Blog Posts in Conflict Minerals
The ‘Enough Moment’ for Confronting Africa’s Human Rights Crimes
When confronted with some of the worst human rights crimes on the face of the earth – rape as a tool of war, child soldier recruitment, and genocide – it is easy and even understandable to turn away in horror. It turns out, however, that more and more people aren’t turning away.
As we write in The Enough Moment, a book I’ve co-authored with Don Cheadle (www.enoughmoment.org), “a strange and beautiful cocktail of hope, anger, citizen activism, social networking, compassion, celebrities, faith in action, and globalization are all coming together to produce the beginnings of a mass movement of people against these crimes and for peace. And this is happening at the very time that an American administration is populated by a number of people who have been” leading voices against these human rights abuses. “We call the sheer possibility inherent in this confluence of factors the Enough Moment, and it means that our feeling that Enough is Enough might actually get translated into real change.” Don and I discuss how this change can come about, and how everyone can make a real contribution to that change.
At a personal level, anyone who decides to get involved experiences their own Enough Moment, when something clicks inside and being a bystander is no longer an option – you know you need to become what we call an Upstander. For Don, it was being involved in the film “Hotel Rwanda” and then getting the chance to go to Darfur. For me, it was seeing footage of the Ethiopian famine back in the early 1980s and not being able to get it out of my head. In The Enough Moment, we collect the stories and testimonies of three groups of people who discuss their inspiring Enough Moments:
- Frontline Upstanders: people who have survived tremendous human rights abuses and gone on to help rebuild their communities;
- Citizen Upstanders: folks throughout the U.S. who have taken extraordinary action on behalf of survivors of human rights abuses half a world away; and
- Famous Upstanders: well-known people from the worlds of entertainment, sports, and politics who have decided to use their fame to help bring about change.
To read more about these stories and learn how we can end these crimes, order the book at www.enoughmoment.org. With the release of the book today, we’re also launching our Enough Moment Wall, where you can watch videos of people describing their Enough Moment and record your own. As we write in the book, “There will always be injustice, driven by greed, bigotry, power. But the degree to which injustice is thwarted and countered and reversed is up to us. The battle is joined. We hope you will choose to be part of it. Millions of lives hang in the balance.”
This post originally appeared on Huffington Post.
Congo’s Tin Trade: A Porter’s Perspective
We’ve gotten permission to share an excellent recent post by Lane Hartill of Catholic Relief Services. He offers a unique perspective on the conflict minerals trade, writing as though through the eyes of a porter involved in the tin trade in eastern Congo. Here’s an excerpt and a link to the original:
Jules had been hiking all day, slipping his way down the trail to Ndjingala. He pushed leaves as big as dinner plates out of his eyes and shifted the 115 pounds of rocks in the mesh sack on his head. For long stretches of time, all Jules heard was the soft panting of the group of 15 men and the sucking sound of the mud underfoot.
These rocks—heavy with tin ore, known as cassiterite here in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—were going to feed Jules' family for a week. But only if he made it to the end of the trail. He'd get a buck a mile: $25 for 25 miles. He was in the home stretch now, only a mile to go. Please, he thought, let the trail be clear. Please, no more roadblocks. Or bandits.
He knew the tricks of the trade: Don't leave the trail, bandits lurk in the bush. Don't get separated from the group of transporters, stragglers are easy targets. Don't stop, not for anything. At the checkpoints, he knew to keep his head down and hand over the few bucks to the men with guns. Whatever you do, don't ask questions. And don't draw attention to yourself.
But then it happened: Word came down the line that a transporter up ahead had been shot at, told to hand over his rocks. The man, stupidly, argued with the men in balaclavas and military garb. Who knows if they were rogue soldiers or bandits. That's when the shooting started. And that had Jules worried.
Jules had started the day before in Bisiyé, a tin ore mine in eastern Congo's North Kivu province. The mine swells with thousands of Congolese from every corner of the country. From high school teachers to grade-school dropouts to army commanders to housewives, all are willing to hike to Bisiyé—estimates have the population there between 12,000 to 14,000—because they know cassiterite means cash.
Read on here.
CNN Spotlights Ashley Judd in Congo
Enough recently had the opportunity to travel with actress and activist Ashley Judd on her second trip to eastern Congo. John Prendergast accompanied Ms. Judd to the region, where they worked closely with Enough’s field researchers to visit camps for Congo’s displaced people, mines, local civil society organizations, and hospitals treating survivors of sexual violence.
“We really drilled down into the causes and solutions,” reports Prendergast. “Ashley mixed real compassion for survivors of sexual violence with probing analysis of the issues that drive the violence."
CNN.com published the first report about the trip this morning. Here’s a portion of the piece, which captures Ms. Judd’s thoughts on the trip in her own words:
CNN: In general, how should travelers planning humanitarian missions prepare emotionally, mentally and practically for journeys to remote and possibly dangerous places?
JUDD: Number one: Check your motives. That's the most important thing.
Number two: Understand the local context. Educate yourself. Reach out to experts, both at the policy level as well as the grass-roots level. Read books about the history of the place. And also be savvy about the particular historical perspective that the author may have.
Watch documentaries. I watched "Born into Brothels" before I started spending time in brothels in Mumbai, India, and it was very helpful for me to kind of spiritually fortify myself because I had the visual.
I knew what they looked like, what they sounded like, before I went, and so that helped me skip over the visceral shock of walking into these phenomenally crowded, fetid brothels.
I had a spiritual director in my life and a spiritual community with whom I stay very current -- and that's enormously important to me.
