
Do you have a smart phone? A laptop? Then you play a role in the violence that occurs in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Cell phones, laptops and other electronics don’t work very well without the mineral, coltan. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, poor farmers are gathered by armed gangs and enslaved to dig coltan out of the ground.

With the release of another 250,000 classified diplomatic cables from the U.S. State Department by the WikiLeaks website, Washington’s Africa policy has been further exposed for its imperialistic designs. These revelations point to the necessity of the anti-war and peace movements in the U.S. incorporating anti-interventionist and anti-imperialist demands with specific reference to the African continent into their political programs.

Haitians say protests are the inevitable outcome when troops who have occupied Haiti for five years with seeming impunity have introduced a deadly, misery-multiplying disease.

Forty-eight years ago, the first freely elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Patrice Emery Lumumba, was brutally murdered by the United States, Belgium and certain local elites because he wanted the resources of the Congo to benefit the Congolese people.