December 2010 - Congolese Women Speak Out:
The true cost of your new Christmas laptop? Ask the eastern Congolese?'


"Millions of sleek, glossy, elegantly designed laptops and mobile phones will end up as presents under Christmas trees all over the globe in the next few weeks, and how will we know what they have really cost?

What lies between your laptop and the mines in the eastern provinces of Congo is an immensely complex entanglement of economics and politics.

Eastern Congo's hell is an instance of how globalisation generates ungovernable spaces. Where there is a collision of desperate poverty, plentiful guns and a world greedy for natural resources, a brutal chaos results”.

There is a direct connection between our demand for electronics products and the worst sexual violence in the world. The conflict minerals problem is complicated, and the suffering in Congo is immense. But, because, we as electronics consumers are attached so directly to the problem, we can actually play a role in ending the violence.

We must raise our collective voice as consumers, denounce and condemn the violence. By pressuring those in power and electronics companies to remove conflict minerals from their supply chains, we can help remove fuel from the fire in Congo.

The Congolese people have endured Africa's longest and deadliest war. The scramble for Congo's enormous mineral wealth has fueled a conflict which has claimed the lives of more than 6 million people since 1996, and ongoing mass rapes. The painful paradox is that these minerals help make the lives of thousands of eastern Congolese agonisingly wretched.

This is the worst humanitarian crisis and the world's deadliest conflict since World War II, yet the media has given it little attention, and much of the world remains uninformed.

The estimates of Congolese women raped over the last 16 years of conflict, range between 200.000 and 600.000, an undoubtedly low estimates, given the number of incidents that go unreported.

Rape and sexual abuse, committed with unprecedented violence, include acts aimed at humiliating and degrading the victims. It hurts women forever, because even in peacetime you find little response in terms of repairing the effects and providing justice.

Rapes are carried out in public in front of the family, the children and the neighbours. This is the most humiliating act a woman can experience. The fact that after having raped, soldiers will go further on mutilating, forcing members of the same family to have sexual relations with each other, inserting objects such as sticks, bottles, green bananas, pestles smeared with chilli pepper and rifle barrels into the genitals of the victim, we believe that it is an incredible strategy to destroy a whole community. When women are raped in public, they are ostracized and stigmatized. As result of those violent rape, women become incontinent and can no longer control their bodies, they smell and stink.

In addition, could we imagine the psychological and emotional effect on the children who witnessed those horrible acts on their mothers, and also witnessed their fathers being killed? In situations where there is no psycho-social support for traumatised women, girls and even men whose relatives have been raped - how do you expect recovery of that family? Women are dying silently from rape-related effects like fistula. Many have HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections... The attackers also abduct young women and keep them as sexual slaves.

Last month, Roger Meece who heads the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo, said the scale of the security problems in the DR Congo, including sexual attacks, is "enormous - The U.N. force "cannot serve as the complete answer to the security problems of the Congo.”

This conflict has destroyed all prospects of development and stability in our country.

Victoria Dove Dimandja - Congolese Human Right Campaigner
Liberation Congolese Women Group