AP IMPACT: Kids working in African gold mines

[Omaha Steve]

I was going to post this in labor. I put it here hoping more people would read it.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20080810/D92FGDT81.html

Aug 10, 11:15 AM (ET)

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI AND BRADLEY S. KLAPPER

TENKOTO, Senegal (AP) - A reef of gold buried beneath this vast, parched grassland arcs across some of the world's poorest countries. Where the ore is rich, industrial mines carve it out. Where it's not, the poor sift the earth.

These hardscrabble miners include many thousands of children. They work long hours at often dangerous jobs in hundreds of primitive mines scattered through the West African bush. Some are as young as 4 years old.

In a yearlong investigation, The Associated Press visited six of these bush mines in three West African countries and interviewed more than 150 child miners. AP journalists watched as child-mined gold was bought by itinerant traders. And, through interviews and customs documents, The AP tracked gold from these mines on a 3,000-mile journey to Mali's capital city and then on to Switzerland, where it enters the world market.

Most bush mines are little more than holes in the ground, but there are thousands of them in Africa, South America and Asia. Together, they produce a fifth of the world's gold, according to United Nations reports. And wherever you find bush mines, these reports and mine experts say, you also find child labor.

If you wear a gold ring on your finger, write with a gold-tipped fountain pen or have gold in your investment portfolio, chances are good your life is connected to these children.

One of them is Saliou Diallo. He's 12 years old and less than 4 feet tall.

---

Saliou and his friends, Hassane Diallo, 12 (no relation), and Momodou Ba, 13, dropped out of school about three years ago when the village's only teacher left. They were living in mud huts with their families in Guinea, and went to work in their fathers' fields.

FULL story at link.


Sere Traore, 7, sells gold for 5,000 Guinean Francs (approx. $1) to gold buyer Majan Djwara, in the region of the Fatoya mine, in Guinea on April 25, 2008. (AP Photo/Rukmini Callimachi)

[varelse]

1. "We don't live in the bush, so we have nothing to do with child labor,"

"We just buy gold."

The attitude... it seems... familiar somehow...

[seemslikeadream]

2. A look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U28joj6d1A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMMQhHuI9_Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biEXCEOy_vs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPKcgo4Es8E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIM8kVSN8ug

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_WEY7xQEhk

[seemslikeadream]

3. I have just returned from hell I'm trying to figure out how to communicate what I have seen

I have just returned from hell I'm trying to figure out how to communicate what I have seen


I have just returned from hell. I am trying for the life of me to figure out how to communicate what I have seen and heard in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. How do I convey these stories of atrocities without your shutting down, quickly turning the page or feeling too disturbed?

Eve Ensler, Glamour Magazine, August 2007

http://www.allthingspass.com/uploads/html-230THREE...

THREE CHEERS FOR EVE ENSLER?
Propaganda, White Collar Crime
and Sexual Atrocities in Eastern Congo


Third Draft: October 10, 2007


keith harmon snow

www.althingspass.com


On a visit to Eastern Congo in May 2007, Eve Ensler—the playwright and producer of the Vagina Monologues—was witness to the profound human suffering and unprecedented sexual violence. Ensler came to see what those whose eyes are open cannot deny: the sexual violence and predation in Central Africa is unacceptable, unfathomable, and stoppable. And she has the courage and audacity to write and speak about it.

Three cheers for Eve Ensler!!

Or not?

Through her global campaign to end violence against women, called “V-Day,” and with a nine-page feature article in Glamour magazine in August, Ensler has launched a campaign calling for an end to rape and sexual torture against women and girls in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

“Stop Raping Our Greatest Resource, Power To The Women And Girls Of The Democratic Republic Of Congo,” Ensler’s web site explains, “is being initiated by the women of Eastern DRC, V-Day and UNICEF on behalf of United Nations Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict. The campaign calls for an end to the violence and to impunity for those who commit these atrocities.” <1>

Impunity for those who commit these atrocities?

Ensler’s Glamour article is an apt documentary of human suffering and courage. The doctors working to save and heal the survivors of sexual brutality are heroes. The women and girls who have survived are themselves portraits of courage and human dignity.

In her nine-page portrait of heroism and suffering, there is a single half paragraph that ostensibly addresses the roots of the problem. “The perpetrators include the Interahamwe,” Ensler writes, “the Hutu fighters who fled neighboring Rwanda in 1994 after committing genocide there; the Congolese army; a loose assortment of armed civilians; even U.N. peacekeepers.” <2>


THE GLAMOUROUS GENOCIDE

Who is responsible for the brutality?

According to Glamour and Vanity Fair, it is always those rag-tag Rwandan genocidaires who fled justice in Rwanda, or those ruthless Congolese soldiers from the heart of darkness, and the loose assortments of obviously “loose” civilians, and even the U.N. peacekeepers who, in the United Nations Observers Mission in Congo (MONUC), are men from India, Uruguay, Nepal, Pakistan… and in Darfur, Sudan, it is those damned Janjaweed—Arabs on horseback, you know, the usual dark-skinned subjects.


http://www.allthingspass.com/uploads/html-203BD%20...

Blood Diamond: Double Think & Deception
Naming the players behind the scenes



http://www.slate.com/id/2097314/

On the Trail of the Congo's "Cannibal Rebels"



http://img.slate.com.nyud.net:8090/media/1/123125/122986/2094254/2096262/2097309/2097537/2097538/06_32.jpg

4 MILLION DEAD SINCE 1998 - THIS IS GENOCIDE