Africa News blog
African business, politics and lifestyle
Must we see rape in Britain to understand rape in Congo?
I was left somewhat traumatised after going to see a screening of a controversial new Hollywood-backed short released this week, aimed at highlighting the link between minerals mined for British mobile phones and the use of rape and murder as weapons of war in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The highly graphic campaign video – appropriately called Unwatchable – starts with a little English girl picking flowers in the garden of her family’s multi-million pound mansion in a picturesque Cotswolds village.
This tranquil scene is shattered in an instant when armed men descend on the house, gang-rape her sister on the kitchen table and then murder her parents. It ends five minutes later with the girl running for her life.
“We placed it in a sort of cliché idyllic countryside, and tracing it back to mobile phones would make it relevant to people on the street,” Marc Hawker of production company DarkFibre told AlertNet.
“It’s a foreign story and that’s how people think. We wanted to target 16 to 30-year-olds who know nothing about what is happening,” said Hawker, who wrote and directed the film.
The film is based on the story of a woman from eastern Congo, Masika, and her family’s suffering at the hands of militia, re-enacted in rural England. According to Hawker, Masika was made to eat her husband’s flesh before the rebels mutilated and killed him, and then raped her and her daughters.
“We wanted people to imagine what is going on in the Congo,” said Vava Tampa, director of Save the Congo, a human rights group made up of London-based Congolese students and professionals which is backing the campaign. “If they can imagine what is happening on the ground then perhaps we will be compelled to take more action.”
Will bandages mend broken ties in the DRC?
The relations between First Quantum and the Democratic Republic of Congo have gone from bad to worse in recent months, after the country expropriated the miner’s $765 million Kolwezi copper tailings project in September.
A recent court ruling in the DRC has also cast a cloud over the future of the company’s Frontier and Lonshi mines, located in the south of the country. The widely covered dispute has led the DRC to accuse First Quantum of running a smear campaign against the country, the feud nearly foiled the DRC’s efforts to secure a $8 billion debt relief deal from the World Bank.
But in a rare conciliatory gesture First Quantum said it is responding to an aid request from the DRC, after a fuel tanker explosion killed at least 230 people and left nearly 200 injured in the Central African country. The company said it has obtained two tonnes of bandages, creams, painkillers and antibiotics from South Africa and is in the process of transporting the medical supplies to the DRC.
First Quantum, which expects the shipment to reach the DRC on July 8, said it plans to coordinate its efforts with the United Nations mission in the region. Can an airplane full of bandages help fix a multi-million dollar international dispute? Only time will tell.
Interesting how much interference goes on in the supposedly “free market”. Governments protect banks when they bring themselves to the edge of collapse. Banks and monetary funds protect corporations against sovereign states.
Why not just let the markets decide who is right?
If DRC has truly mistreated FQ, then other companies will be reluctant to risk investing into mining operations in the DRC, and eventually they will have to learn the hard way.
Free market my foot, constant intervention is how the world economy is run.
Nile River row: Could it turn violent?
The giggles started when the seventh journalist in a row said that his question was for Egypt’s water and irrigation minister, Mohamed Nasreddin Allam.
The non-Egyptian media gave him a bit of a hammering at last week’s talks in Addis Ababa for the nine countries that the Nile passes through.
Allam bared his teeth when a Kenyan journalist accused him of hiding behind “colonial-era treaties” giving his country the brunt of the river’s vital waters whether that hurt the poorer upstream countries or not.
“You obviously don’t know enough about this subject to be asking questions about it,” he snapped before later apologising to her with a kiss on the cheek.
Five of the nine Nile countries — Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya — last month signed a deal to share the water that is a crucial resource for all of them. But Egypt and Sudan, who are entitled to most of the water and can veto upstream dams under a 1929 British-brokered agreement, refused.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi have not signed yet either and analysts are divided on whether they will or not. Six Nile countries must sign the agreement for it to have any power but Egypt says even that wouldn’t change its mind. The five signatories — some of the world’s poorest countries — have left the agreement open for debating and possible signing for up to a year.
So, the world may see the first major water war, but we still do virtually nothing about climate change.
It is good that someone cares enough to do something to stop the atrocities. I hope that after seeing this re-enactment, more people will care and pressure manufacturers to do the right thing, applying pressure where it will help. I hope that this re-enactment will encourage and embolden people to raise awareness of this important issue, and lead to the understanding that rape of African women is just as intolerable as rape of blonde-haired, blue-eyed women.