It’s really really bad what is happening on the Gaza-strip, Israel bombing innocent children and Hamas are putting them in schools and others public building to prevent this from happening.
But, in a country the size of Western Europe, a war rages that has lasted nine years and cost four million lives. Rival militias inflict appalling suffering on the civilian population, and what passes for political leadership is powerless to stop it. This is Congo, and the reason for the conflict – control of minerals essential to the electronic gadgetry on which the developed world depends – is what makes our blindness to the horror doubly shaming. In Norway we are marching the streets, young kids goes on a rampage – but why don’t we do the same thing about Congo, that in itself is probably one of the reason for this has become the forgotten war!
This is the deadliest war since Adolf Hitler’s armies marched across Europe – a war that has not ended. But it’s also the story of a trail of blood that leads directly to you: to your remote control, to your mobile phone, to your laptop and to your diamond necklace. In the TV series Lost, a group of plane crash survivors believe they are stranded alone on a desert island, until one day they discover a dense metal cable leading out into the ocean and the world beyond. The Democratic Republic of Congo is full of those cables, mysterious connections that show how a seemingly isolated tribal war is in reality something very different.
This war has been dismissed as an internal African implosion. In reality it is a battle for coltan, diamonds, cassiterite and gold, destined for sale in London, New York, Paris, Oslo and Stockholm. It is a battle for the metals that make our technological society vibrate and ring and bling, and it has already claimed four million lives in five years and broken a population the size of Britain’s.
It’s nothing more that an real shame on us, instead it’s much more convenient of supporting the Palestinians of Isreals aggression that doing something about Congo. It’s pathetic!