In a blockbuster end-of-decade issue reviewing the past 10 years in rock and roll, Rolling Stone magazine also devotes considerable time and space—12 pages, to be exact—to one of the most intransigent conflicts that spanned six years of this decade: the conflict in Darfur, Sudan.
Journalist Ben Wallace-Wells draws on interviews with some of the most active leaders—including Enough's Co-founder John Prendergast—dedicated to resolving the conflict. Wallace-Wells's analysis divides the conflict into phases, beginning with Aid, and progressing to Diplomacy, Peacekeeping, Justice, and currently, Stalemate.
As Prendergast recalls to Wallace-Wells, "There was an ever-increasing chorus to send in peacekeepers before there was any peace agreement, but the chorus was all wrong." He concludes that the Darfur/Sudan crisis has been governed by "the law of the tool - if you have certain tools, you throw them in."
He adds, "We've lost years not dealing with the political roots of the problem."
Grab this latest issue of Rolling Stone at newsstands now.
Photo: Sudan Liberation Army rebels in South Darfur. (IRIN)
A soon-to-be-published United Nations report on conflict-minerals mining in the DRC has—for the first time—identified a U.S. company that allegedly trades in one of the conflict minerals fueling Congo’s rebel groups.
An article on the news site Global Post, by veteran reporter Joe Lauria, cites the U.N. study’s disclosure that Niotan Inc., located in Mound House, Nevada, “buys and sells the mineral coltan, used to make electrolytic capacitors for mobile phones and personal computers. The report details a four-step process by which the minerals move from the killing hills of eastern Congo to American electronics manufacturers."
Coltan, or tantalum, from Congo makes up between 15% and 25% of the world’s annual consumption of the mineral. The other conflict minerals mined in Congo and traded on the black market include tin, tungsten, and gold.
“Niotan,” the article says, “buys from three war-zone suppliers — Chinese-run Huaying Trading Company (HTC), Bukavu-based World Mining Company (WMC), and Etablissement Muyeye, one of the biggest minerals trading houses in Bukavu (Congo). These groups get their minerals from areas of South Kivu province controlled by the FDLR rebel group, the report says.” The Congo traders sell their minerals to Hong Kong-based African Ventures Ltd., which is run by a director of Niotan, John Crawley. Crawley didn’t return Lauria’s phone calls seeking a comment.
Click here for an op-ed by John Prendergast on Global Post that traces the international conflict minerals supply chain from mines to mobile phones and other electronics.
Click here to listen to Enough Research Associate David Sullivan’s interview with New York public radio station WNYC’s Brian Lehrer on the new U.N. report and Niotan’s alleged role in the coltan trade.
New media aficionado Matt Smith, a Bend, Oregon, graduate student, knew he had to work fast when he heard about the Enough-YouTube Come Clean 4 Congo video contest a few days before the submission deadline.
Driving home from volunteer work, Smith wrote a script and cast a video in his head. In the next days, he whipped together a team: a former intern who's a student and a rap artist in Chicago to perform, a video editor, musician, and photographer - all volunteers - and got the video submitted to the Enough Project in Washington, D.C., on time.
The result, Life Should Be Free, is a compelling rap monologue that won over thousands of viewers around the world and beat out stiff competition from other video artists. Speaking into the camera, rapper Micah Bournes, 21, vividly articulates the connection between the armed rebel-controlled trade in conflict minerals mined in Congo and the widespread sexual violence against women perpetrated by the rebels - and the connection those issues have to cell phones and other small electronics that are powered by Congolese minerals. An excerpt:
"It's right here, right now, today
Hiding inside the price we pay
For the brand new phone that says we don't know or we don't care
That death and despair and war are what provide the means
To have our own well-connected lives."
Next month, Smith will fly to the Hollywood Film Festival in Los Angeles as Enough's guest, where his video will be screened at an October 24 symposium to address the issue of violence against women in Congo. He'll receive an award from actress Sonya Walger from the ABC’s series “Lost.” Smith's video is being featured on Enough's website and YouTube page, where it has been seen by more than 100,000 viewers.
