World Ark Magazine - November/December 2008 - (Page 15)

I wanted to talk to people who’d seen war with their own eyes, who knew it from their own lives. On the porch in front of the building were some empty benches, so I sat down to wait for my appointment. Soon the seats started filling up. One young guy who sat down next to me had been a video editor in Bukavu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Another man came from one of the refugee camps in the West of Uganda, where he and his wife looked after their own six children and seven orphans. He told me in Swahili that he was from Bunia. “Isn’t the war over in Bunia?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “It is quiet there now. But after the things I have seen with my eyes, I can never go back.” More people filed in, and a woman named Lillian from Goma in the Congo sat down next to me with her son perched on her hip. “What is your son’s name?” I asked. “Bryan,” she said. “How old is he?” “He is 5 months. But he is sick.” “Do you have others?” “I have three children. One is 3. The other is 5. But I don’t know where they are. We are wakimbizi,” she said, using a Swahili word that means “the running people.” “The Lendu are killing everybody.” “Really?” I said. “I thought the fighting was finished.” “Every time it finishes, it starts again.” “Why?” She looked out at the road and said, “You can’t know.” It is hard to know why the Lendu were killing the Hema, or the Hema were killing the Lendu, or the Hutu were killing the Tutsi, or the Luo were killing the Kikuyu. From afar, one can understand why the carpet seller might wonder if conflict was simply in their system. But up close, the question resists such a simplistic and condescending answer. Once, when I was living in Tanzania in the 1990s, I was sitting in a garden restaurant when a small boy came up to me. He sat down at my table and asked if I wanted to go on a safari. I said I didn’t and he didn’t really seem to care. So I asked where he was from, and he said he was from Burundi. He was a Tutsi, and his family had been killed by Hutus. “A Hutu isn’t a person,” he told me. “You can talk to them, and they look right at you, and they look like a person. But if you turn around, they will kill you. They are not human.” For me, this raised perhaps the most important question at the heart of many of Africa’s problems. It is the question of The Other, of not only how we draw the line between us a Blessing and a curse a frica is a mineral-rich continent, which is part of the problem. Copper, uranium, gold and other valuable resources lie beneath African soil, and the race to claim those resources drives much of the fighting. In 1998, an organization called Global Witness issued a report delineating the strong ties between Africa’s buried treasure and its wars. The report shows how the diamond fields of Angola essentially fueled the country’s civil war, which cost half a million lives. Since then, “conflict diamonds” or “blood diamonds” are something every clerk in every jewelry store in the West can talk about, and the industry has set up the Kimberly Process, a certification scheme that, while not perfect, has gone a long way toward reducing the number of blood diamonds on the market. But there is more. There is blood oil. There is blood copper. There is blood timber and blood tin. It is sometimes called the “resource curse,” which is when a country has weak institutions and strong resources. Instead of making the country rich, resources can exacerbate corruption, conflict and poverty. Take coltan, a metal used in computers, cell phones, video games and other electronics. It’s estimated that 80 percent of the world’s coltan is in North and South Kivu in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Coltan miners there can earn up to $50 a day, a fortune in a country where the per capita income is about 80 cents a day. While the area was under Rwandan control from 1999-2000, revenue was reportedly $20 million per month. Incidentally, North and South Kivu are where much of the conflict still rages today. www.heifer.org November/December 2008 | WORLD ARK 15 http://www.heifer.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of World Ark Magazine - November/December 2008

World Ark Magazine - November/December 2008 Contents Letters For the Record The Good Life Asked and Answered Finding Peace in Africa Sierra Leone on the Mend The Roma: A People Apart Mixed Media Heifer Bulletin Heifer Spirit Calendar First Person

World Ark Magazine - November/December 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.