Amanda
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"Break the Silence"
Female
24 years old
NAPERVILLE, Illinois
United States
Last Login:
7/6/2008
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Amanda's Interests
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| General | | | Books | Just ask me for a list of sources on the essay above or any other books on the Congo, I have dozens! Also if you would like to see pictures of the Congo and take a guided web tour of the nation you can go to www.ushmm.org. It also has the latest news on the situation in Congo and is just a wonderful website all around. Also another wonderful web site you can visist is http://www.friendsofthecongo.org or the blog, http://www.friendsofthecongo.org/Blog.php This is a great organization that is working to empower the Congolese people so if you would like to help them ask me or visit their web site/blog! There is also the web site www.monuc.org/Home.aspx?lang=en which is the site of MONUC a group that is actually working in Congo right now. They have news and info that is very helpful, check them out! | | Heroes | |
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Amanda's Details
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| Status: | In a Relationship | | Zodiac Sign: | Aquarius |
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Amanda's Blurbs |
About me:
The Democratic Republic of Congo- A History of Silence-
More than a world away from the United States there is a war going on, one that is not being fought by Americans or getting nearly as much media attention as Iraq; yet millions have died from this forgotten war and if things continue the way they have been millions more will die. It is the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) it started in August of 1998 and since then nearly four million people have died, including civilians, women and children. It is estimated that over a thousand people die a day due to lack of health care, unsanitary conditions, and disease. Despite this not many people have heard about this war, governments(including the United States) are not doing anything to stop the violence or help the people, so the Congolese people must suffer in silence, as they spent the better part of a century doing. Why has the United States and other wealthy nations not stepped up to aid the DRC? According to one author,
“When comparing with the response in Kosovo, they pointed out that in 1999, donor governments gave just $8 per person in the DRC, while providing $207 per person in response to the UN appeal for the former Yugoslavia. While it is clear that both regions have significant needs, there is little commitment to universal entitlement to humanitarian assistance” (Shah).
While looking at the present situation of the DRC it is important to look at the history of the Congo. It is always important to look at the history of a country to understand its present and look to its future. Author Adam Hochschild wrote King Leopold’s Ghost and in it he describes the events of 100 years ago in the nation of Congo. Henry Morton Stanley was the first European to bring the Congo into the spotlight in the mid 19th century. While Mr. Stanley explored uncharted territory (for the Europeans) and discovered many things about the physical nature of the country, the same cannot be said for his treatment of the people living in Congo. He came to the nation with assumptions about the Congolese peoples being lazy and inferior and he did not try to understand their culture. Instead he brutalized the people and went back to Europe reporting that they were lazy, uncivilized heathens that deserved to be treated worse than animals. According to Hochschild, in Stanley’s diaries he chronicled his abuses of the people. In one entry he recalled shooting a Congolese man out of his canoe for amusement.
It was at this time that a ruler of Belgium, King Leopold II, was becoming desperate to hold onto to his power in a time when absolute monarchies were fading out and being replaced by democracies, republics, and Parliaments. Leopold used Stanley to help him claim the Congo for his own. He disguised his lustful claim to the nation under the guise of good will and brotherly love. The United States was the first nation to recognize Leopold’s claim to the country. This was because a senator from the South wanted all the African Americans to relocate to Africa, he campaigned Congress and the President to recognize Leopold’s claim to Congo.
The King of Belgium had the world convinced that he was “saving” the people of Congo from their heathen ways by bringing civilization and religion. He was actually enslaving an entire nation and becoming quite rich off it, according to Adam Hochschild in today’s money Leopold made close to $4.4 billon. The King exported massive amounts of rubber and ivory from the nation and used slave labor to achieve this. He stole from these people and in the meantime through murder, starvation, and disease reduced the population by half. Mr. Hochschild states that as many as ten million people might have died during Leopold’s reign of terror. A Congolese historian estimates the number may be as high as 13 million. To those that survived, they had to endure brutal treatment. There were accounts of people getting their hands cut off for not meeting rubber quota, babies being snatched out of mother’s arms and thrown in the grass, villages being demolished to make way for the rubber industry.