The 27-year-old intercultural studies major saw the strife in Congo's mineral-rich eastern region first-hand as a humanitarian volunteer earlier this year. "Three months before we got there, the whole region was evacuated and houses were ransacked, looted and emptied, crops destroyed, livestock stolen," he says. "There was a distribution of food and fuel, and basically entire towns, entire villages, were lined up. We talked to people and heard a lot of stories about rape and gender violence."
Working in Congo and on a previous project with homeless children in Ethiopia, Smith says, made him certain about his career path: "It was me realizing that what I want to do, with everything I've been given, I want to give back - to help restore peace, to help restore justice, to restore life."
While in graduate school, Smith works as a youth counselor at a church in Bend and is volunteering with World Relief Next, a project focused on the Great Lakes region of Africa. Affiliated with the relief and development organization World Relief, Smith's group works on projects to engage younger audiences through online organizing, videos, and blogging, and fundraisers like foot races, film screenings, and a benefit CD.
The project's motto, love-learn-engage, Smith says, is what he lives by too. "Recognizing that there's a bigger story out there in the world is really the first step.People knowing about what's going on in the Congo is next,” he says. “Then we engage with the right tools and the right information."
In a live interview with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC today, Enough
Co-founder John Prendergast previewed some of the most important issues in Africa that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be confronting during her trip this week and next.
Prendergast noted that while Africa has made progress in areas such as economic growth and health care, "what continues to bring Africa down is conflicts." He mentioned the two worst, in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Asked about the Obama administration's apparent policy confusion over Sudan, which was the subject of hearings on Capitol Hill last week, Prendergast said there was split over "whether Obama should use carrots and incentives, or pressures and sticks." Prendergast noted that he personally disagreed strongly with simply giving the Sudanese government incentives to change. "I think the government of Sudan is going to eat these carrots and continue with the status quo, which is very deadly."
Regarding the Congo, Prendergast told Mitchell that nation was host to the "deadliest conflict in the world since the Holocaust" and the
"deadliest place in the world if you're a woman, because of the use of rape as a tool of war." He added that Secretary Clinton should talk about ways the U.S. could address the problems of Congo to "treat the root causes, not just the symptoms." He mentioned one of the causes -- the mining of conflict minerals in Congo to produce "raw materials that go into our cellphones and laptops."
Enough’s RAISE Hope for Congo campaign reached out to video artists to help tell the story about the crises plaguing the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s – an epidemic of sexual violence, armed groups earning millions from the mining of conflict minerals, increasing numbers of people displaced by conflict.
We launched the Come Clean 4 Congo partnership with YouTube, and dozens of activists responded with clever, creative videos illustrating the scourge of conflict minerals. A trio of celebrity judges narrowed them down to three finalists. Now it’s up to the public to choose the very best – beginning today. You can visit www.youtube.com/enoughproject to watch the three finalist videos (they’re only a minute long each) and cast your vote. The winner will be announced on September 9.
Or just watch the videos here:
The videographer who made the winner will be flown to Los Angeles, where the video will be screened at the first-ever human rights symposium connected to the Hollywood Film Festival at the ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood on October 24. The winner will be presented with an award at the symposium, which will feature an expert panel of speakers to address the issue of violence against women in Congo, Afghanistan, Iran and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
The winning video also will be featured on the Enough Project’s websites and YouTube page. Judges for the contest were Oscar-nominated actor Ryan Gosling, actress Sonya Walger from ABC’s "Lost," and Oscar-nominated director Wim Wenders.
But don’t stop there: Please help us end the mining of conflict minerals by endorsing the Conflict Minerals Pledge. All you have to do is text CONGOPLEDGE (one word, no spaces) to ACTION (228466) and endorse the pledge. Help Enough reach our goal of 100,000 endorsements.
