A young girl washes her hands in a puddle near a UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the DRC. Photo Credit: UN Photo/Sylvain Liechti

By Juliana White
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 21 2025 (IPS)

Electric vehicles contribute to an ongoing environmental and humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Mining operations cause deforestation, pollution, food insecurity and exploitative labor practices.

Advertisers paint electric vehicles as an environmentally friendly option to help save the planet. In the West, American states like California and New York incentivize citizens to go green and help their cities by ditching gas-powered vehicles.

California officials are trying to enact legislation to reach 100 percent zero-emission vehicle sales by 2035. Across the country in New York, officials implemented the Drive Clean Rebate. Through this program, New Yorkers can receive up to 2,000 USD off the purchase or lease of an electric vehicle.

Governments are pushing for more electric vehicle sales because they are helping reduce the damage inflicted by fossil fuels. In the United States, emissions have reduced by around 66 percent. In China, a country dominating the electric vehicle production and sales market, emissions have been reduced by an estimated range of 37 percent to 45 percent.

However, consumers must understand that electric vehicles primarily benefit the environment in wealthier regions. Rising demands for electric vehicles and lithium-ion batteries foster destruction and exploitation in poorer countries like the DRC.

One of the key minerals used to make lithium-ion batteries is cobalt. The DRC is the world’s top producer of mined cobalt, at a staggering 75 percent. To fulfill high demands for the mineral, the DRC has become a hot spot overrun by industrial and artisanal small-scale mining operations.

“The surge in demand for lithium-ion batteries has dramatically increased global demand for cobalt, and DRC cobalt production is projected to double by 2030,” said the International Labor Organization (ILO) to IPS. “Because industrial mines can’t keep pace, this has encouraged expansion of artisanal and unregulated mining.”

Artisanal small-scale mines are poorly regulated, informal operations for extracting minerals. Located all over the DRC, these mines exploit child labor, use basic handheld tools, and disregard safety protocols.

“ASM can also lead to conflict as clashes take place between traditional licensed large-scale mining operations and ASM over access to minerals,” Dr. Lamfu Yengong, the Forest campaigner for Greenpeace Africa, told IPS. “While statistics on the actual number of ASM miners in SSA are hard to find, it is estimated that in the DRC alone, there are between 200,000 and 250,000 ASM miners who are responsible for mining as much as 25 percent of the DRC’s cobalt.”

The growth of mining is also decimating the DRC’s environment. Mining sites need large areas of land to operate. As laborers dig, open pits form, releasing dust and other toxic chemicals into the air and polluting surrounding waterways.

Cobalt mines often contain sulfur minerals, which can create acid mine drainage. This process occurs when sulfur minerals are exposed to both air and water.

Sulfuric acid is incredibly harmful because it can make water unsafe for human consumption, kill aquatic life and produce algal blooms. Contact with the acid causes skin irritation and burns, and respiratory issues, and long-term exposure increases the risk of cancer.

Deforestation, erosion, contaminated soil and water sources, increased noise levels and dust and smoke emissions from mining pursuits disrupt the lives of Congolese locals and wildlife. Many are killed or forced to relocate as land, once prosperous for life, now nourishes profit-fueled exploits.

“Mining in the DRC is tearing through the heart of the Congo Basin, one of the world’s most important carbon sinks, leaving behind poisoned rivers, deforested landscapes, and devastated ecosystems,” Yengong said. “What once were lush forests are now scarred by unregulated extraction, threatening biodiversity, accelerating climate change, and robbing future generations of their environmental heritage.”

Despite having over 197 million acres of arable land, the DRC is one of the top-ranking areas of food insecurity globally. Over 25 million Congolese people suffer from a lack of access to food.

Mining endeavors only fuel the hunger crisis because contaminants in the soil and water make growing crops difficult. Forest resources also disappear as more land is cleared for new mines.

Alongside food insecurity impacted by pollution, agriculture efforts suffer from climate change. Weather patterns have drastically changed across the globe, making rain patterns unpredictable. A heavy reliance on rainfed agriculture and prolonged droughts in the DRC immensely impact food supplies.

