The Democratic Republic of the Congo

The violent situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, aka "The Congo" and formerly known as Zaire is complex and has a long history. The purpose of this blog is only give basics on global issues of importance. So, there will be a zillion details that I am leaving out, of course. I desire in no way to minimize the complexity of the issue, nor do I claim to have a firm grasp on it, but in keeping with my purpose, I will attempt to be brief. (After writing this, I will correct now myself and simply apologize for it being long, but I really tried! Please read it anyway...it's a horrible thing and the more of us that understand the issue a little bit, the better.)

The Congo is a large country in central Africa; it is about 1/4 the size of the US, in area. Basically, an influx of refugees from neighboring countries fled and streamed into the Congo in the mid nineties. Additionally, prior to and during that and since then, as with the violent struggle for diamonds in this region of the world, addressed in an earlier blog entry below, this war is in large part due to a struggle over resources, specifically diamonds, water, tin, copper and coltan an element used in technology such as cell phones.

Since the outbreak of fighting in August 1998,
-At least 3.3 million people, mostly women, children and the elderly, are estimated to have died because of the conflict, most from disease and starvation
-More than 2.25 million people have been driven from their homes, many of them beyond the reach of humanitarian agencies.

Does this number mean anything to you? 3.3 million people is more than the number of people that live in Chicago. v It's like 6 Seattles, 8 Pittsburghs and well over 100 of the City of Athens. Dead. Either from starving or disease or violence.

This conflict involves (or has involved) various nations, and many assert that the United States is directly and indirectly responsible. Here is one quote.

"The United States military has been covertly involved in the wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a US parliamentary subcommittee has been told. Intelligence specialist Wayne Madsen, appearing before the US House subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights, also said American companies, including one linked to former President George Bush Snr, the father of the current US President, are stoking the Congo conflict for monetary gains."
— John Kakande, US Army Operated Secretly in Congo, allAfrica.com, June 17, 2001

According to www.globalissues.com when Congolese President Laurent Kabila came to power in May 1997, overthrowing the former leader, Marshall Mobutu, He had the aid of Angola, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Eritrea. It was believed that a revival would take place in the region. However, the situation got worse. President Kabila, also backed by the United States, was accused by rebels (made up of Congolese soldiers, Congolese Tutsi Banyamulenge, Rwandan, Ugandan and some Burundian government troops) of turning into a dictator, of mismanagement and corruption. Up until the assasination of President Kabila in January 2001, Angola, Zimbabwe, and Namibia supported the Congolese government, while the rebels were backed by the governments of Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. It seems that a UN Peacekeeping group was deployed, but lacked forces to have much of an effect. This group, MONUC, is described by Amnesty International as being weak and ineffective. President Kabila's son, Joseph Kabila was sworn into power and in 2002 a peace agreement was signed by himself and the president of Rwanda, but none of the other involved parties. FIghting has continued despite some small international efforts including a bolstering of MONUC and a brief involvement of a French-led peacekeeping force.

-16 million people have critical food needs.
-There are 2,056 doctors for a population of 50 million; of these, 930 are in Kinshasa.
-Infant mortality rates in the east of the country have in places reached 41 per cent per year.
-Severe malnutrition rates among children under five have reached 30 per cent in some areas.
-National maternal mortality is 1837 per 100,000 live births, one of the worst in the world. Rates as high as 3,000/100,000 live births have been recorded in eastern DRC.
-DRC is ranked 152nd on the UNDP Human Development index of 174 countries: a fall of 12 places since 1992.
-2.5 million people in Kinshasa live on less than US$1 per day. In some parts of eastern DRC, people are living on US$0.18 per day.
-80 per cent of families in rural areas of the two Kivu Provinces have been displaced at least once in the past five years.
-There are more than 10,000 child soldiers. Over 15 per cent of newly recruited combatants are children under the age of 18. A substantial number are under the age of 12.
-Officially, between 800,000 and 900,000 children have been orphaned by AIDS.
40 per cent of health infrastructure has been destroyed in Masisi, North Kivu.
-Only 45 per cent of people have access to safe drinking water. In some rural areas, this is as low as three per cent.
-Four out of ten children are not in school. 400,000 displaced children have no access to education.