In a project focused on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice paid a visit to the Harlem Children's Zone to introduce students to the work of the United Nations. "Young people in this country have a great generosity and a great capacity - even when they have tough times themselves - to understand and be interested in the circumstances of kids in other parts of the world," Ambassador Rice told the 120 students at the charter school famous for turning out high-achieving students from low-income, minority families. As this CNN report by U.N. correspondent Richard Roth shows, Ms. Rice brought along staff from UNICEF to demonstrate the types of humanitarian aid the agency provides, such as food supplements and capsules to make water drinkable. Later, the children were asked to choose what items to include in packages that would be sent to Congo. Take a look:
Enough's co-Founder John Prendergast has a wide-ranging discussion with host Daljit Dhaliwal on the PBS international affairs program Foreign Exchange this weekend. He talks about the Obama administration's interest in engaging with activists in the Darfur movement, but also touches on the need for the president to articulate a definitive Sudan policy and move quickly to begin implementing it with the help of international partners. Prendergast discusses hoped-for changes in Uganda that U.S. activists will push for during the upcoming June Lobby Days in Washington, D.C., and he explains the Enough Project's work to highlight the conflict minerals trade in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and brutal sexual violence it fuels.
The program will be broadcast Sunday, May 31, on public television stations around the country. In Washington, D.C., the program will air at 9am on WETA Channel 26 and at 10am on WHUT Channel 32. For the national schedule, click here.
Don’t miss this new CNN piece about Congo’s conflict minerals trade. Enough's RAISE Hope for Congo campaign is fully engaged in bringing this trade -- and the mass violence it helps perpetuate -- to the public’s attention. The thoughtful and thorough segment aired over the weekend on CNN's Inside Africa program, and included an interview with Enough’s co-Founder John Prendergast and a snippet from our YouTube video contest to raise awareness about the connection between trace minerals contained in cell phones and other electronic products and armed conflict and sexual violence in Congo.
The five-minute piece also included comments about Enough’s conflict minerals campaign from CTIA, the International Association for the Wireless Telecommunications, and U.S. Representative Jim McDermott (D-WA), who is considering sponsorship of a House bill on this issue. Senators Feingold, Durbin, and Brownback last month introduced a Senate bill, the Congo Conflict Minerals Act of 2009, which would require American companies to disclose where exactly they are getting their minerals.
This weekend, catch Enough co-Founder John Prendergast and U.S. Representative Jim McDermott on CNN-International's Inside Africa cable television program. They'll talk about how the mining and marketing of conflict minerals from Congo help fuel armed rebel groups and lead to sexual violence against women and girls. The minerals, tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold, end up in cell phones and other small electronic devices. A Senate bill, the Congo Conflict Minerals Act of 2009, would help break the link between conflict minerals and armed groups and would provide for greater accountability and transparency in the minerals marketing process. The program will air:
Saturday, 10am and 6:30pm (EST)
Sunday, Sunday, 6:30am (EST)
Tuesday, 3:30am and 10pm (EST)
A webcast of the program will be available on Inside Africa’s website on Tuesday, May 26. To learn more about conflict minerals and get involved in raising awareness about the deadly links between the minerals trade and the world’s deadliest war, visit RAISE Hope for Congo.
Today, Enough Advisor Omer Ismail, a native of Darfur, joined 16 members of the Congressional Black Caucus for a press conference to announce their participation in a fast "in solidarity with the Darfuri people."
Actress and activist Mia Farrow, whose hunger strike for Darfur inspired the Darfur Fast for Life fasting chain, issued a notice that "among President Obama's priorities, Darfur has to take its place."
Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ) described the fast as "our small way of saying to Darfuris that they are not alone, they are not forgotten, and we stand with them." He emphasized that the group's highest priority was to secure a meeting with President Obama and his Special Envoy to Sudan, Gen. Scott Gration, to discuss next steps. The group, he said, was glad that Gen. Gration is about to begin a trip to China, one of biggest international players in Sudan, though he wished the CBC had been granted a meeting ahead of time.
Caucus Chair Barbara Lee, who's been to Darfur several times and sponsored the Darfur divestment bill that became law last year, noted that John Conyers (D-MI), the caucus's longest-serving member, was there, along with one of its newest members, first-term Representative Donna Edwards (D-MD.) The hastily-called press conference drew several members of the press, a testament to the power of the caucus and the importance of the issue.
Kudos is due to the caucus for holding this event as a stand-up on the terrace of the Cannon House Office Building without the customary comfy chairs, continental breakfast, or deli lunch. We have had enough of events where a bountiful repast is served to those discussing the fate of 2.8 million people living on 1,000 calorie a day "refugee rations."
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