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Mark · Site Admin Joined: 13 Nov 2007 Posts: 1052

The Human Cost of Cheap Cell Phones

http://www.opednews.com/articles/...Ce-by-Rady-Ananda-080724-599.html

Excerpt:

By Kathleen Kern

Goma’s hospital has one tent for rape victims awaiting surgery and one for victims recovering from surgery. In the pre-op area, I held a month-old girl who was entranced by the dim electric light hanging from the ridgepole. She arched her back and waved her arms, straining to encounter this exciting new world and oblivious of the atrocity that had created her life.

The mother told me her baby’s name was Esther. Clasping her breasts, she said she had no milk. She did not tell me what operation she was waiting for. Perhaps her rapist(s) had caused a fistula, penetrating the wall between her rectum and vagina with penises, guns, or machetes. Hundreds of other injuries are possible. We had seen pictures of women who had been shot in the vagina, who had had salt rubbed in their eyes until they were blind (and thus could not identify their assailants), who had been burned or had limps amputated after being raped.

A week earlier we had been in Bukavu, where we had visited the office of a human rights organization and seen glory photos of a recent massacre in the nearby village of Kanyola. The assailants were members of the Interahamwe militia that had carried out the genocide in Rwanda. They had hacked their victims to death with machetes or burned them instead of using guns, so that UN peacekeepers at a nearby base would not hear the slaughter. The human rights worker showing us the pictures had recently replaced the previous director of the agency, Pascal Kabungulu Kimbembe. After a local Congolese army officer had threatened him, Kimbembe had been assassinated in front of his home earlier in the year.1

These low-tech acts of barbarism engulfing eastern Congo are outgrowths of a global demand for high-tech consumer goods such as cell phones, laptop computers, and PlayStations. Coltan (short for columbite-tantalite), an ore vital for manufacturing these devices, has been a particular concern for those investigating the involvement of multinational corporations in the violence: 80% of the known coltan reserves in the world are in Congo, making it potentially as strategically important to the U.S. military as the Persian Gulf.2 But demand for gold, diamonds, copper, zinc, uranium, cobalt, cadmium, timber, and other resources in which Congo is rich has also contributed to the holocaust that has overtaken the country during the past decade.