While all of this was going on, the world was oblivious to the Congo’s plight, much as most of the world is today about the nation of Congo. But just as there are outspoken advocates for the country now, there were those who spoke out against the atrocities going on in the past. E.D. Morel was just an ordinary man of no great wealth or political significance, yet he mobilized almost all of Europe to protest Leopold’s reign of terror. Morel was organized and efficient and he got much of the world to take notice of what was really going on in Congo. He would not have succeeded without the help of his friend Sir Roger Casement, who spent almost two decades in the Congo and recorded the crimes against humanity that he saw. He also mobilized the missionaries in the area to document what they saw as well. Speaking of crimes against humanity, one of the first people to use that term was George Washington Williams. He went to the Congo with high hopes and instead found murder and tragedy. Instead of turning a blind eye he wrote scathing letters of criticisms to England, the United States and even Leopold himself, saying the King was guilty of “crimes against humanity.” There was also Hezekiah Andrew Shanu who worked for the regime but was an informant for Morel and gave him vital information about the abuses of Leopold’s men on the people of Congo.
Due to massive protests worldwide, King Leopold was pressured into relinquishing his colony over to the Belgium government. He died an old man without ever paying for his crimes. As for Morel, he continued to work tirelessly for the fair treatment of the Congolese people until the end of his life.
According to Hochschild, the people of Congo are still to this day paying for Leopold’s greed and quest for power, as is much of Africa still reeling from the effects of imperialism. The author also compares what happened in Leopold’s Congo to other tragedies in history such as the Holocaust and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Yet there is no remembrance day for those that perished in Congo and scarcely a lesson in the schools about the mass killings that took place from 1885 to 1908. Why is this event significant for the world, why should Leopold’s Congo be remembered? Hochschild explains that from Congo the first ever modern human rights protest rose up. Morel and his movement helped solidify the ideal that basic, unalienable rights apply to all human beings, not just westerners and Americans. Tragically the Congo has come full circle. One hundred years ago millions were dying, and today nearly four million have perished in the past decade due to war. Not since WWII have so many people died.
The conflict started ten years ago, as a result of the genocide in Rwanda. Fleeing from Rwanda, the Hutsu troops poured into the D.R.C. Their presence there continues to be hostile. This conflict has come to be known as Africa’s First World War, for the fact that many armies have gotten involved. Congo has much to offer those who seek to rule it. Its rich resources have never gone undetected as seen from the savage rape that King Leopold II performed on the region a century earlier. The minerals in Congo alone make up for a vast amount of wealth. The Belgians have been replaced by feuding armies that are literally tearing the region and its people apart. The residents of the D.R.C have to leave their homes in record numbers.
“There are nearly three million displaced Congolese which only leads to higher rate of poverty in the region. Because they have been forced to leave their homes nutrition has suffered and even worse health care is hard to come by. It is the violence in the D.R.C. that causes such human suffering.” (Prendergast, John)
The D.R.C. is a land that has many resources to offer its natives, however the violence must be stopped so that they are able to take advantage of such resources. When the troops from Rwanda invaded the Congo ten years ago they brought a war that they had started in their own nation with them. It was a war the people of the D.R.C. did not ask for, and were unprepared to fight. According to John Prenderagast, “The militias that reside in the East currently pose the biggest threat to the D.R.C. If the U.N. does not get them under control the demise of the D.R.C. will be long and painful not short and quick.”
Children all over the world learn about tragedies in History. They learn about the slave trade, specifically slavery in the United States. They learn about the Holocaust. Yet there is no National Congo Remembrance Day to honor those who were enslaved in their own country, and died under the reign of King Leopold II. There is no major news team such as CNN, permanently stationed in Congo to report live and give the world daily updates. The United States, supposedly the spreaders of democracy, have not addressed the conflict or the millions of people that have died. The country that was once Kongo, then Zaire and finally the Democratic Republic of Congo has largely been ignored by the world. There might be many reasons for this, but one thing is for certain, education is the key to start to help the people of Congo. The world needs to stop ignoring the nation and see what has been going on for the past one hundred years. People need to learn about King Leopold and the millions of people he killed. They need to learn that the genocide in Rwanda was not contained to that nation, it’s after affects are still reverberating in the Congo to this day. Educating the world is the first step. By shedding light on the Congo’s past the world can start to plan for the future. By acknowledging the problems and the atrocities that have occurred and are occurring the world can start to give the Congolese people the dignity and respect they so richly deserve.