One of the many camps in the DRC for people displaced by conflict and environmental devastation. Credit: UN Photo/Sylvain Liechti

The pursuit of minerals for lithium-ion batteries encourages mass destruction and egregious human rights violations in the DRC. But mining operations cannot simply stop to solve the problem. Many Congolese people rely on working in the mines to support their families.

Groups such as the ILO, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the World Food Programme (WFP) are actively working on sustainable solutions to stop further exploitation and harm to the DRC.

“To improve the health of workers in or near mine sites, the ILO is supporting the roll-out of the universal health insurance scheme (Couverture Santé Universelle—CSU), which aims to provide coverage for all individuals in DRC, including those working in the mining sector and their families,” the ILO said. “The benefit package will include a range of services such as general and specialist consultations, hospitalization, essential medicines and vaccines, medical procedures and exams, maternity and newborn care, palliative care, and patient transfers between facilities.”

The UNEP is forming plans focusing on minimizing the environmental impacts of mining. Working with the DRC’s government

“UNEP is working with the DRC’s government to develop a national plan for the extraction of minerals like cobalt. The plan would focus on minimizing the environmental impact of mining,” said Corey Pattison in a UNEP press release. “We are also exploring whether local and international institutions can help resolve conflict around mineral extraction, including through processes like revenue sharing and dispute resolution.”

The WFP is trying to ease the problem by investing in resilience programs. Activities are created to build skills in communities to improve long-term food security. Skill building includes educating farmers in post-harvest loss management, literacy, business and collective marketing.

They also work closely with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to limit negative environmental impacts. Reforestation initiatives are actively underway across the DRC. The WFP reported that 3,850 women in North and South Ubangi planted tree seedlings in 2022.

The crisis in the DRC should not mark the end of lithium batteries and electric vehicles. Scientists are working on new solutions for cleaner, more efficient power sources. Some new batteries in the works include sodium-ion batteries, silicon-carbon batteries, and lithium-sulfur batteries. Introducing more power sources could limit the overwhelming strain on resources in the DRC as the need for cobalt would reduce.

A report released by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) suggests that sustainable mining techniques and technologies are another tactic to reduce environmental impacts. However, significant change relies on the DRC’s government and its officials. They must enforce stricter mandates to mitigate the harm ravaging Congolese people’s lives.

The ILO says that Corporate Social Responsibility has been made mandatory through the 2018 mining code. Mining companies are required to invest .3 percent of their annual turnover into community development projects.

In turn, the mandate allows for easy tracking of mining companies’ income through transparency mechanisms like the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI).

While the DRC has enacted environmental regulations and is involved in additional support programs, its history of weak institutions and conflict challenges aid efforts. Rampant instability greatly limits the implementation and enforcement of policies.

“The world’s clean energy transition must not come at the cost of Congolese lives and forests. The critical minerals beneath the DRC fuel the global economy, yet the people above them remain among the poorest and most exploited,” said Yengong. “Real climate solutions must prioritize the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, end greenwashing, and ensure justice, not just extraction.”

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Dr. Augustine Njamnshi of ACSEA addresses a group of civil society organizations ahead of the AUC Summit in Addis Ababa. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Isaiah Esipisu
ADDIS ABABA, Feb 27 2025 (IPS)

Renewable energy and climate change activists have challenged African heads of state to take a united stance to safeguard essential mineral resources, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and other parts of the continent, which are selfishly exploited by foreign miners with disregard for poverty-stricken local communities.

“We call upon the Africa Union Commission (AUC) to convene a special summit on the DRC and come up with resolutions on how African countries, particularly the DRC, should determine the value of their essential minerals, how they should engage foreign miners, and how to protect fundamental human rights of communities living in the mining areas,” said Dr. Augustine Njamnshi, the Director, Africa Coalition on Sustainable Energy Access (ACSEA), at an event ahead of the election of the new AUC Chairperson in Addis Ababa.

So far, the DRC is the world’s largest producer of cobalt and the third largest producer of copper, among other essential minerals that are used to manufacture state-of-the-art electric cars and buses, golf carts, pumps, and electric motorbikes, among other non-emitting but expensive gadgets like smart phones, tablets, laptops, drones, smart watches, and electric scooters, among other items.

As a result, the value and the growing demand of cobalt and other such essential minerals have led to a scramble for these rare metals, particularly by foreign miners.

