TEACH-INS, concerts, screenings of films and documentaries, rallies, demonstrations, and other actions and events were organised in several cities around the globe from October 13 to 19 to raise global consciousness about the struggles of the Congolese people for peace and justice.

“Breaking the Silence: Congo Week” has been observed annually in the third week of October since 2008 to commemorate the more than 5.4 million killed over the last 10 to 12 years, amid what the UN described as the deadliest conflict since World War II.

On average, between 1996 and 2008, 1,500 lives were claimed daily, either directly by violence or by the hunger and diseases brought about by this conflict. Hundreds of thousands of women were raped in this war fought for control over the vast mineral wealth of this country the size of western Europe along the equator in the heart of Africa, bordering nine neighbours.

Rwanda and Uganda, which had invaded Congo with the backing of the US and Britain in 1996 and again in 1998, withdrew their troops in 2002. But militias they had spawned continued to fight until the peace agreement in 2009. 

Following the agreement, these proxy militias have reorganised under different names. In recent years, they have once again captured strategic regions of the DRC, especially along the border with Rwanda and Uganda, where they mine its mineral wealth that feeds aerospace, automobile, electronic and military industries around the world.

One such precious mineral, two-thirds of whose global reserve is concentrated in Congo, is coltan. UN studies have described the multinational corporations buying coltan illegally mined by the foreign-backed militias as “the engine of the conflict in the DRC.” Over half a dozen of these companies are US-based.

“Once the coltan is processed and converted to capacitors, it is then sold to companies such as Nokia, Motorola, Compaq, Alcatel, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lucent, Ericsson and Sony,” according to the organisation Friends of the Congo (FOTC). It is used in devices such as cell phones, cameras, laptop computers, gaming consoles, jet engines, rockets, and the GPS and ABS systems in automobiles.

Another key mineral used in the rechargeable batteries of cell phones and electric cars is cobalt. Sixty per cent of the global cobalt supply comes from the DRC. Companies using this mineral range from automotive giants such as General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, and BMW to manufacturers of electronic goods like mobile phones and computers including Samsung, IBM, Dell, Apple, etc.

Copper, zinc, gold, diamond, silver, magnesium, germanium, uranium and petroleum are some of the other minerals found in substantial quantities under the Congolese land.

“Corporations like Apple make trillions of dollars off of the profits of these minerals. Yet, the people in Congo are living on less than $2.15 a day,” bellowed Keerthana Kulendran with the Answer Coalition in Philadelphia, addressing a demonstration organised by the Black Alliance for Peace, Free Congo Philly, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and others, outside an Apple store in Philadelphia, in the US state of Pennsylvania.

Another protester remarked that the “US government sends millions of our taxpayer dollars to Rwanda,” which is “funding, training and arming the M23… one of the many militias responsible for the atrocities. The West, and the US in particular, wants us to stay ignorant and silent about Congo. Today the ignorance ends in Philadelphia.”

Stanford University also held its inaugural Congo Week this year, organised across the university’s departments by an alliance of student organisations. It kicked off with a “teach-in on mining, technology, human rights abuses, and environmental challenges affecting [Congo], the Stanford Daily reported.

“We literally carry the Congo around with us in all our electronic devices, but we don’t really understand Congo’s long history, and particularly US foreign policy towards Congo,” said environmental justice lecturer Dena Montague, who has researched DRC for over 30 years.

“Congo has blessed us with its mineral wealth. It is now our turn to return the favour,” said 25-year-old Congolese student Asukulu Songolo.

Movie screenings and concerts were organised in Britain. People from 600 university campuses and communities from over 75 countries have participated in Congo Week since 2008 when the FOTC started organising it.

“Congo is arguably the richest country on the planet in terms of natural resources,” FOTC maintains. Apart from its mineral wealth, it has the agricultural and hydroelectric potential to provide the food and electrical needs of the entire African continent.

However, the vast majority of Congolese people languish in poverty while their resources are extracted by outside powers. In 1885, European powers, meeting in Berlin, handed over the Congo to King Leopold II of Belgium, who massacred 10-15 million Congolese lives in the process of extracting ivory and rubber.

The rule of its first democratic government elected by the Congolese people after winning independence in 1960 was brought to an end in less than seven months with the murder of pan-Africanist leader Patrice Lumumba in a coup supported by Belgium and the US, which installed dictator Joseph Mobutu in power.

It was well over half a century later that Congo witnessed the first peaceful transfer of power when Felix Tshisekedi became the president in 2019 after winning the election. He was re-elected in December 2023. However, the armed conflict has also risen in the meantime, with the resurgence of the M23 in 2022, capturing a large area in North Kivu province by June 2023.

Noting Rwanda’s support for this militia, Bintou Keita, special representative of the secretary-general and head of the UN Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Monusco) warned that the “rapidly escalating M23 crisis carries the very real risk of provoking a wider regional conflict.”

“In spite of the remarkable challenges faced by the Congolese, they can be overcome, especially in light of Congo’s incredible human and natural potential,” reads a flier issued by FOTR ahead of the Congo week.

This article appeared at peoplesdispatch.org.