Photograph by Dan Caspersz.
If you’re not familiar with the current conflict in the DRC1, I’ll hook you up with a really simple version: millions of people are slaughtered, be it through armed conflict, semi-veiled ethnic internal disputes or complete and utter genocide, because rich multi-national companies require parts to construct computers, mobile phones.
People die, are massacred, are mass-raped and yet people never stop to recoil about this. About the fact that people are being killed because of bits and bobs that are needed to create components that make computer/mobile phone/canned tins. And very, very few news medias report on this conflict, despite it being the fastest, most compact and effective current killing-machine, if one can label a country as such. And more civilians die every day.
Over 45000 people die per month in the DRC. This means more than 2.7 million people since 20042 – interestingly enough, an estimated 5.4 million since 1998, which means more people die in the DRC per year. Disease and famine are also rampant, contributing to deaths and increasing.
Massive parts of the population work in excavated mines where they extract minerals that are sold to major companies around the world; these monies are mostly channeled through the Congolese government army, which means they often serve feeding the war, e.g. funding forced mass-moves of people to new geographic regions, mass-rapes and massacres; this has been going on for more than 12 years.
As a picture says more than my words, I recommend that you check this slideshow out, consisting of pictures by photographer Marcus Bleasdale – do also please check out his “Rape of a Nation“, a video slideshow, right here.
An organisation named Global Witness published a report entitled “Faced with a gun, what can you do?”, which is best described by the organisation itself:
[The report] details how companies are buying from suppliers who trade in minerals from the warring parties. Many mining areas in eastern DRC are controlled by rebels and the national army, who violently exploit civilians to retain access to valuable minerals, including cassiterite (tin ore), coltan and gold. Cassiterite and coltan are used to make mobile phones, computers and other electronics, among other things.
Boycott.
The 110-page report is available right here in its entirety, and there’s a list of the companies that are trading the DRC conflict minerals here.
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