Rape of a Nation

by Marcus Bleasdale

Marcus Bleasdale: The Congo is gifted with enormous natural resources.

It has diamonds, gold, vast amounts of water, coltan, cassiterite.

It could and should be a very, very rich country.

But in fact what the reality has been in the past years is that these natural resources have been a curse.

It's created a conflict, led by warlords that are trying to take the natural resources from DRC for their own gains.

The warlords have been recruiting child soldiers and in the last 10 years more than 30,000 child soldiers have been recruited in Eastern Congo. Many of whom are still serving now.

The local mining population doesn't really know the value of what it is they're extracting. And so they rely on intermediaries to tell them what the price of that gold is.

And those intermediaries inevitably don't tell them the right price, and the increases in prices on the international markets are never passed down to the people that are extracting that gold from the gold fields.

Many of the children that were forced to fight to gain control of the mines, they put down the Kalashnikov, that they were made to carry 12 months earlier and they pick up a shovel and they are forced to work in the mines digging for gold for the warlords.

And many hundreds of children have died being buried alive in the tunnels, in the gold fields of Eastern Congo.

Joseph Kabila was elected President. And has been ruling the country ever since.

His response to the elections and his new found power was to eradicate the political opposition.

He arrested many of the opposition activists. And these billions of dollars that have been spent on the Congolese election have essentially been wasted because there is now no democracy in Congo.

The Congolese have had this history of being led by dictators who look out for only themselves. They steal the vast natural resources that DRC has and the Congolese people receive no benefits. The Congolese people only suffer as a result of the lack of social structure that this pillaging creates.

But this is not exactly a great lesson for the Congolese people who see their leaders as thieves.

That filters down through every level of society.

The military will use their AK47, the Kalashnikoff's, to reap the benefits of war. They will pillage, they will rape, they will steal cattle, they will steal goats, they'll take a chicken at gunpoint just so that they can eat because they're essentially not getting paid by anyone.

When there's increased military activity in, in certain areas to try and secure the natural resources, the population inevitably starts to, to run.

The displaced in Congo number in the millions. They have no access to any medical care, any healthcare. Sometimes they have to walk for days before they arrive in safety.

More than 90% of the people who die in Congo are dying because of the lack of access to medication.

And this lack of access to medication is caused by the overall insecurity.

Just the very smallest of illnesses like diarrhea, the most basic of sicknesses like malaria, which warrant just a small series of pills, they have no access to this sort of medication because they've probably been stolen by the military.

As a result you have many millions dying because of the lack of access to the most basic healthcare.

Over the past years in DRC sexual violence has been an enormous problem.

Just in 2007 alone there are 40,000 reported rape cases.

It's happening in every town, in every province.

Anywhere there's military activity sexual violence is prevalent and it is a daily fear for every woman. The government soldiers and the warlords are equally culpable.

A military may be arrested. He may spend 6 or 7 days in jail, but then he'll be out again. And he could find himself passing the women he raped just weeks after he was found guilty of the crime.

The women, they whisper to you what happened to them because they're so ashamed of what it was that was committed against them.

In one province alone there were reported 40 women being raped every day. 13% of those being raped were under the age of 14. And 10 to 12% of those that were raped contracted HIV.

These problems and these statistics are just horrific and so huge that we sometimes can't even contemplate the severity of the problem there. But still, the international community does nothing.

The problems in Congo are vast and sometimes the whole problem feels just too huge to fix.

This is the largest death toll in the world since the Second World War, but it's not a problem that is unsolvable. It is not a problem that we can't do anything about.

I think there's one thing that we can do as consumers, and that is be aware of where our natural resources come from.

When you're buying gold, when you're buying diamonds ask the retailer if they know where they're coming from.

And that's one of the ways that we as consumers can maintain pressure on an industry that is sometimes not as diligent as it can be.

One of the main things that will bring Congo out of the situation that it's in at the moment is education.

There are great organizations that are working in DRC. Save the Children, UNICEF, Human Rights Watch is doing enormous amount of work. And organizations such as UNHCR are providing the stability and the infrastructure to allow the children to receive some form of education.

If we maintain a good level of education amongst the population, there is always a hope that the future will be better. A better-educated population leads to better questions, and better questioning population leads to a better government.