Enough In the Blogs

The phrase “conflict minerals” is quickly becoming a much more familiar term as concerned consumers, organizations and politicians begin to raise public awareness of the role the mineral trade plays in fuelling the violence raging in the eastern provinces of the DR Congo.

There was a rare flash of good news about Sudan recently. The government of Sudan and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), one of the two main rebel groups who have been fighting against the government of Sudan and has been backed by the government of Chad, signed a preliminary cease-fire at a meeting in Doha, Qatar.

As controversy over conflict gold and dirty mining escalates, ethical issues are becoming as important for gold as they are for diamonds.

Apple recently published a report on their site addressing how the global powerhouse is taking the responsibility to pressure its suppliers to not only treat their employees fairly, but also ensure conflict minerals are not a part of their products.

n honor of Valentine’s Day I attended a benefit production of Eve Ensler’s award-winning play The Vagina Monologues. This year the V-day global campaign focus is “Stop Raping our Greatest Resource: Power to Women in the DRC.”

I’ve learned some new words.

One is “autocannibalism,” coined in French but equally appropriate in English. It describes what happens when a militia here in eastern Congo’s endless war cuts flesh from living victims and forces them to eat it.

Do you live in Oklahoma? Or have any friends and family in the lovely Sooner State? Then you need to get on the phone and tell Senator Tom "Dr. No" Coburn to stop blocking the passage of the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act.

It’s easy to wonder how world leaders, journalists, religious figures and ordinary citizens looked the other way while six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. And it’s even easier to assume that we’d do better.

My Sunday column is again from Congo, through the lens of a doctor (Denis Mukwege) and his patient (Jeanne Mukuninwa). They are both extraordinary figures, and Dr. Mukwege is sometimes mentioned — most deservedly — as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. His Panzi Hospital is an oasis in South Kivu, just as the Heal Africa Hospital is in North Kivu.

My Thursday column is about the war in eastern Congo, looking at the work of Lisa Shannon and her Run for Congo Women. Readers sometimes ask why I often write about outsiders, like Lisa, rather than about the innumerable local people who are doing extraordinary work — often at greater risk. It’s certainly true that Congo, for example, has a vibrant and admirable civil society, full of Congolese women themselves organizing against rape and war.

Four years ago, asking the President of the United States a meaningful question would have required serious power, uncommon access, or a lot of luck combined with being in the right place at the right time. Not anymore.

Thanks to CitizenTube and the connective power of the internet, any one of us can reach the president. Yesterday, we did.

Thanks to the Sudan advocacy community's ability to quickly mobilize, the Enough Project was able to get Sudan policy front and center before President Obama not just once, but twice in 48 hours. First, President Obama was at the Duke-Georgetown basketball game on Saturday where he saw a powerful joint appeal from students at both schools during halftime to support the Sister School's program assisting Darfuri refugee kids trying to get an education in camps in Chad.

The Georgetown basketball team may have won against Duke on Jan. 30 in front of a capacity crowd that included President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, but students from both schools have put aside rivalry to become partners for a common cause -- Darfur refugees.

Today's YouTube event at the White House, starring President Obama, CitizenTube director Steve Grove, and a bunch of user-generated questions from the public, has to be judged a success, in my view.

This week didn’t bring any news of attacks by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). And compared to this time last year, the general state of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has eased. Although Enough Project warns that though Ugandan and Congolese state officials may say that the conflict is dying down, attacks are not a thing of the past, and happen with relative frequency.