October 30, 2006
Project Censored: Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007
#5 High-Tech Genocide in Congo
The world’s most neglected emergency, according to the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, is the ongoing tragedy of the Congo, where six to seven million have died since 1996 as a consequence of invasions and wars sponsored by western powers trying to gain control of the region’s mineral wealth. At stake is control of natural resources that are sought by U.S. corporations—diamonds, tin, copper, gold, and more significantly, coltan and niobium, two minerals necessary for production of cell phones and other high-tech electronics; and cobalt, an element essential to nuclear, chemical, aerospace, and defense industries.
...the reasons for why the Congolese people have suffered a virtually unending war since 1996, requires an understanding of the organized crime perpetrated through multinational businesses. The tragedy of the Congo conflict has been instituted by invested corporations, their proxy armies, and the supra-governmental bodies that support them.
The process is tied to major multinational corporations at all levels. These include U.S.-based Cabot Corp. and OM Group; HC Starck of Germany; and Nigncxia of China—corporations that have been linked by a United Nations Panel of Experts to the atrocities in DRC. Extortion, rape, massacres, and bribery are all part of the criminal networks set up and maintained by huge multinational companies. Yet as mining in the Congo by western companies proceeds at an unprecedented rate—some $6 million in raw cobalt alone exiting DRC daily—multinational mining companies rarely get mentioned in human rights reports.
article w/sources
~Tribal conflicts?
more from the top 25: http://www.projectcensored.org/censored_2007/
~You call yourself a news junkie?
[photo from google: child soldier congo]
~I have a difficult time with images of child soldiers. Even beyond the "hold this gun for the photograph" quality of some of them. Google Image Results: child soldier Kids without weapons frighten me.
Child soldiers, death squads and suicide bombers are what people can encounter, others must live with, in the sweaty nightmarish places out there beyond America's borders, where I would never want to visit anyway.
Here's a link to the Coalition to stop the Use of Child Soldiers: http://www.child-soldiers.org/
(Most every week within 20 miles of here there are what the news calls gang-related or drug-related killings, and children are sometimes killed. We don't have death squads or suicide bombers.)
Posted by Stubbornson at October 30, 2006 02:22 PM