Tag: Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief

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.

The official Oct. 1 release of the U.N. report documenting the Rwandan and Ugandan armies’ massacres of Hutus in the Congo, should be a defining moment for President Barack Obama. The Congo bill he authored as a senator, passed in 2006, forecast much of the explosive information in the report.