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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
Time: 2:20 am
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Results for (democratic republic of congo)
1 results foundAuthor: Leslie, Zorba Title: The Congo Report: Slavery in Conflict Minerals Summary: Slavery in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is nothing new. Central Africa was a site of slave raiding for the Red Sea and Indian Ocean slave trade long before the arrival of Europeans. But the Belgian colonial occupation, and especially the personal fiefdom of King Leopold II, brought a particularly brutal brand of slavery enforced through torture, limb amputation and murder by the mercenary Force Publique. This was slavery on a massive scale, and an estimated ten million people died over a fifteen-year period. The term “crimes against humanity” was first used to describe this slavery and genocide. The driving force behind this assault was the extraction of Congo’s riches, focused then on rubber and ivory. The loss of cultural memory was so great that few Congolese today have any knowledge of the genocide or mass enslavement. Congo’s people achieved independence from colonial rule in 1960, but were soon subjected to the predatory regime of Mobutu Sese Seko. Mobutu robbed the country of its riches while neglecting the government’s most basic functions for more than three decades. The jungle literally grew up over the country’s network of roads; unpaid soldiers turned to living off the people; and the people did whatever they could to survive. A corrupt informal economy flourished, fertile ground for modern forms of slavery. Mobutu was deposed in 1997, ending a short civil war in which the victorious rebels were supported principally by Rwanda. But the resulting instability ushered in a second and catastrophic war that left 5 million dead from the conflict, its aftermath, and related famine and disease. Abuses committed by all sides in the conflict are well documented. Demands for justice for the crimes committed during that era have been strengthened by a recent UN report on the most serious violations, including slavery, committed between 1993 and 2003. While peace came officially in 2002, the conflict between the army, armed groups composed in part of rebels from neighboring countries, and a number of homegrown, rag-tag militias in the eastern countryside never stopped. As of this writing, ill-prepared elections scheduled for November 2011 are generating fears of further instability and even a return to full-scale conflict. Meanwhile, the war against women and girls in particular, fought by both armed groups and civilians through means of sexual violence, has never ended. In a context in which the rule of law has collapsed, members of armed groups fight and—more often—prey upon civilians for several reasons. They secure their survival through looting. They fight for control over land that was once devoted to farming and ranching, sometimes along ethnic fault lines, and they fight for control over the mines. This report documents several types of slavery in Congo’s mines. Some forms of slavery are directly linked to the conflict, including the use of so-called “child soldiers” and the kidnapping of civilians for forced labor and sexual slavery by illegal armed groups and uncontrolled army units. Other forms of slavery are familiar around the world: debt bondage, forced marriage, slavery in the commercial sex trade, and child slavery that grows out of poverty and the lack of community-enforced norms respecting child rights. But while slavery is not new, neither are efforts to stop it. An anti-slavery campaign at the end of the 19th century broke Leopold’s grip on Congo. Today, human rights workers in Congo’s war-afflicted east, supported by activists in North America and Europe, work to end the widespread abuses of rape, slavery, and wanton killing. Nonetheless, the dynamics of slavery and how the slavery of eastern Congo fits into contemporary legal definitions of slavery are not well understood. There is no doubt, however, that this is slavery—the control of people using violence and its threat to extract work or sexual exploitation, a radical diminution of free will, intentional coercion to make the victims believe they cannot walk away, and no pay beyond subsistence, if that. Armed groups are the principal perpetrators, but they are not alone. Civilian middle managers, moneylenders, brothel owners, and even parents in some cases, are also responsible for these modern forms of slavery. This means that ending the conflict is only part of the solution. Nor is it possible for a modern-day abolitionist simply to step into the world of eastern Congo, with all of its history and complexity, and expect to rescue those in slavery one-by-one. Congolese abolitionists and human rights workers, joining with anti-slavery workers around the world, must and do operate at multiple levels. The necessary approaches include: active and courageous international diplomacy, pressure from all quarters on Congolese and neighboring governments including Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi; regulatory, consumer and investor pressure on companies to clean slavery out of their supply chains; and the strengthening of mining communities at the local level. Details: Washington, DC: Free the Slaves, 2011. 36p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed March 10, 2012 at http://www.freetheslaves.net/Document.Doc?id=243 Year: 2011 Country: Congo, Democratic Republic URL: http://www.freetheslaves.net/Document.Doc?id=243 Shelf Number: 124426 Keywords: (Democratic Republic of Congo)Conflict Minerals (Democratic Republic of Congo)Debt BondageIllicit Mineral TradeSlavery |