Until recently five armies occupied the D.R.C.: Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Congolese rebels and some hundred U.N. sponsored troops called MONUC. Today while most of the foreign armies have formally withdrawn, they still continue to assert control over the nation and even have some militia groups still in the country. With so many armies, the situation is often referred to as chaos. For example there is a major problem in the area with children-solider recruitment. Rebels will raid villages, killing the men and raping the women. Then they will kidnap the young boys and brainwash them, in some cases giving them drugs such as heroine or cocaine. These children are then forced to fight or cross enemy boarders to send messages. They do this because no one suspects the younger children. This causes a dilemma and ties up the U.N.’s peace keeping forces. Do they shoot the children? How does one go about finding someone who hides behind children and uses them to do their murderous bidding?
The children who are born into war are deeply affected by it whether they participate or not. Pressures to join militias are often as great as the pressure for children in this country to try drugs. Some families see joining the militia as an economic solution to the constant poverty. It is hard to stop this cycle of violence because resources to so are not available to the Congolese. This “war” that is being fought is an unorganized war within a war. Not only are the armies fighting rebel militias but also each other with no clear winner but only a nation that loses. The number of armies that occupy the D.R.C. at the moment is the least of the U.N.’s problems; it’s the horrible acts that these armies commit while they are running around unchecked. There are widespread reports of rape and murder.
“According to [ The UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo] MONUC, a group of inspector from its human rights division went to Equateur Province in April 2004 to conduct investigations against the alleged rapes on a massive scale. The team established that in the night of 21 December 2003, the Congolese army battalion based in Songo Mboyo, which were actually [Movement de liberation du Congo] MLC troops, had raped 119 women and girls. The battalion rebelled against its commanders whom they had accused of keeping part of their salaries. The soldiers then robbed almost all the houses in the villages of Songo-Mboyo and Bongandanga.”(IRIN).
There have even been some reports of cannibalism among the rebel factions that are running the area.
“Thousands of residents have fled Bunia and according to the UN mission in Congo, at least 280 people have been killed since May 4, including women and children. Some bodies have been decapitated, and others had their hearts, livers and lungs missing. Witnesses described the death and mutilation that occurred as Lendu tribal fighters killed civilians and combatants and then ripped out their hearts, which they ate while still warm. ‘The sight of a corpse with a missing liver and heart is horrific, especially when you know those parts were eaten by fellow human beings,’ Acquitte Kisembo, a 28 year old medical student, told the Associated Press. The UN mission in Congo said it would investigate these allegations of cannibalism, but it is not the first time such accusations have arisen in Ituri. On January 15, UN investigators confirmed that rebels had committed cannibalism, rape, torture, and killing. ‘The perpetrators of these atrocities will be placed under the spotlight and will be obliged to answer for their actions. They may eventually be the target of prosecution before the International Criminal Court,’ warned Sergio Vieira d Mello, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in a statement on April 8. The Democratic Republic of Congo is a party to the International Criminal Court, so the court has jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity and acts of genocide committed on its territory”(Ladisch).
These armies are out of control and in need of discipline; the rebels need to be eliminated from the fight because they appear only to be harming the D.R.C. The U.N. needs to ban together and send many more troops of its own to as well as humanitarian workers to help get these rebel factions under control and make it so other countries armies’ could be scaled back or leave from the region.
To understand and make realistic conclusions about what the U.N. can do in the future; one must look at past efforts they have made.
“The Security Council deployed the UN Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Cong (MONUC) in November 1999 to support the ceasefire. In July 2003, the Security Council imposed a 12-month arms embargo in the eastern part of the country where armed conflict continued. In May 2005, the Council expanded the arms embargo throughout the DRC territory, and imposed a travel ban and assets freeze on those responsible for the ongoing conflict. But with an area the size of Western Europe and porous boarders, the UN has had difficulty implementing the arms embargo. In March 2005, UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland stated that Easter Congo was scene of the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world today, with a death toll outstripping that of Sudan’s Darfur region”( Boulden, 32).
