Since 1996, more than six million people have been killed in the continuing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DCR or Congo). As London-based academic Carrie Giunta points out, the ongoing annihilation of humanity in the DCR exceeds by millions the number of deaths engineered over the same timeframe through war and conflict in Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Rwanda. The vast majority killed in the Congo are civilians. Not since WW II have so many deaths occurred through the deliberate and consequential killing that follows the declaration of war.

Rape and sexual torture have featured prominently in the Congo’s killing fields. Occurring on a daily basis, militia strategically turn the bodies of females of all ages, some infants, others elderly, into battle grounds. They do this by penetrating and mutilating their victim’s genitals to impart maximum physical and psychological damage. The damage to victims, and also to their families and communities, is not only horrific. It is immeasurable. It happens alongside kidnapping which, while targeting young men as military recruits, also targets girls and women for sex slavery. Often, women and girls are held captive for months or, in some instances, for several years.

Back in 2010, Alex Duval Smith interviewed  Congo medico Dr Dennis Mukwege, observing that this skilled and committed gynaecologist kept hopes alive. He has drawn his strength from the indomitable spirit of the most weakened of victims – girls and women raped in a calculated act of war, arriving on his hospital doorstep , broken, waiting for death, and hiding their faces. Often, they are unable to talk, walk or eat, following sexual assaults which are beyond the bounds of the describable. By 2010, from his single-story medical centre,

Dr Mukwege, together with a dedicated team, had surgically repaired the mutilated bodies of more than 20,000 of the thousands upon thousands of girls and women war-raped in the DCR’s Great Lakes region. Insightfully, during that interview Dr  Mukwege suggested that “coltan ore politics” were behind the international apathy towards what this unimaginable campaign of sexual terror inflicted on Congolese women and girls.

Highlighting this suggestion, Alex Duval Smith wrote of the DRC’s 14-year-war that it was ‘in effect, a continuation of the genocide that took place in neighbouring Rwanda [but in the Congo] had become a gynocide in which rape was used to tear the bonds of the community apart and facilitate access to mineral
wealth’.

This mineral wealth underlies and promotes the killing and violence in Congo. In a world basking in the perceived wealth of globalisation, human rights abuses, the majority relating to unfair wages and unsafe working conditions for workers in developing countries, are hardly rare. But with multinational corporations from the United States, France, Belgium, and the United Kingdom accused of cashing in on Congo’s mineral wealth, the coinciding rape, ravaging and destruction of women’s bodies, women’s psyche, and women’s lives, sinks the human rights abuses of globalisation to an all time, unacceptable, low.

In September of 2011, in her FemAid Report ‘From Kabul to Kisangaini’, Dr Carol Mann raised the likelihood that the DRC’s mineral economy was fueling the violence against the country’s women. In her words, ‘blood-gold, blood copper, blood coltan (the all-precious material that goes into your mobile phones and computers) is at the heart of the violence. In this context, it is reasonable to conclude that a global majority is today reaping the benefits of what Dr Mann calls ‘blood-High Tech’.

Precisely one year later, in September of 2012, Dr Mann and co-author Alphonse Maindo described the shortcomings of the Dodd-Frank Act. Known in the DRC as Loi Obama, the Dodd-Frank Act aimed to ensure that public companies trading in these commodities guarantee that their business does not benefit warlords in the region. While the US Act was designed  to prohibit the marketing of minerals linked to the country’s conflict/war, reports from 2013 suggest that it is “business as usual” when it comes to both the sexual terror inflicted on Congolese women and girls, and the demand for the DRC’s minerals.

Sexual terror is a focus of UNHCR spokesperson Fatoumata Lejeune-Kaba. She reported in July of 2013 that since January, protection monitoring teams registered 619 cases of rape in Congo province North Kivu – a dramatic surge compared with the 108 cases registered during the same period of 2012. Overall, ‘… recorded cases of sexual violence in North Kivu soared from 4,689 cases in 2011 to 7,075 in 2012. Many more cases remain unreported.’ According to Lejeune-Kaba, there are serious concerns ‘that the fighting between the ADF, a Ugandan rebel group, and the army as well as renewed fighting between the army and the M23 rebels near the North Kivu capital, Goma, over the past two weeks will increase the danger for women in the region, including those living in camps’.

Four months later, in  November 2013 Dr Carrie Giunta writes that the DRC’s violence and brutality is “proportionate to the demand for the eastern regions of the country’s rich mineral deposits … and it is less a matter of who is funding and supporting one army or another. The question is, rather, what is creating a heightened demand for conflict minerals?” ‘It is doubtful’,’ she says, ‘if defence companies will be seeking out conflict-free mineral sources any time soon.’ Anyway, as she adds, ‘A conflict-free weapon is an oxymoron”.