Even as the activists make an appeal, the mineral wealth has become a pawn in the DRC’s war with Rwandan-backed M23.

According to Congolese president Felix Tseisekedi’s spokesperson, Tina Salama, on X, the United States was warned not to buy minerals from Rwanda, as this was tantamount to buying stolen goods. She said the proposal to buy directly from the DRC was also open to the European Union, with a warning that “receiving stolen goods will become increasingly complicated.”

“President Tshisekedi invites the USA, whose companies source strategic raw materials from Rwanda, materials that are looted from the DRC and smuggled to Rwanda while our populations are massacred, to purchase them directly from us, the rightful owners,” Salama said on X.

Appolinaire Zagabe, a Congolese human rights activist and the Director for the DRC Climate Change Network (Reseau Sur le Changement Climatique RDC), told IPS in an interview that the mineral exploitation was mired in corruption.

“The foreign miners sign contracts with the government to legalize their activities, and since they make so much money, they always bribe government officials and top-ranking police officers to protect them as they illegally expand their mining areas by forcefully evicting communities from their ancestral land,” Zagabe said.

“The current system of mineral exploitation activities in the DRC has almost no positive impact on the local communities. Community rights are not respected and the population is a victim of companies’ pollution,” Zagabe told IPS. “There are no community programs undertaken, no durable infrastructure is put in place, no health facilities, no schools, no roads. Hence, people in those areas remain the poorest in the world.”

Zagabe says that nearly all the hundreds of thousands of community members who suffer at the hands of foreign miners of cobalt and other essential minerals have never seen what an electric vehicle looks like, they have never owned a smart phone, and they don’t dream of using a tablet or even a computer in their lifetime, yet they interact on a daily basis with essential minerals that are at the center of manufacturing these items.

A report by Amnesty International in collaboration with the Initiative for Good Governance and Human Rights/Initiative pour la Bonne Gouvernance et les Droits Humains (IBGDH) paints a grim picture of what is happening in the DRC.

The minerals, which are apparently supposed to be a huge blessing, have turned out to be a curse for the communities.

“People are being forcibly evicted, or threatened or intimidated into leaving their homes, or misled into consenting to derisory settlements. Often there was no grievance mechanism, accountability, or access to justice,” said Donat Kambola, president of IBGDH, in a statement.

“It is total chaos,” said Zagabe. “Human rights activists are often harassed whenever they denounce violations of community rights in mining areas, and they risk being killed since most illegal mining companies have the backing of politicians or high-ranking soldiers,” he said.

The rush for essential minerals has also exposed artisanal/local miners to harsh working conditions where some of them have been buried alive within collapsed tunnels, children have been forced to child labor, and women, whose livelihoods have been taken away, have been forced to toil to extreme lengths to find minerals, which they sell to foreign mining companies for almost nothing.

According to a report by Friends of the Congo (FOTC), child labor is well documented in the cobalt supply chain, with children as young as seven (years old) working in mines under dangerous conditions, depriving them of education and a healthy childhood.

“Pit wall collapses are common when digging in larger open-air pits, with the result of all miners being buried alive; of the 10,000 to 15,000 tunnels dug by artisanal miners, none have supports, ventilation shafts, or other safety measures,” reads part of the report.

According to Njamnshi, whatever is happening in the DRC mining sector is replicated in nearly all other African countries. “The only difference is that in the DRC, the atrocities are on a large scale and therefore are more visible than what is happening, for example, in Kenya’s Nyatike goldmines in the western part of the country,” he said, noting that there is a need for a collective high-level resolution to protect all African countries from greedy foreign mineral-thirsty companies.

The alleged disrespect of human rights and signing of dubious contracts that oppress communities, denying them right to their resources, is not in line with the Dubai COP 28 resolution, which called for rapid decarbonization of the energy system to keep the goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius within reach.

The negotiators called for acceleration of the clean energy transition both from the demand and supply sides, but through a transformation that is orderly, just and equitable and also accounts for energy security.

“The world is changing very fast, and the geopolitical dynamics are becoming more unpredictable,” said Dr. Mithika Mwenda, the Executive Director at the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA).