It is important to see that efforts have been made, yet because the D.R.C. is so big, those efforts have been difficult to keep up. The U.N. desperately needs to send more humanitarian workers to make sure their decisions are being honored. To get things done it takes a lot of people and money, and to get that, a lot of media attention. Today one cannot turn on the television without hearing news of the war in Iraq. Many people are informed on the war because of the media, and because they are informed they are more likely to get involved and form opinions and share those opinions not only with each other, but also with deacons makers. Some think there is a hidden agenda to there being very little media coverage for Congo. Pierre-Andre Conod spoke with The New York Times and said this,
“The reasons for this lack of interest are connected with politics. The conflict was completely forgotten until 2002; nobody talked about it since it was confined to the north of the country. But when Uganda was authorized by the Sudanese government to carry out military operations in southern Sudan in order to purse the rebels causing a significant increase in the number of displaced persons on the territory of Uganda itself international awareness of the conflict began to grow.”
In another article in a review of the book The Silence of the UN Security Council Conflict and Peace and Enforcement in the 1990s Jan Oberg writes,
“Hawkins also discusses the so-called CNN Factor. His conclusion is that the media cannot change priorities of governments but reinforce them beyond proportions and they can also, by neglecting certain facts, perspectives and whole conflicts, add to the world’s body’s indifference vis-à-vis human suffering. Generally, the media focuses intensely on only one or two conflicts, and those which are of political or other interest to leading Western countries and where they are engaged. The out-of-any proportion media attention to Kosovo in 1999 at a time when wars were about to rage or actually raged in the DRC, Ethiopia- Eritrea, Sierra Leone speaks for itself, and is backed up by both reference to media analyses elsewhere and Hawkins own study of the coverage of these conflicts at the time in The New York Times” (Oberg).
The more people are involved, the more money that could be poured into the funds so that more people can be sent to the area to get the armies under control. The more attention, the more humanitarian volunteers could sign up and help out in the DRC. Another solution could be to have journalists based for long periods of time in refugee camps in Congo and broadcast the harsh daily existence of the people’s lives. This would get the Congolese peoples stories’ heard and inspire people around the world to take action.
The conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been going on for a decade now. Some estimate that nearly four million people have lost their lives in the past ten years due to war. Reports claim that over 1,000 people die daily in the nation due to lack of health care and the conflict.
“Recent estimates hold that at least 3.3 million have died in the DRC since August 1998- the largest mortality figure in any conflict since World War II, and equivalent to the number of Sept. 11 deaths everyday for three years, in a country whose population is one-fifth of the US. Recent waves of systematic civilian slaughter around the northeastern town of Bunia have killed upwards of 5,000 and forced the displacement of 500,000, according to Human Rights Watch”(Rackley).
Women and young girls are at risk for rape, young boys must worry about being kidnapped and recruited to the rebel army. Many people have lost everything they own and are forced to live in refugee camps. While the Congolese people suffer, they must do so in silence, because most of the world is focused on Iraq and Sudan, while atrocious crimes against humanity are being committed by the thousands everyday in Congo. When will it stop? The United States seems very eager to get involved in conflicts that directly affect it, yet this nation has barely lifted a finger to help the plight of the Congolese people. While the media has its lens focused on Iraq and Iran, thousands of people are dying everyday in the Congo and most people have no idea this is happening. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere” so must the international community ban together to stop these horrific crimes against humanity in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The people of Congo have waited for over a hundred years to have their story told, yes I know there is much suffering and strife and war in the world, even within the United States, but the Congolese people have suffered in silence for too long. They can not afford to once again be pushed onto the interantional backburner and ignored for who knows how long. I want to help spread their story and get more people involved in and aware of the plight of the Congolese people. This is a subject that I am very passionate about and after knowing what I know I cannot just walk away from the human rights abuses that are going on and have gone on for a century. I hope after reading this you will be inspired to learn more and join me in spreading the word. Do not think, "I am just a regular person what can I do." As Margeret Mead once said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citzens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
..This profile was edited with Thomas' myspace editor™ V2.5
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Who I'd like to meet:
I'd like to meet people who are intrested in talking about global issues and humanitarian causes. I would like to meet people with an intrest in travling to "third world" countries and who would like to be more informed on the nation of Congo and who like to join me in helping spread the word about this forgotton nation and doing anything and everything to help not only the Congo but other people and places who are in need.
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