So how about this, to kind of bring this situation into a bit of clarity regarding how this conflict actually affects individuals. First, here is a quote from http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Africa/DRC.asp#StruggleforPoliticalPower:

"I am convinced now ... that the lives of Congolese people no longer mean anything to anybody. Not to those who kill us like flies, our brothers who help kill us or those you call the international community.... Even God does not listen to our prayers any more and abandons us."
— Salvatore Bulamuzi, a member of the Lendu community whose parents, two wives and five children were all killed in recent attacks on the town of Bunia, north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

And here is a personal story from a Congolese woman from the website www.womenforwomen.org

Furaha Mirindi - 34 yrs. old
"I am from Kavumu. I got married when I was 15 years old; he was 18 years old. We did not have an official ceremony or anything, but we lived together as a married couple. Together we had 6 children. I had no formal educational training. While I cannot read and write, I successfully ran a small business selling peanuts and palm oil to feed my family before we were directly affected by the war.
In 2002, there was a great deal of insecurity in my village Kavumu. I and my family left the village for a more secure village nearby. Knowing the insecurity in the surrounding areas, the village chief gave me and my family temporary refuge. The first night we spent in the new house to escape the insecurity, we were attacked. I was with my mother and two younger siblings (my younger brother and my younger sister) and my six children, as well as my sister-in-law and her seven children.
There were more than six military men that entered the house that night. My mother, my younger sister, and my sister-in-law were all raped. For me, I was raped by at least three of them. I cannot remember. I was numb. My younger sister who was raped is completely crazy now. I tried to stop them, not only because I did not want to be invaded, but I did not want them to rape me in front of my children. In my struggle with them, they hit me on my right eye. My right eye is now damaged.
After the incident, I spend six months in the hospital because of my eye and the ruptures and other damages from the rape. In addition to the physical damages of the rape, I got pregnant. I gave birth and did not even realize. You may wonder how that is possible. I was in so much pain physically and emotionally and was bedridden. I could not distinguish the pain from my eyes and the rape from the pain of giving birth. I did not have a cesarean, but the child had to be forced out of me because I did not have the courage or the energy to give birth. Ironically, the child is born with damage of the left eye, similar to the damage of my right eye. The doctor says it is because the position I was in during the eight months I was in the hospital. But it’s like a curse to me.
My husband supported me throughout the time I was in the hospital. He sold all of our possessions to pay for my medical bills. But he left sometime after the child was born. He left me not because of being raped itself. He simply could not deal with the cost of the aftermath. The costs were too high and the burdens were too heavy for him to carry. He told me that I had made him poor. The child I gave birth to after the rape, a little girl, is always sick. She needs more than we can provide. Although we were not officially married before and he had paid no bride fees as we do in our culture, before he left me he went to my family and paid the bride fees and told them that he was returning their daughter. He said that he has supported me but no longer has the means and resources to continue to do so.
My little girl is now one and half year old. She cannot walk, crawl or sit up. Clearly there are some developmental problems. I came to Bukavu with the hope that the centre for handicap children would take this child and treat her and provide for her. I am not able to attend to her needs. I love my baby even though she is a product of being brutally raped. I would like for her to have a normal childhood -- to be like other children and to one day walk and play. Unfortunately the centre did not take my baby because I, as the parent, am still alive and the centre is only for handicap children who are orphans.
I hope to find an opportunity to care for my children, all of them. I feel like I have no value. When you see your child crying because she is hungry and there is nothing that you can do about it, it’s painful. It hurts at the core of my being. The feeling of being insignificant and worthless is further enhanced because everyday is more and more difficult, especially with this baby. While I am no longer active in a church, I continue to put my faith in God. I have to believe that I will one day reconstruct my life and provide for my children and perhaps find a husband again."

Here is a story from just last month I found at http://www.europaworld.org/week207/congolesewomen14105.htm "Fighting has broken out again in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). According to reports from the UN this week. Thousands of Congolese refugees fleeing fighting between two major ethnic groups in the eastern Ituri region have poured into neighbouring Uganda, UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency said. An estimated 5,000 to 7,000 people, mostly women and children in poor health, have made their way across Lake Albert by boat to the village of Nkondo, some 285 kilometres from the Ugandan capital of Kampala."

I know, this is getting so long. Is anyone still reading this? I hope you are because it breaks my heart to write it. I just want to do something. Do you? One thing you can do, which I have, is to join Amnesty International or make a donation toan organization like UNICEF or World Vision who speak out against this violence and provide aid to refugees. Label your donation "DRC relief" or "Congo Relief." My good friend Bono, whom I've never actually met or communicated with directly, has a great organization called DATA that deals with all of this messy stuff in Africa. Donate to them! They also suggest an interesting awareness-creating project called The White Band Project...find out more about it here: http://www.whiteband.org/actnow/wbindivid/en

www.data.org

www.amnesty.org

http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/drcongo.html

Sweatshop Labor

Let's talk about sweatshop labor. Just so we're on the same page, sweatshop labor is a widely used term used to describe a situation where a big company usually that makes something like shoes or clothing hires poor people in other countries and in the US (often young people, often uneducated and almost always impoverished) to do hard labor, under poor working conditions.