“President Donald Trump’s executive orders should be a wake-up call for the continent, and likewise, African countries should find the power to dictate terms on their natural resources, including essential minerals,” he said during a PACJA event ahead of the 2025 AUC Summit in Addis Ababa.

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The ICJ heard that children in Palau stand to inherit a country that no longer reflects the stories and values of their ancestors. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
THE HAGUE & NAIROBI, Dec 10 2024 (IPS)

After many decades of colonial rule, Palau was the last country to emerge from the UN Trusteeship. Palau celebrated 30 years of independence in October 2024 “and takes seriously the rights and responsibilities of independence. Independence should mean that Palau is free to build its own future and be responsible for the security, safety, and well-being of its own people,” said Gustav N. Aitaro, the Minister of State of the Republic of Palau at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

“Yet, Palau is learning that with freedom of independence must also come with a basic responsibility towards neighbours. Every independent nation must ensure that the activities they allow within their territory do not cause significant harm to other nations. Man-made climate change is now the biggest threat to the Palauan people’s independence and right to self-determination.”

In 2021, a youth group in Vanuatu collaborated with their Prime Minister to seek an advisory opinion from the ICJ on the obligations of UN member states in respect to climate change and the legal consequences of these actions. Nearly 100 states and 12 organisations have been enjoined in the case and public hearings are currently ongoing at The Hague, the seat of the ICJ, in pursuit of the much-needed advisory opinion. Among those making their submissions today were Palau, Panama and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Realization of Independence At Stake—Palau

Aitaro stressed that in order for Palau to fully realize its independence, “it must ask this Court to recognize that states have the legal responsibility to ensure that they do all they can to prevent emissions from their territory from causing significant harm to other states. In order to understand the threat that climate change poses to Palau, I invite you to walk with me through the lived reality of Palau, a reality deeply marked by the relentless impacts of climate change.”

Koror State is the most populous in Palau. The red areas are flood zones from sea level rise. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

In the 1970s, higher-than-normal tides were rare and only one instance was recorded, but between 2010 and 2019, the number rose to five and there were four incidences in 2021 alone, Aitaro said, showing the court how badly affected Palau is.

Ernestine Rengiil, Palau’s Attorney General, emphasised that while climate change poses tremendously complex practical problems for the world, as a matter of international law, the issue of climate change is straightforward. She said common to the principles of law of all civilized nations is the concept that one’s property may not be used to cause harm to another’s.

That if one uses or allows their property to be used in a manner to cause harm to another, that harm must be stopped and reparations paid in full. In common law systems, this is a law of nuisance.

“In civil law systems, this is a servitude established by law—and in most moral systems, this is simply the golden rule. In international law, this principle is better known as the law of transboundary harm and state responsibility. This principle is foundational to every state’s independence,” she said.

Rengiil invited the court to decline to “create new exceptions to the basic rules of the international order for climate change. The minority argue that because climate change is caused by a diffused set of global emissions sources, it will be too difficult in any future contentious cases to prove causation. But such practical problems exist in all cases and are not sufficient grounds to abandon the basic legal rules altogether.”

ICJ Needs to Reinforce International Obligations—Panama

In what is shaping up to be a David vs. Goliath public hearing, Panama’s size on the map was no barrier to making a compelling case.

“Panama, regardless of its small size and contribution of only 0.03 percent of global emissions, is mindful of the challenges that require that it has become among a handful of states a carbon-negative country. Panama is not turning away from facing the adverse conduct of others as to human-induced global warming,” Fernando Gómez Arbeláez, an expert in international legal affairs, said.

Panama invited the court to consider ongoing advisory proceedings as “a critical opportunity to attend to the inadequacies of the current Conference of the Parties, or COP, of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). By means of an opinion that in itself carries great legal weight and moral authority, the court can offer much-needed legal clarity to reinforce international obligations and inspire a stronger determination to tackle the global climate crisis.”

Human Rights and Due Diligence Work Together—DRC

In her submissions, the Democratic Republic of the Congo said, although in the minority, certain states are keen to invoke the relationship between different sources of international law to require a compartmentalised reading and a selective utilisation of them. Stressing that the different international obligations of states coexist and that compliance with one obligation in no way relieves them of their responsibility with regard to the others.