Because eastern Congo is what it is, it's such a severe place and the problems are so huge, I had my crisis of faith and my breakdown within 72 hours of getting here. Normally, it happens like three weeks into a trip, but this place just cut me off at the knees immediately, and I had to reach out to people with whom I'm walking this walk -- both through e-mail and through telephone -- and that sort of helped me have that breakthrough and tap back into my resilience.
Click here to read the full piece and check out more photos by Jeff Trussell of Ashley Judd in Congo.
American Consumers Can Help End Congo's Circle of Violence
This article originally appeared in Global Post.
WASHINGTON — In central Africa there is a proverb: The way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.
Recently, the U.S. Congress, with the support of advocacy groups, faith-based organizations and concerned citizens nationwide have shown that they understand our national connection to the horrific conflict in eastern Congo and have taken their first bite of elephant.
The conflict in the Congo is one of the most complex the world has ever seen. As American citizens we should realize we can only do so much, but more importantly we should realize that we can do something.
Like it or not, the most effective way to create political will in the United States is by amplifying people’s voices through their dollars and consumption habits. The recent passage of a conflict minerals provision embedded within the Dodd-Frank Financial Regulatory Reform Bill is a testament to a group of American citizens and policymakers understanding the ways we can make a difference, and understanding that small steps and persistence will ultimately yield success.
The new bill requires U.S. companies that use tin, tantalum and tungsten — the three T’s — as well as gold, to annually disclose their methods of determining whether their materials originated from the Congo or not and in turn, whether through acquiring those minerals they have directly or indirectly funded armed militants.
Like any legislative reform, the provision has its critics. Some complain that this method of resolving the issue of conflict minerals is over-simplistic, and that the new law will require burdensome reporting requirements, lead to de facto boycotts on mining in the region and create job losses causing increased instability.
The truth of the matter, however, is that inaction on this issue is unacceptable and — for companies that source minerals from eastern Congo and hope to continue to move along the path of the status quo — tantamount to complicity.
The trade in minerals comprised of the 3T’s as well as gold is a primary driver of the conflict in Congo, which has claimed more than 5 million lives, displaced millions more and is directly responsible for a reported 1,100 rapes per month.
These minerals are primary components of the vast array of gadgetry we now consider essential in our everyday lives — mobile phones, laptops, mp3 music players and jewelry to name a few. There is no escaping the connectivity. The new bill is intended to combine U.S. government, private sector and consumer pressure to bolster the government and civil society of the Congo and to reduce the presence of armed groups in the region known to have committed some of the worst human rights atrocities in history.
Both the bill and the Enough Project are working to create legitimate, legal and peaceful mineral trade programs in Congo that would benefit both private sector development and war-weary communities that have absorbed so much destruction.
The Enough Project is categorically opposed to any form of boycott and we are urging our supporters to pressure companies who use these minerals to commit to producing conflict-free products. With the passage of this recent legislation, companies can now make a positive impact in the Congo.
However this is just the tip of a much larger spear. Governments, companies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) need to go further by implementing three critical steps to creating a legitimate mineral trade in eastern Congo. We propose starting with a framework to trace, audit and certify.
To continue reading, click here.
Photo: Tin ore (Sasha Lezhnev/ Grassroots Reconciliation Group.)
When Will Enough Be Enough?
_1.jpg)
Recently released accounts that the FDLR gang-raped roughly 200 women—and four baby boys—during the course of a four-day raid on a group of villages near Walikale in the North Kivu province of eastern Congo is a stark reminder of why increased pressure to disarm rebel groups and choke off the economic drivers of conflict in the area is so critical. Reports allege that during the attack, which took place only 20 km from a U.N. peacekeeping base, most of the women were raped simultaneously and by more than one attacker. One official from the NGO International Medical Corps, which has been documenting rape cases in the region, claimed that the rebels in this case were “systematically” raping the population and “most women were raped by two to six men at a time,” in several instances “in front of their children and their families.”
Although the conflict in eastern Congo remains one of the world’s most complex, one thing is for certain: widespread sexual violence and atrocities committed against civilians are not abating, and in many regions they continue to increase. A year ago Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the use of rape as a weapon in the region, calling it “evil in its basest form.” Secretary Clinton pledged $28 million to fight sexual violence in the Congo and support victims of rape. This support can’t come fast enough—but it will also not be enough. Concerned citizens worldwide must continue to raise their collective voices to pressure U.S. leaders, their national representatives, and other western governments to not only take stock of the horrific human rights abuses occurring in the region, but to take action as well. There is a moral imperative at play for those of us who value women and children in our society, who believe in the strength of community, and who feel that no human should have to endure a daily existence of fear for rape, amputation, or forced cannibalism.
The road to peace in eastern Congo is long and cobbled with significant obstacles. Complex issues remain, including the predatory behavior of the Congolese army, grievances around land rights and citizenship, and the utter lack of accountability for human rights violators. There is no silver bullet that will stop horrifying incidents like this. However, the impetus to act against the use of rape as a weapon of mass destruction goes beyond the usual geopolitical and economic considerations of foreign policy. There is a human need for action against such atrocities. Those responsible for ordering and committing these abuses must be held accountable, and communities who have endured such trauma must be given support to heal. Thus far our leaders have yet to show they are interested in moving beyond empty rhetoric and throwing money at problems. We must continue to raise our voices for the citizens of Congo and to pressure our leaders to take action to stop those groups responsible for these unconscionable acts.
Photo: Three Congolese women (Enough)