A sweatshop is a workplace that violates the law and where workers are subject to:

Extreme exploitation, including the absence of a living wage or long work hours,
Poor working conditions, such as health and safety hazards,
Arbitrary discipline, such as verbal or physical abuse, or
Fear and intimidation when they speak out, organize, or attempt to form a union.

With many thousands of garment factories throughout the world that employ tens of millions of workers (in nearly 200 countries), big corporations scour the world for the lowest labor costs they can find, set up shop and ignore human rights. Sweatshops exists everywhere, from Mexico to Kenya to Indonesia to Turkey to China. These workplaces (generally) pay poverty wages (the lowest that people will work for...and in poor countries, that ain't much) force workers to work long hours, hire children to work, deny workers the right to form a union, fire women who become pregnant and subject workers to dangerous conditions. Even here in the U.S., sweatshops exists. According to www.sweatshopwatch.org, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that 67% of Los Angeles garment factories don’t pay workers minimum wage or overtime.

I find this issue to be a little bit confusing in terms of what to do about it. Because the reality is that simply boycotting, for example, J. Crew, who is widely known as having sweatshops, can actually place a strain on that locale's economy. Like, if there's a factory in, say, Indonesia, and poor workers are employed there...we boycott, profits go down, J. Crew lays off a bunch of workers...and you can bet there isn't any severance pay involved. So, in that regard, simply not buying the product may not have the best impact.

Probably the best thing to do is send a message to the company, literally. Email your favorite clothing companies. I mean, let's face it, I'm not going to never buy something from the Gap again...they have the best t-shirts! But what I can (and do) do is write to the company. Just go to the company's web site, click on "contact us" and tell them that you are against sweatshop labor, and that you, as a paying, loyal customer are urging them to improve their worker's conditions and pay them a fair wage. As an example, as a result of presure from anti-sweatshop groups, The Gap published a report last year, making public it's findings (many shortcomings) after an evaluation of it's human rights practices and created a plan to improve the situation. That is a positive step, in the right direction, and The Gap should be applauded for this even if it is only to make them look better.

More info:

The anti-sweatshop movement encourages consumers to shop with a conscience and buy goods made under fair labor conditions. The organizations listed below have compiled the following buying guide, representing a sampling of sweatshop-free apparel products currently available on the market.
The products offered by the retailers and suppliers below are made by workers in the United States and around the world who are organized into democratic unions or worker-owned cooperatives. They have achieved or are striving towards:
· Healthy and safe working conditions.
· Wages and benefits sufficient to support their families' basic needs.
· Treatment with respect, dignity, and justice.
· Freedoms to organize and collectively bargain and decide workplace policies.
You can support their struggles by purchasing the products they make.

No Sweat, the 1st international union made brand, carries sneakers, sox, sweats, camis, yoga pants, oxfords, khakis, PJs, jackets, caps, scarves, denim and more!
Union Jeans has a wide selection of your everyday needs including denim shirts. Their workers are members of UFCW Local 1099.
Justice Clothing is a one-stop shop for union-made and sweatshop free apparel. They are constantly on the hunt for new lines, styles, and manufacturers who meet their strict criteria, and hope to add an expanded line of products in the near future, including linens, dishes, flatware and more.
DeMoulin Brothers is an an all-union manufacturer who make band uniforms, as well as formal men's wear, including tuxedo pants, jackets, shirts, and bow ties. Their workers are members of UNITE HERE Local 546.
Ben Davis has been a union manufacturer of work wear and work fashions in San Francisco since 1935. Their workers are members of UNITE HERE Local 101.
Nueva Vida is a worker owned co-op in Nicaragua which produces t-shirts and camisoles for Maggie's Organics. Get your fix of organic and tye dye at OrganicClothes.com.
Fuerza Unida was founded by former Levi's workers in San Antonio, Texas. They formed a unique women's sewing cooperative that makes and silk screens t-shirts, canvas bags and flags.
Global Exchange's Fair Trade stores feature products such as clothing, accessories, crafts, jewelry, coffee, and chocolate from over 40 countries - with fair prices for consumers and fair prices paid to producers.

This list above is provided by: http://www.sweatshopwatch.org/swatch/sweatfree/index.html

Caffeine with a Conscience

I can use that slogan from Donkey because I invented it. So there.

Now...on to the topic of the day....Fair Trade Coffee.

You've probably heard the term somewhere. But what does it mean and why is it significant?