Speaking on behalf of the DRC, Sandrine Maljean-Dubois, who is a dedicated teacher and researcher in international environmental law, spoke extensively of the obligation of due diligence and human rights. Stressing that these obligations are not in conflict. That the obligations for the UNFCCC framework and the Paris Agreement are reinforced by other international obligations. Emphasising that the international climate regime, specifically the Paris Agreement alone, will not prevent significant harm to the climate system.

“On the one hand, failure to implement all available means to prevent significant harm to the climate system puts the state in breach of general international law. On the other hand, it is clear that each state has to play its part. The obligation of preventing harm is informed and buttressed, in turn, by treaty obligations,” she said.

Maljean-Dubois said the obligation of due diligence requires a maximum level of vigilance. Informed by the climate regime and enlightened by the IPCC reports, “the due diligence obligation requires states to take fair, urgent and ambitious measures to mitigate the effects of climate change and to adapt to them. Far from lessening over time, this obligation has, to the contrary, become more stringent as scientific evidence has mounted.”

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Elena Pasquini filming somewhere in the AKIgonze IDPs camp in the outskirts of Bunia in Ituri. Credit: Elena Pasquini

By Sania Farooqui
NEW DELHI, India, Jul 29 2021 (IPS)

The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the most hostile and dangerous regions for journalists. A complex conflict, deeply rooted in the country’s past, allows very little freedom, both movement and the press.

“There are multiple actors involved, and as a journalist, we have the duty of admitting this complexity,” says Elena Pasquini, founder and editor in chief of Degrees of Latitude, in an interview with IPS. “Be aware of the difficulties when it comes to understanding the issues, and be careful of every single word we use to portray this conflict.”

Pasquini, who reported from the DRC earlier this year, says the risk of reporting from such a conflict zone is not just physical, not just a question of safety, but also highlights the responsibility journalists have in their work and how they cover a story.

“For a journalist and a foreigner, it’s really important to understand when a situation is potentially risky and identify the threats at an early stage. I was worried while travelling along roads that I knew were home to armed groups. I was scared each time I was stopped at a checkpoint and while interacting with the police or even walking in areas where kidnappings occur frequently,” Pasquini says. “It’s important to learn from the local colleagues and adapt our behaviour according to the local environments.”

Elena Pasquini travelling with the UN peacekeeping mission, somewhere in Irumu territory, Ituri. Credit: Elena Pasquini

According to Journalists in Danger (JED), Reporters Without Borders (RSF) partner organisation in the DRC, at least 115 press freedom violations were logged in 2020. This report by RSF tells of how several journalists had been detained in response to complaints by provincial governors. A former minister sued one of RSF’s correspondents. Armed groups prevalent in the east of the country have attacked, threatened, or forced journalists into hiding. One journalist was killed.

“A journalist who has gone missing, his family members were informed by an armed group that he had been executed three days after abducting him,” the report says. “Journalists with many online followers have been the victims of smear campaigns.”

Women are often victims of abuse and violence, and in the DRC, rape is a weapon of war, says Pasquini. Crowded areas in the DRC are often chaotic and hotspots for fights, protests, and gatherings, which can turn deadly.

While covering a protest against an alleged extrajudicial execution, Pasquini had no choice but to trust the instinct of her local driver, who asked her to immediately stop filming, roll up the car windows and not make eye contact with anyone outside.

“At that point, I didn’t think about the weapons or the machetes the people surrounding our car could have had. I don’t know if I would have been a target or not, but I simply followed my driver’s instructions and got out safely. It’s truly the fixers, producers and the drivers who make the difference and can save your life in such situations,” Pasquini says.

Earlier in February this year, the Italian Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Luca Attanasio, was killed. According to this report, the United Nations convoy he was travelling in came under fire near Goma, killing him, an Italian military police officer and a Congolese driver.

Pasquini was amongst the few international journalists present in the DRC at the time and had travelled along the same route and with the same convoy just a few days before the attack on the Italian Ambassador.

“That road connects Goma to Uganda, and it’s as dangerous as any area would be in a conflict zone. It is very difficult to have an idea of what really happened, but from my experience, I can say kidnapping to get ransom is very common on that side.”

