese Rally for Democracy army (RCD-Goma), which rampages thru the eastern Congo. The US also funds President Kabila and his Congolese army, which fights against the RCD. A representative of the human rights organization CODHO spoke to our delegation of an “Anglophone conspiracy” by the US, UK and South Africa to distribute arms to militias and armies. By doing so, he said, they keep the region destabilized and thus open to exploitation of its resources.

Nearly all the Congolese with whom we met cited these resources as the key to understanding Congo’s desperate situation and as the smoking gun in the hands of the West. Rwanda and Uganda might be the pirates, but multinational corporations based in the First World have equipped them to do their plundering.

An April 6, 2001 hearing held by us Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney exposed the involvement of Western nations, and the corporatocracy appears in almost every state of the conflict in the region. Rwandan President Paul Kagame was trained by the US military at Fort Leavenworth in 1990.11 The United States wielded its power to prevent UN peacekeeping troops from entering Rwanda to stop the genocide in 1994 but promptly provided the country with $75 million in military aid after Kagame took control.12 US Special Forces began training the Rwandan army in 1994, three months before the April 6, 1994 missile attack on the aircraft carrying the Rwandan and Burundian presidents – the event that precipitated the genocide in Rwanda. The Special Forces training included counterinsurgency, combat, psychological operations, and instructions about how to fight in Zaire.13 In August, before ordering the 1996 invasion, Kagame visited the Pentagon to get US approval. Rwandan and Ugandan troops who were trained at Fort Bragg participated in the 1996-97 invasions to topple Mobutu.14 Military contractor Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, reportedly built a military base on the Congolese-Rwandan border, where the Rwandan army has trained.15 The Bechtel Corporation provided satellite maps and reconnaissance photos to Kabila so that he would monitor the movements of Mobutu’s troops.16 Bechtel is a particularly good example of collusion between corporate and political interests. Former Secretary George Schultz sits on Bechtel’s board and former Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger served as legal counsel. Jack Sheehan, senior vice president, is a retired US Marine Corps general and a member of the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon.17

During 1996-97, many corporations began negotiating with Kabila for access to the minerals in eastern Congo. He sent a representative to Toronto early in 19979 to speak to mining companies about ‘investment opportunities.’ The trip resulted in $30 million for Kabila, which he used to march on Kinshasa, capital of Congo. In May 1997, American Mineral Fields (AMF) cut a $1 billion deal with Kabila immediately after his forces captured Goma (near the Rwandan-Congolese border). Kabila’s US-trained finance commissioner handled the negotiations, giving AMF exclusive exploration rights to zinc, copper, and cobalt mines in the area. Mike McMurrough, a friend of US President Bill Clinton, was the chair of AMF. Tenke Mining announced in the same month that it had signed a contract with Kabila that it had previously signed with Mobutu’s government in 1996. Planeloads of representatives from other corporations like Bechtel also began arriving to do business.

The Washington Post reported that US soldiers (probably Special Forces) were signed in the company of Rwandan troops in Congo on July 23 and 24, 1998 – about a week before the “official” Rwandan invasion of Congo. The Canadian mining firms Barrick Gold (whose board members include former US President George H.W. Bush, former Canadian prime Minister Brian Mulroney, former US Senator Howard Baker, and Clinton advisor Vernon Jordan) and Heritage Oil and Gas arrived with the Ugandan and Rwandan militaries when they invaded Congo in 1998 and secured lucrative oil contracts. In 1999, the financial arm of RCD-Goma (the Congolese militia allied with Rwanda) received $5 million in loans from Citibank NY. It also received financing from the Belgium company Cogecom.18 Belgium, Denmark, Japan, Switzerland, and the United States have doubled their aid to Rwanda from $26.1 million in 1997 to $51.5 million in 199l, which helped Rwanda finance its intervention in Congo.19

As Rwanda and Uganda continued to enrich themselves with the plunder, they receive praise from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank for increasing their gross domestic product. An unintentionally ironic IMF press release in 2002 noted that its representatives in Rwanda “urged the authorities to pursue peace relentlessly,” even though the rise in the GDP the IMF had applauded occurred precisely because the Rwandan government had exacerbated violence in eastern Congo and had used the instability to exploit the area economically. In 2006, the IMF offered this praise of Uganda: “Fiscal restraint, coupled with prudent monetary management, have supported Uganda’s robust growth and helped contain inflation to single digit levels over most of the past decade. In recent years, these policies have contributed to a very comfortable level of international reserves.” Again, it chose to ignore how Uganda had come to accumulate these reserves.20

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Rady Ananda Social Media Pages: Facebook page url on login Profile not filled in       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

In 2004, Rady Ananda joined the growing community of citizen journalists. Initially focused on elections, she investigated the 2004 Ohio election, organizing, training and leading several forays into counties to photograph the 2004 ballots. She officially served at three recounts, including the 2004 recount. She also organized and led the team that audited Franklin County Ohio's 2006 election, proving the number of voter signatures did not match official results. Her work appears in three books.

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 researcher or investigator for private lawyers, and five years as an editor.

She graduated from The Ohio State University's School of Agriculture in December 2003 with a B.S. in Natural Resources.

All material offered here is the property of Rady Ananda, copyright 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009. Permission is granted to repost, with proper attribution including the original link.

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." Tell the truth anyway.

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