What Bob Barker should have said

Last night I saw, what I thought, was a ridiculous program on the National Geographic channel about a center for rehabilitating stray and behaviorially challenged dogs. There is an enormous dog center, called Dogtown, in Arizona. The medical facilities are the nicest I've seen anywhere for any kind of animal, humans included, and I was just in shock about the excesses put into this center. I had a thought in the middle of the ridiculous program people in the US probably care more about dogs than folks in Africa. While this is a very unfair general statement to make, there's probably some truth in it. My next thought was what if Bob Barker changed his famous last line of every show of The Price is Right. Instead of saying something like "remember to get your dog spayed or neutered" he changed it to "every day in Africa a 10 year old girl is raped and murdered" or "last year in Africa two million people died from AIDS" and followed it up with "do your part by doing x,y,z to help change this". Probably would have had little effect, if any, but who knows.

You can't visit this continent and not be affected by some of the horrific problems here. For me, ironically, I think I've been more impacted by the problems going on in a country I have not even officially visited, the Democractic Republic of Congo. You can see on the map of the trip that I have literally been next to half of the country's southern border and almost the entire eastern border. I've looked north and west for months now and seen the landscape of the DRC. In the last two decades over five and half million have died in the conflicts, primarily resulting from the Rwandan genocidaires fleeing into the eastern DRC. More and more, people have an idea that something has happened and is going on in the DRC, but I'll be 9 out of 10 people worldwide couldn't tell you a single detail about it.

Here's one detail about the war. The genocidal hutu militias and other rebel groups support themselves financially in large part through the mining of tin. The DRC has one third of the global reserves of tin, and its located in the eastern DRC in a region called the Kivus, where the militias pretty much run the show. Tin is used now in cellphones, computers, and quite a few different electronic devices because its replacing lead, which is more harmful to the consumer than tin. Tin is even being praised as allowing such devices to be more "eco-friendly". The militias control the mining and smuggle it out of other countries, such as Rwanda and the Republic of Congo(different country. yes, it's confusing), where it gains so called legitimacy for export to the world market.

This means that when you're buying your eco-friendly cellphone because it has tin, coltan, casserite, or other minerals from the eastern DRC which are supposedly better for the environment than lead you are in fact doing the following:
Unknowingly supporting groups responsible for five million deaths in the past twenty years. Groups that use sexual violence as a weapon of intimidation and genocide through the spread of HIV. In the three eastern DRC provinces of South Kivu, North Kivu, and Ituri its estimated that 75% of the women have been raped! Unfortunately, from what I've heard, simple rape is uncommon. Its usually gang rapes for days or months at a time. Women as young as you can imagine are regularly raped. Fathers are often forced to rape their daughters or see them killed. Sometimes they have to rape their daughters and than shoot them or be forced to watch the militia members rape their daughters and than hack to death with machetes. These groups are funding themselves through rich mining resources of the DRC, and the world is turning a blind eye. That the average world citizen does not know about this is an indictment of the world governments which know full well where they are buying their raw tin resources from, but choose to look the other way.

When I was in Gisenyi, Rwanda I was a few meters away from Goma, DRC. The two towns share the northern end of Lake Kivu, and from Gisenyi you can see planes taking off all the time from Goma. Its supposed to be a very poor city, and I couldn't figure out who the heck was flying in to the town every half hour to hour. Well, I just found out from Patrick, an American I met while rafting in Jinja who is working in Goma. He works for a non-profit airline that provides at cost flights to humanitarian groups around the world, and Goma is one of their biggest locations. I asked him about the flights, and he said there are constant flights from the mining regions to Goma and from Goma to several different places taking the raw ores out for processing and export. He said some of the flights actually go straight to Gisenyi, and that the Rwandan govt is seeing a nice middleman cut on the trade. The DRC can't really be considered one country by any sense of the imagination. The "central" govt. in Kinshasa has little control over events in the eastern DRC, and how could it? The country is half the size of the western US has only a few hundred miles of roads in the entire country. Most of the country is the rainforest, has huge mountains, and geographically is one of the most difficult places to move around in the world.

The geography of the region is definitly preventing any end to the ongoing violence, but the rest of the world's complacence is criminal. I recently read a Nicholas Kristof editorial in the NY Times which talked about the ongoing sexual violence and how the US was bringing up the issue at a special session of the UN. If the UN was serious about doing something they could have asked each nation to ban the import of tin from the DRC or the neighboring African countries which usually export it on behalf of the militia groups. There would be a black market trade, for sure, but it might make a dent in the groups finances. The decrease in funds wouldn't have a negative effect on the local communities who have been forced to work in the mines for non-existent wages, in the meantime their crops are neglected and people are hungrier with the mines than they were before. The only people making money are the militia groups and corrupt middlemen.

Ultimately, to sell something these days you need cheap resources and having an "eco-friendly" label is a great marketing tool. So its unlikely anything regarding the militia led mining in eastern DRC will change. Women will continue to be raped on a massive scale, more people will be killed, and our cellphones and computers will be cheap and "good" for the environment.