“I hope the investigation will lead to the discovery of who is behind the attack of the Ambassador, it is hard, and impunity is common. Every day such crimes are committed, and it is very rare that someone is convicted for those crimes, or even just identified,” says Pasquini.

Over the years, multiple conflicts which escalated in the eastern part of the DRC forced almost 6000 people to flee their homes, making this crisis “the largest number of new displacements due to conflict in the world”.

“DR Congo is one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 21st century. A lethal combination of spiralling violence, record hunger levels and total neglect has ignited a mega-crisis that warrants a mega-response. But instead, millions of families on the brink of the abyss seem to be forgotten by the outside world and are left shut off from any support lifeline,” the Secretary-General of Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland, said in a statement.

A residential area in Goma, North Kivu. Volcano Nyragongo seen in the background. Credit: Elena Pasquini

Human Rights Watch (HRW) estimates that there are 5.5 million internally displaced people in the country. Nearly 930,000 people from Congo were registered as refugees and asylum seekers in at least 20 countries worldwide. Numerous armed groups and, in some cases, government security forces attack civilians, killing and wounding many.

“Several thousand fighters from various armed groups surrendered throughout the year, but many have returned to armed groups as the authorities failed to take them through an effective Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) program. In many instances, armed assailants were also responsible for sexual violence against women and girls, HRW said.

In May, DRC President Felix Tshisekedi proclaimed a “state of siege” in North Kivu and neighbouring Ituri province to counter growing attacks and fights against armed groups.

Despite efforts by the government, violence and insecurity continue to threaten the safety of journalists in this region. JED & RSF have called out the DRC’s government to prioritise two major reforms to keep its promise to improve press freedom and create mechanisms designed to ensure rapid response to violations and follow up at the highest level. It also asked the government to establish a communication channel with press freedom groups and step up its protection for journalists, and combat impunity.

“The lack of legislation that can protect freedom of the press remains a challenge in the DRC. The level of violence is very high, so you have to put in place a lot of safety measures and do what you can to protect yourself,” says Pasquini.

“We need to keep the spotlight on the DRC and keep the attention on what’s happening in that country. Due to the ongoing conflict, it is already very dangerous to travel, to go to those places where stories are happening. It’s also very tough to verify information,” Pasquini says. “There are multiple threats from various armed groups, various checkpoints all over the region, institutional threats of defamation, they all make it very tough to tell the story, and that’s why we need to tell those stories even more.”

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By Bede Sheppard
NEW YORK, Oct 28 2015 (IPS)

Surprise turned to confusion, then to horror, when the children at Kiata primary school realized that the soldiers they had spotted at the bottom of the hill were heading for their school and its occupants.

As the soldiers reached the hilltop school in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, students scattered in all directions, scared of the armed men and what they might do.

Those who failed to escape the courtyard before the soldiers entered were caught, beaten and forced to help as the armed men converted the school into their temporary base. The soldiers made the children fetch water, steal food from nearby farms and chop up their school desks for fire wood. When one of the captured boys refused to obey, a soldier sliced his arm with a knife. If the older girls resisted the soldiers’ advances the men would rip their clothes, one student told my colleague.

The capture of Kiata primary school in late 2012 features in a new report by Human Rights Watch, which documents the far-too-frequent misuse of schools by the Congolese army and various armed groups in areas of the country that are still affected by conflict. In fact, our investigation shows, the presence of armed men inside schools is a far-too-familiar sight for many children in Congo who are yearning to learn.

When fighters take over a school, they sometimes only make use of a few classrooms or the playground; at other times, however, they convert the entire school into a military base, barracks or training grounds. As the students held captive at Kiata school attested, troops occupying schools means students and teachers risk being unlawfully recruited into armed groups, forced to work without pay, beaten and sexually abused.

Munitions removed from the latrines at the Institut Bweremana in Minova, South Kivu province, in June 2013. Altogether, nine 107mm rockets, two boxes of AK-47 ammunition, and two recoilless rockets were found. The Congolese army had previously occupied this school and at least 41 others in the area in late 2012. (c) 2013 Lane Hartill / Human Rights Watch

Even once vacated, a school may still be a dangerous environment for children if troops leave behind weapons and unused munitions. I visited one school in Congo that had been used as a temporary base, where the occupiers had dumped some of their unused munitions in the school latrines before leaving. The rockets left immersed in the waste required demining experts to remove­a process that was only completed more than seven months later.

