The Human Cost of Cheap Cell Phones

1 In this chapter, Congo refers to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the nation once called Zaire, whose capital is Kinshasa – as opposed to the Republic of Congo which borders the DRC and whose capital is Brazzaville.

2 Testimony in a congressional hearing conducted by Representative Cynthia McKinney, April 16, 2001, www.house.gov/mckinney/news/pr010416.htm

3 The International Rescue Committee estimated in 2004 that approximately 3.9 million people have died since 1998 because of the instability: 38,000 deaths occur in Congo every month above what is considered a “normal level” for the country, translating into 1,250 excess deaths every day. Over 70% of these deaths, most due to easily preventable and treatable diseases, occur in the insecure eastern provinces. “Less than two percent of the deaths were directly due to violence,” Richard J. Brennan points out. “However, if the effects of violence – such as the insecurity that limits access to health care facilities – were removed, mortality rates would fall to almost normal levels.” The British medical journal Lancet confirms the IRC statistic of 3.9 million war-related deaths between 1998 and 2004. It also notes that every few months “the mortality equivalent of two southeast Asian tsunamis [referring to the December 2004 catastrophe] ploughs thru its territory.” Lancet declares that the high mortality rates are ongoing: “Preemptive War Epidemiology: Lessons from the Democratic Republic of Congo.” The primary article discussing the procedure by which the IRC and the Lancet came up with their statistics is Benjamin Coghlan, Richard J. Brennan, Pascal Ngoy, et al., “Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: A Nationwide Survey,” Lancet 367 (January 7, 2006), www.thelancet.com

4 In 1961, the US installed Mobutu, who had, with the support of the US and Belgium, assassinated Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of Congo/Zaire after Belgium granted the country independence. Lumumba was a Pan-Africanist and populist, unwilling to ally with either the US or the Soviet Union. After he publicly advocated using Congo’s resources to benefit the Congolese, the diamond corporation DeBeers feared it would lose access to Congo’s diamonds; Lumumba’s stand no doubt hastened his demise. Once Lumumba  was out of the way, acting Prime Minister Adoula approved a deal with DeBeer’s negotiator Maurice Tempelsman and telegrammed the news to US President John F. Kennedy. A 1961 State Department memo headed “Congo Diamond Deal” concluded that the US ought to support the proposal: “How US Foreign Policy over Decades Was Influenced by the Diamond Cartel,” www.minesandcommunities.org/Company/diamonds1.htm. This website contains a partial transcript from an April 6, 2001 discussion held by Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney at which Janine Farel Robersts testified. Roberts’ research appears in Blood-Stained Diamonds: A Worldwide Diamond Investigation (Bristol: Impact Media, 2001). Over the next decades, Mobutu pillaged the country, as the Belgians had before him, depositing billions of dollars in foreign banks. Tempelsman and his staff helped Mobutu run Congo/Zaire and secured funding for Mobutu from the Untied States. Mobutu, however, had begun to limit  Western access to Congo’s resources, and this may also have been a motive for the US to support Kabila, Rwanda, and Uganda in their quest to overthrow Mobutu. Tempelsman is a major donor to the Democratic Party. During the presidency of Bill Clinton, he stayed at the White House several times and went sailing with the Clintons when they vacationed at Martha’s Vineyard: Susan Schmidt, “Tempelsman Plan Got the Ear of US Aides,” Washington Post, August 2, 1997.

5 Madeleine Drohan, Making a Killing: How and Why Corporations Use Armed Force to Do Business (Guilford, Conn.: Lyon’s Press, 2004), pp. 302-3.

6 “Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo,” 2001, www.un.org/Docs/sc/letters/2001/3573.pdf; Asad Ismi, “Congo: The Western Heart of Darkness,” Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Monitor, October 2001, posted on the Mines and Communities website, www.minesandcommunities.org/Country/congo1.htm

7 Small coltan deposits have been mined from some time in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, and Zaire, where it is often found as a byproduct of cassiterite in industrial tin mining: Pole Institute, “The Coltan Phenomenon: How a Rare Mineral Has Changed the Life of the Population of War-Torn North Kivu Province in the East of the Democratic Republic of Congo,” January 2002, www.pole-institute.org/documents/coltanglais02.pdf

8 All Party Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes Region and Genocide Prevention, “Illegal Minerals and Conflict,” Parliamentary Briefing, March 2003, www.appggreatlakes.org/cgi-bin/site/index.cgi?back=&pid=27&keywords=&topic=Briefing_Papers. See also the official Rwandan response to the “Report of the Panel of Experts,” 2001, at www.gov.rw/government/04_22_01news_Response_To_UN_Report.htm

9 “Report of the Panel of Experts,” 2001. See also Dena Montague and Frida Berrigan, “The Business of War in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” Dollars and Sense, July-August 2001. The report covers plunder by Congolese and Zimbabwean political, military, and commercial interests, noting this network had transferred as much as US$5 billion of assets from the state mining sector to private companies. From 1998 to 2000, none of these transactions benefited Congo’s treasury. The report notes that the rates of malnutrition and mortality in the government-held areas were a result of diverting resources from state companies such as Gécamines to corrupt Zimbabwean and Congolese officials.

10 “Report of the Panel of Experts,” 2001, on the plunder of Congo, casts doubt on Rwanda’s assertions that it was invading Congo for its own security. The Panel had a letter dated May 26, 2000, in which the Military High Command for RCD-Goma (a Rwandan-backed Congolese militia group) urged its units to maintain good relationships with their Interahamwe “brothers.” A 30-year-old Interahamwe combatant living in Bukavu told United Nations personnel in 2002, “We haven’t fought much with the RPA [Rwandan Patriotic Army] in the last two years. We think they are tired of this war, like we are. In any case, they aren’t here in the Congo to chase us, like they pretend. I have seen the gold and coltan mining they do here, we see how they rob the population.”

11 In an April 16, 2001 hearing Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney investigated charges that Kagame had orchestrated the April 6, 1994 assassination of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, shooting down their plane with surface-to-air missiles obtained from the US via Uganda. Cameroonian journalist Charles Onana made similar claims in his book, The Secrets of the Rwandan Genocide.  Kagame sued him for defamation, but a Paris court found in favor of Onana. Sympathy for Tutsis in the West after Rwandan genocide has given Kagame carte blanche to commit egregious human rights abuses in much the same way that the world does not hold Israel accountable for human rights abuses because of Germany’s attempt to slaughter all the Jews during WW II. The Congolese resent this indulgent attitude toward Rwanda. At a guest house in Goma where our delegation stayed, the manager, discovering our intent to understand the roots of violence in the region told us, “The Tutsis are a cruel people.” He then described abuses committed by Tutsis in Rwanda before the genocide.

12 Montague and Berrigan, “The Business of War.”

13 McKinney hearing, April 16, 2001.

14 Ismi, “Congo: The Western Heart of Darkness.”

15 McKinney hearing, April 16, 2001.