32 Colleen Freeman, phone and email interviews, December 2005-Janury 2006. Freeman worked with Friends of the Earth prior to taking a job with RAID. See also the report Five Years On: A Review of the OECD Guidelines and National Contact Points, September 22, 2005, www.oecdwatch.org/docs/OECD_Watch_5_Years_On.pdf. I contacted the US companies mentioned in the third UN report. Two of them, Cabot and Kemet, supplied links to web pages responding to charges that they had profited form illegally obtain coltan. Cabot’s page ha a link to a PDF file stating, “Cabot will no purchase any tantalum supplies from any unlawful source in any part of the world.” However, the 2001 UN Panel of Experts reports noted, “In fact, no coltan exits from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo without benefiting either the rebel group[s] or foreign armies.” During the period covered by the report, 60-70% of the coltan in eastern Congo was mined under the surveillance of the Rwandan military, using the forced labor of prisoners. George W. Bush’s Secretary of Energy (appointed in 2005), Samuel Bodman, was CEO and chair of Cabot Corp. in 1997-2001, when large quantities of illicit coltan from Congo hit the market and Cabot allegedly acquired them.
33 RAID, “Unanswered Questions” report, April 2004. Human Rights Watch echoes RAID’s final suggestion in the report, writing, “The international community may want to consider a permanent roster of experts who can investigate these issues throughout the world, rather than ad hoc panels.” Arvind Ganesan and Alex Vines, “Engine of War: Resources, Greed and the Predatory State,” www.hrw.org/wr2k4/14.htm.
34 For more on this point, see www.raid-uk.org/news.htm
35 Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib scandals in the American media, cited CPT as a source in his May 5, 2004, New Yorker article “Chain of Command.” After the kidnapping of four CPTers in Baghdad, Hersh told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman that the work of CPT was “cutting edge.” www.DemocracyNow.org/article.pl?sid=05//11/30/153252.
* * * *Kathleen Kern has worked with Christian Peacemaker Teams since 1993. CPT provides organizational support to persons committed to faith-based nonviolent alternatives in situations where lethal conflict is an immediate reality or is supported by public policy (see www.cpt.org). However, teams in Haiti, Chiapas and other locations have found that once the risk of lethal physical violence ends, the economic violence cemented in place by the corporatocracy can cause as much, if not more, suffering. Kern has served on assignments in Haiti, Palestine, Chiapas, South Dakota, Colombia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She was a member of a fact-finding delegation to the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo in autumn 2005, where she gathered information that appears in this article.
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Reprinted with permission of the publisher. From A Game as Old as Empire: The secret world of economic hit men and the web of global corruption, © 2007 by Steven Hiatt, ed. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, CA. All rights reserved. www.bkconnection.com
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Notice of any transcription errors should be sent to Rady Ananda at j30rady@yahoo.com.
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