Word: kivu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...people have been killed since the conflict began in 1996, some through direct abuse, others through the political and economic chaos that the conflict has created. Armed groups frequently force civilians to mine the minerals, extorting taxes and refusing to pay wages. The report quotes one miner from South Kivu: "We are their meat, their animals. We have nothing to say." (See pictures of the civil war in Congo...
...provinces of North and South Kivu in the eastern DRC are filled with mines of cassiterite, wolframite, coltan and gold - minerals needed to manufacture everything from lightbulbs to laptops, from MP3 players to Playstations. Over the past 12 years of armed conflict in the region, control of these valuable natural resources has allegedly become a lucrative way for warring parties to purchase munitions and fund their fighting. The Global Witness report claims to have followed the supply chain of these minerals from warring parties to middlemen to international buyers. (How the world must act on Congo...
Drive west through Rwanda, threading past hills of eucalyptus, down to the shores of Lake Kivu and the Congolese border and you'll see real, actual signs of trouble. Every few hundred yards are hand-painted signboards marking the sites of massacres during Rwanda's 1994 genocide. Here, 532 were killed. There, 318. Here, "+/? 5,000." The word JENOSIDE is painted in scarlet, and after you've seen it--and the redness of the earth--a few times, it's hard not to wonder about the great flood of blood that bathed Rwanda when 800,000 people were slaughtered...
...latest chapter in the crisis began in October 2008 when Tutsi rebel leader Laurent Nkunda launched an offensive, taking advantage of the weak Congolese President, Joseph Kabila, and his collapsing army. Nkunda quickly doubled his territory in the province of North Kivu and threatened to march on the capital, Kinshasa. The U.N. says a quarter of North Kivu's 4 million people are now refugees as a result. "This is war" was Nkunda's explanation...
...late November, MONUC raised the threat level in Goma to 4 out of 5. Escorts of humanitarian convoys continued across North Kivu, but hundreds of soldiers had been pulled back to the city from 43 bases across the region, and patrols were largely limited to Goma and its immediate environs. The U.N. Security Council also granted MONUC 3,000 extra troops. Still, the force remained chronically overstretched. "Congo is the size of Western Europe, without roads," Doss says. Before he received his reinforcements, Doss had 10,000 soldiers in North and South Kivu protecting a combined population of 10 million...