Break The Silence Congo Week

The miners are already getting drunk at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Their clothes and faces covered in yellow dust, they swig 750ml bottles of Primus beer as they walk home from the mines. High above the road, an orange gash in the hillside between banana trees and cassava plants reveals the cassiterite mine, where men can be seen toiling into the afternoon. Access to this mine is forbidden to outsiders, a local authority in charge of the mine said. The miners here in the South Kivu province of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo are distrustful of foreigners. The Canadian company that controls this mine, Shamika Resources, is trying to take away the miners’ livelihood, they said.

Has the video game industry dug up its very own blood diamond? According to a report by activist site Toward Freedom, for the past decade the search for a rare metal necessary in the manufacturing of Sony's Playstation 2 game console has fueled a brutal conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. At the center of the conflict is the unrefined metallic ore, coltan. After processing, coltan turns into a powder called tantalum, which is used extensively in a wealth of western electronic devices including cell phones, computers and, of course, game consoles.

On Thursday July 10th 2008 my mom Suzanne, my little sister Ingrid, my little brother Junior, my little sister Barbro and I (Nancy-Josée) decided to go to see Sean Paul, Akon and Wyclef Jean at a concert here in Toronto. My family is known to do things at the very last minute, however we went to this concert with a purpose in mind and that was to bring awareness about the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Every month more than 45 000 people die in the DRC. It is the deadliest crisis since World War II but still not many people know this. My sister Barbro and I (Nancy-Josée) have just started a new group called “HALISI”. The word “Halisi” is Swahili for positive.

Today rabble.ca published a story I wrote about the connection between Apple’s 3G iPhone, released today in Canada, and the vicious war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The connection is that almost all electronics equipment, including cell phones, contain the element tantalum which is ideally suited for the production of capacitors used in these devices. Tantalum comes from a substance called coltan, and 80% of coltan comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It is one of the world's most resource-rich countries, with huge deposits of diamonds, gold and copper. For a decade, the Democratic Republic of Congo was torn apart as factions backed by neighbouring countries wreaked murderous havoc on Africa's third-biggest country. Three million died.­

As war subsided in all but the eastern region of this vast nation, a new regime led by Joseph Kabila signed dozens of valuable mining contracts with Western concerns based in the southern Katanga region. Only now are the implications of those contracts coming to light.