Well, first of all there is a coffee crisis, as involved people have been calling it. There is a crisis destroying the livelihoods of 25 million coffee producers around the world. The price of coffee has fallen by around 30 per cent (in real terms) in the past 15 years to a 100-year low. Long-term prospects are grim.

Many developing-country coffee farmers, mostly poor smallholders, now sell their coffee beans for less than they cost to produce – only 60 per cent of production costs in Viet Nam’s Dak Lak Province, for example.

The coffee crisis has become a development disaster whose impacts will be felt for a long time. Families dependent on the money generated by coffee are pulling their children, especially girls, out of school. Many can no longer afford basic medicines, and are cutting back on food.
The economies in coffee-growing countries are suffering. Government funds are being squeezed dry, putting pressure on health and education and forcing countries further into debt. Of the total value of the global coffee market ten years ago one third used to go to coffee producing countries. This has now fallen to just 10% of the total value of the coffee market today. Over the last five years the value of coffee exports has fallen by US$4 billion; compare this with total debt repayments by Honduras, Viet Nam, and Ethiopia in 1999 and 2000 of US$4.7 billion.


What is Fairtrade?

The term Fairtrade refers to an independently audited certification and labelling system for products, (certified products are labelled with the logo to the right) which ensures that the farmers and workers producing the product are paid a fair return for their work.
Fairtrade is about giving poor farmers and communities a fair go by:
-paying farmers and workers a fair price for their work helping them gain the skills and knowledge they need to develop their businesses in the global economy
-providing a certification and labelling system to ensure Fairtrade standards are met and that the benefits of Fairtrade get back to the farmer who grew the coffee

Fairtrade also means farmers and communities:

using improved environmental methods for growing coffee establishing democratic associations or co-operatives to undertake local community development projects with the proceeds of Fairtrade resulting in local health services, credit schemes and improvements to local schools have access to low cost credit and technical assistance.

WHAT CAN YOU DO:

Buy Fairtrade Coffee
Ask your coffee shop to sell it
Ask your grocer to carry it.

More info: http://www.oxfam.org.au/campaigns/mtf/coffee/coffeecrisis/index.html

Power of One; a brief review

I saw a movie a year or two ago and it inspired me further to want to be a person who tries to (forgive me for this overused phrase) make a difference in the world. It's called The Power of One and it's about a little caucasian boy who grows up in South Africa. Of course, it has to do with racism and hatred and like most good stories, it gets it's life from the themes of the power of love and determination and sacrifice. It's based on a true story, and I don't want to tell you too much about it...but I promise, if you do yourself a favor and rent this movie, you'll want to run outside of your house and change the world. Other suggestions?

Acid Throwing

I promise, I'm looking for some good news, but for now, here's some info on a phenomenon called Acid Throwing which apparently began about 50 years ago in Bangladesh.

Perhaps you've heard of this horrible form of violence against women in South Asia. In countries like India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, a prevalent way for a man to inflict revenge on a woman who has either turned down his marriage proposal or insulted him in some way is to break into her house and throw sulfuric acid on her face. This also happens in public, on the streets. The really unfortunate and outrageous part is that the perpetrators of such crimes are almost never charged with doing anything wrong. Many, many cases go unreported because, like rape, it is a shameful thing to endure in that culture, despite the obvious injustice. Below is some information from The Acid Survivors Foundation, an organization established in Bangladesh in 1999 to support victims of these crimes and move forward in efforts to prevent such atrocities. More information is below, from their web site. www.acidsurvivors.org

WHAT IS ACID THROWING ? Acid throwing is a vicious form of violence against women. Although we know that violence against women is a universal phenomenon, what many of us may not know is the extent and form the violence takes. This differs from one society to another. ACID THROWING is a particularly vicious and damaging form of violence against women in Bangladesh. There are cases of acid throwing in other countries but these are isolated incidents, nowhere near the number of attacks that occur in Bangladesh.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ACID IS THROWN ON A VICTIM ?
When acid is thrown on a person, the results are horrific. Nitric or Sulphuric Acid has a catastrophic effect on the human flesh. It causes the skin tissue to melt, often exposing the bones below the flesh, sometimes even dissolving the bone. When acid attacks the eyes, it damages these vital organs permanently. Many acid attack survivors have lost the use of one or both eyes. The victim is traumatized physically, psychologically and socially.
An acid attack on your body would dramatically change your life. Most survivors of an acid attack are forced to give up their education, their occupation and other important activities in their lives. This is because recovering from the trauma takes up most of their time and because the disfigurement they have to bear debilitates and handicaps them in every conceivable way.
The scars left by acid are not just skin deep- victims are most often faced with social isolation and ostracisation that further damages their self esteem, self-confidence and seriously undermines their professional and personal future. Women who have survived acid attacks have great difficulty in finding work and if unmarried, as many victims tend to be, they have very little chance of ever getting married, which in a country like Bangladesh is socially isolating.