Extended use of drones in the past decade translates to a US need for the coltan-derived  high-grade metal tantalum to build the basic circuitry of these military aircraft. And, at the current rate, if not already, the weapons industry could put coltan consumption for smartphones and tablets in the shade.  Dr Giunta draws the (now) obvious conclusion that the largely femicidal war in Congo ‘is tied to the huge appetite of the west for strategic minerals essential to the electronics and military industries … [as] criminal regimes in Uganda and Rwanda sponsor proxy militias whose violence facilitates the smuggling of these minerals through the two African nations.’

She notes that at least part of the solution is ‘for western governments to hold Rwanda and Uganda accountable’ for funding these militia. This is evident in the retreat of M23 rebels from Eastern DRC in recent days. But with stockpiles of ‘blood coltan’ apparently running low, the violence could intensify further and may have done so already if the rend within the UNHCR report prevails. International pressure can, she argues, work in stopping Rwanda from continuing its support for the rebels. This is evident in the ‘retreat of M23 rebels from the Eastern DRC in recent days …’

There are worrying connections between two contemporaneous wars, Dr Guinta observes – the twelve-year war on terror and the sixteen-year war in the Congo. The two are joined through the demand for Congolese minerals. They are linked by weapons manufacturing. This gives new meaning to the term ‘blood coltan’.

Lynette J. Dumble and Jocelynne A. Scutt (c) November 2013

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Lynette Dumble, PhD, MSc, DipEd (University of Melbourne, 1972, 1970, 1994 respectively) was the Senior Research Fellow, Department of Surgery at the Royal Melbourne Hospital from 1973 to 1996, and simultaneously visiting Professor of Surgery at the University of Oklahoma (1976 to 1980), University of Illinois in Chicago (1981 to 1988) and University of Texas in Houston (1989 to 1994). From 1997 to 1998 she was a senior lecturer on the History of Political Science and Technology in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, and in 1997 she founded the Global Sisterhood Network, (GSN) largely consisting of feminists from around the world working hand-in-hand, irrespective of class, colour or creed, in a collaborative effort to create improved lives for women, see: http://www.global-sisterhood-network.org  Dr Dumble is currently active in local and national movements in Australia, committed to justice for Indigenous and refugee communities, community development and environmental safety;  and international movements promoting feminist perspectives on conflict resolution, climate change,  community development, gender equity, poverty and global demographics with respect to the world‘s vanishing females.

Jocelynne A. Scutt holds doctorates from the University of Michigan (SJD 1979) and UNSW (PhD 2007) and an Honorary Doctor of Laws from Macquarie University (1994). She is co-administrator with Dr Dumble of ‘The Burqah Debates’, a website devoted to the politics of the hajib, burqah and niqab. Her DVD installation ‘Covered’ is a central feature of the website. Dr Scutt is a Barrister & Human Rights Lawyer, admitted to practice in all Australian jurisdictions and a Member of the Inner Temple, London. She has been Visiting Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, is Visiting Professor at the University of Buckingham and Visiting Fellow at Pennsylvania State University, The Dickinson College of Law. Editor of the Artemis ‘Women’s Voices, Women’s Lives’ series (some 12 books), her monographs include ‘The Incredible Woman – Power and Sexual Politics’ (2 vols), ‘The Sexual Gerrymander – Women and the Economics of Power’, ”Even in the Best of Homes – Violence in the Family’ and ‘For Richer, For Poorer – Money, Marriage and Property Rights’ (with Di Graham).

Carol Mann, ‘From Kabul to Kisangaini’,  http://www.femaid.org/PakreportI.html (accessed   26 November 2013)

Carol Mann and Alphonse Maindo, Sexual Violence in the DCR   – What Good is the Dodd-Frank Act?,

http://thinkafricapress.com/drc/conflict-minerals-and-issue-rape-dodd-frank

(accessed 26   November 2013)

Carrie Giunta, ‘Blood Coltan: Remote-controlled warfare   and the demand for strategic minerals’, Pambazuka News, Issue 655, 21   November 2013, http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/89735   (accessed 26 November 2013)

Formatted, illustrated version of Carrie Giunta, ‘Blood   Coltan: Remote-controlled warfare and the demand for strategic minerals’ at:

http://www.global-sisterhood-network.org/content/view/2860/59/   (accessed 26 November 2013)

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