By Johann Hari,
What is rarely mentioned is the great global heist of Congo's resources
The deadliest war since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe is starting again – and you are almost certainly carrying a
blood-soaked chunk of the slaughter in your pocket. When we glance at the holocaust in Congo, with 5.4 million dead, the
clichés of Africa reporting tumble out: this is a "tribal conflict" in "the Heart of Darkness". It isn't. The United
Nations investigation found it was a war led by "armies of business" to seize the metals that make our 21st-century
society zing and bling. The war in Congo is a war about you.
Every day I think about the people I met in the war zones of eastern Congo when I reported from there. The wards were
filled with women who had been gang-raped by the militias and shot in the vagina. The battalions of child soldiers –
drugged, dazed 13-year-olds who had been made to kill members of their own families so they couldn't try to escape and
go home. But oddly, as I watch the war starting again on CNN, I find myself thinking about a woman I met who had, by
Congolese standards, not suffered in extremis.
I was driving back to Goma from a diamond mine one day when my car got a puncture. As I waited for it to be fixed, I
stood by the roadside and watched the great trails of women who stagger along every road in eastern Congo, carrying all
their belongings on their backs in mighty crippling heaps. I stopped a 27 -year-old woman called Marie-Jean Bisimwa, who
had four little children toddling along beside her. She told me she was lucky. Yes, her village had been burned out.
Yes, she had lost her husband somewhere in the chaos. Yes, her sister had been raped and gone insane. But she and her
kids were alive.
I gave her a lift, and it was only after a few hours of chat along on cratered roads that I noticed there was something
strange about Marie-Jean's children. They were slumped forward, their gazes fixed in front of them. They didn't look
around, or speak, or smile. "I haven't ever been able to feed them," she said. "Because of the war."
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