JustRealeyez soldier Kyle sent me an e-mail about our friends at Democracy Now! who hold an excellent daily TV/radio news program, hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, airing on over 650 stations, pioneering the largest community media collaboration in the U.S-needless to say it’s pretty beasty! They recently did a show with Maurice Carney of Friends of the Congo and Nita Evele of Congo Global Action talking about the foolishness occurring in the Congo that no one else in America seems to be caring about….here’s the synopsis and a little snippet of the transcript. You can catch the rest here.
A new mortality report from the International Rescue Committee says that as many as 5.4 million people have died from war-related causes in the Congo since 1998. A staggering 45,000 people continue to die each month, both from the conflict and the related humanitarian crisis. Amidst the deadliest conflict since World War II, hundreds of international corporations have reaped enormous profits from extracting and processing Congolese minerals…..
AMY GOODMAN: Although war, poverty, malnutrition and disease continue to stalk the lives of millions of Congolese, the Democratic Republic of Congo also has some of the world’s richest deposits of mineral wealth. As a result, hundreds of international corporations have reaped enormous profits from extracting and processing Congolese minerals.
In June 2007, the Congolese government initiated a process to review sixty-one mining contracts established during the war in the so-called transitional period from 2003 to 2006. The review is complete, but the government has yet to publish the results. When a Congolese newspaper published in November what it claimed were leaked results of the review, several publicly traded mining stocks in the New York, London and Toronto exchanges plummeted. The leaked report indicates that the contracts could be renegotiated or even cancelled.
NITA EVELE:[...] The crisis on the ground is that the rebel group of Nkunda and the Mai Mai and all those people attack the population in villages. And right now we have almost 800,000 people displaced in the Congo. They were fleeing the conflicts between the army of FRDC—I mean, the Congolese army, who are fighting the militia of General Nkunda. So there’s a big crisis, and people are suffering on camps without food and water. Kids are dying of cholera and other diseases.
MAURICE CARNEY: [...] When you look at the Congo, you have to look at the corporate influence and everything that takes place in the Congo. When you look at the situation as it currently is, people usually talk about rape occurring at horrendous scales. However, there are basically two types of rape taking place in the Congo. One is the rape of the women and children, and the other is the rape of the land, the natural resources. And the Congo has tremendous natural resources. We’re talking about thirty percent of the world’s reserves of cobalt, ten percent of the world’s reserve of copper, eighty percent of the world’s reserve of coltan. And these multinational corporations are profiting at enormous rates while the Congolese people are suffering tremendously.