HOW MANY ACID ATTACKS ARE WE TALKING ABOUT ?
It is difficult to obtain accurate statistics because most people in Bangladesh live in rural communities that are relatively isolated and mechanisms to gather information from these communities is weak. But there is evidence to indicate that there is an alarming increase in the number of reported acid attacks incidents in Bangladesh.
In 1996, there were 47 reported cases of acid violence. In 1997, the number rose to 130. In 1998, there were over 200 reported cases. It is highly likely that the number of actual cases is considerably higher. In 1999 the Acid Survivors Foundation started to collect data and in its first year documented 139 known cases. It is highly likely that the number of actual cases is higher.In 2000, 2001 we documented 226, 343 cases and in 2002 the highest number recorded as 484 which had been lower a little bit in the last year - 2003 - the number was 410 cases.

HOW OLD IS THIS PHENOMENON ?
The first documented case of acid violence was in 1967 when a young girl had acid poured on her by her admirer when his proposal of marriage was refused by her mother. So acid violence is a fairly recent phenomenon in Bangladesh.

WHY DOES IT HAPPEN ?
The victims are attacked for many reasons. In some cases, the attack takes place because a young girl or woman has spurned the sexual advances of a male or has rejected a proposal of marriage. Recently, however, there have been acid attacks on children, older women and sometimes also men. These attacks are often the result of family or land disputes, dowry demands or a desire for revenge.
Reasons for acid attacks during the years, the highest rate of occurrence took place over Land Disputes and Family dispute, the next highest rate of these brutal incidents are due to refusal of relationship/sex throughout the country.

WHO ARE THE VICTIM ?
The major victim of attacked is Women(47%) and Men(26%). Children(27%) could not escape from the attack. Sometimes domestic animals or birds are also victimized.

CONFLICT DIAMONDS

Hello friends. I know it's kind of weird to have two blogs...but I decided that my urge to post items of a social justice nature is a different "flava" from my usual rantings, funny stories and observations. SO, this little corner of the World Wide Web will be dedicated to social justice information, politics, and related rantings as well as kudos for people/organizations out there actually doing stuff to make the world more fair and more well, good. I also hope to figure out this new journal site and be able to post links, create action suggestions with links to send emails to decision makers, etc. on here. I promise to try to make it at least a little entertaining, but it will definitely have a different feel than my diaryland pages. My hope is that this will be simple enough and interesting enough that you can send people who may or may not care about stuff like this to this site to find info and consider various situations to get them onto such people's radar screens. You dig?

Anyway, WELCOME! I hope you find this helpful, interesting and informative. We'll start out by addressing some issues that you may or may not know about.

Today, we are going to discuss Conflict Diamonds.

To many people, diamonds symbolize Valentines Day, engagements, love, committment, etc. However, for many others, they mean conflict, unfairness, poverty and even death. In some African countries, the Congo or Sierre Leone for example, profits from the unregulated diamond trade are used to fund armed conflicts. Militias continue to grow because of that 2 carat solitaire you might be eyeing at Kay Jewelers or the one that sparkles so beautifully in the DeBeers Commercial that reminds us...a diamond is forever. As a result, tens of thousands of civilians have over the past years been killed or tortured and millions have been displaced because of conflicts over land that is diamond-rich.

Below is some info on a program called The Kimberley Process:

"In May 2000, Southern African diamond producing states met in Kimberley, South Africa, to come up with a way to stop the trade in conflict diamonds and to ensure consumers that the diamonds that they purchase have not contributed to violent conflict and human rights abuses in their countries of origin."

Please see www.kimberleyprocess.com for more info on how to purchase non-conflict diamonds. Diamonds occur naturally in Canada for example and so gems purchased from there (if certified) can be counted on to be "safe". It occurs to me however that only purchasing diamonds from Canada (any retailer should have country of origin info on all stones) may mean taking business away from legitimate African diamond miners, in an already struggling African economy.

As consumers, we can make an impact, by demanding details about diamonds that we buy. Demanding proof that a gem is conflict-free can send a powerful message to the industry that we will not support an industry or nation that looks the other way as individuals are killed and displaced over a shiny stone.

I think the bottom line is to recognise that there is a serios issue here to be aware of. Let's be thoughtful consumers instead of numb Americans, blind and deaf to the ugliness that our careless purchases can contribute to.