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A bi-weekly audio series and podcast service, hosted by Committee on Conscience Project Director Bridget Conley-Zilkic, that brings you the voices of human rights defenders, experts, advocates, and government officials. Vital voices addressing one of humanity's most vital issues. The opinions expressed in these interviews do not necessarily represent those of the Museum.
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10/05/06
8/24/06
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Interview:
Freelance journalist and Congo native, Mvemba Dizolele talks with Jerry Fowler about the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, focusing on the meaning of the recent elections. He addresses many of the complications undermining the election such as it's size, the various warring militia groups, its mineral riches, and the committment of the international community. To learn more, visit Mvemba's blog.
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Transcript
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7/24/06
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 The high hopes attached to next week's elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo took a blow over the weekend when leaders of the Catholic Church in Kinshasa urged a boycott unless allegations of fraud are addressed. A statement read to churchgoers on Sunday highlighted confusion over the number of registered voters and the printing of a large number of spare ballots. "The members of the Episcopal Council invite the people, if these irregularities are not corrected, to abstain from the elections," the Rev. Leon de Saint Moulin told the congregation of St. Joseph's church, which has 800 members, to a burst of applause. Catholic leaders in other parts of the country are supporting the elections. More than half of Congolese are Catholic.
The Kinshasa Church's statement comes on the heels of a warning by the International Crisis Group that the elections "risk creating a large class of disenfranchised politicians and former warlords tempted to take advantage of state weakness and launch new insurgencies." Crisis Group calls on "donors to initiate new programs in support of good governance that include more funding to strengthen state institutions (in particular parliament and the various auditing bodies), as well as apply more political pressure to make sure reforms are implemented." IRIN, the news agency of the UN's humanitarian office, posted a useful backgrounder on the election today. (Photo © David Hecht/IRIN)
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7/24/06
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In Sunday's New York Times, Lydia Polgreen examined the vexing question of why Darfur has received so much more attention than Congo. Money quote: Darfur holds the world’s gaze because of that magic word, genocide. The word, implying that there are clear criminals and clear victims, has been perhaps the single greatest attention-getter for efforts, however feeble, to end the fighting and organize relief efforts, even though the fighting has lately turned in directions that indicate the situation was never so clear-cut. The conflict in Congo, by contrast, long ago descended into a free-for-all with many sides. Instead of Darfur’s seeming moral clarity, it offers a mind-numbing collection of combatants known by a jumble of acronyms. And that has been a particularly cruel fate, since the long-lasting war there in fact had its roots in the greatest mass killing since the Holocaust — the unambiguous genocide of 800,000 mostly ethnic Tutsis in neighboring Rwanda in the spring of 1994. As the Darfurian rebel groups fracture along ethnic lines and turn on civilians, and the conflict spills over into Chad and even the Central African Republic, she warns that "in some ways, the greatest tragedy in Darfur may not be that it could become the next Rwanda. It is that it could easily become the next Congo."
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