Sadly, the practice of armies using schools for military purposes is not unique to Congo. It happens in the majority of countries with armed conflict. All across Africa, from Central African Republic, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan to Sudan, the occupation of schools by armed forces has deprived children of a safe learning environment and the right to education.

Even troops deployed as peacekeepers by the African Union have been found to be using education institutions as bases in the Central African Republic and Somalia– a particularly troubling development.

But there is hope. Earlier this year, a group of countries from around the world committed to do more to protect students, teachers and schools during times of armed conflict. The Safe Schools Declaration, as the commitment is known, includes an agreement to ensure that military trainings, practice and doctrine emphasize the need to protect schools from military use.

To date, 49 countries have joined this Safe Schools Declaration. Better yet, 13 African countries, including many with recent experiences of the military use of schools in their own territory, were among the first to endorse.

To ensure that its children can learn for life­rather than having to run in fear for it­the Congolese government ought to refrain from using schools for military purposes and join the Safe Schools Declaration. In fact, if all nations across the continent were to rally around this goal, the continent could become the first to have universally endorsed the Declaration.

And if the African Union were to re-examine its rules and procedures for its peacekeeping forces and, as the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations did in 2012, ban all infantry battalions from using schools during their operations, African kids would be that much safer and no longer scarred for life like the boy our report names Amani.

A 10-year-old primary school student, Amani was held in Kiata school for six days. When we met him, he showed off the scar on the bridge of his nose. The soldiers who had occupied his school, had forced him to chop up the school desks. A piece of wood had split off and hurled in his face as he chopped. When Amani was finally allowed to return home, his parents asked if the soldiers had beaten him. When he told them what had happened, they responded: “Understand, child, life is like that.”

But if Congo and other countries across the continent would agree to restrain their armies from using schools, then life needn’t be like that for children in Africa and elsewhere.

(End)

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Migrants looking down from the mountain behind the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in Morocco. Credit: Andrea Pettrachin/IPS

By Andrea Pettrachin
CEUTA, Sep 4 2015 (IPS)

In the middle of the mountains behind the border fence of Ceuta, the Spanish enclave in Morocco, and eight kilometres from the nearest Moroccan village of Fnideq, an uncertain number of migrants live in the woods. No one knows exactly how many they are but charity workers in Melilla, Spain’s other enclave in Morocco, say they could be in their thousands.

Ceuta is one of the main (and few) ‘doors’ leading from northern Africa to the territory of the European Union, and is a ’door’ that has been closed since the end of the 1990s, when the Spanish authorities started to build a tripe six-metre fence topped with barbed wire that surrounds the whole enclave, as in Melilla.

In the past, those waiting in the mountains for their turn to try to reach Spain had been able to build something resembling a normal life. They put up tents and at least were able to sleep relatively peacefully at night.Today, the migrants are forced to remain mostly hidden in small groups among the trees or in small caverns, and they know that all attempts to pass the Spanish border are almost certain to fail and end up with arrest by the Moroccan authorities

That all ended after 2012, when the Moroccan police started to burn down the camps and periodically sweep the mountainside, arresting any migrants they found, charged with having illegally entered the country.

These actions were the result of agreements between the Moroccan and Spanish governments, after Spain had asked Morocco to control migration flows.

The most tragic raid so far by the Moroccan police took place last year on Gurugu Mountain which looks down on Melilla. Five migrants were killed, 40 wounded and 400 removed to a desert area on the border with Algeria. According to the migrants, the wounded were not cured and were left to their own destiny.

Today, the migrants are forced to remain mostly hidden in small groups among the trees or in small caverns, and they know that all attempts to pass the Spanish border are almost certain to fail and end up with arrest by the Moroccan authorities.

They live, in their words, “like animals” and when speaking with outsiders are clearly ashamed by their condition, apologising for being dirty and badly-dressed.

The first thing many of them tell you in French is that they are students and that before having to leave their countries they were studying mathematics, economics or engineering at university.

Many of them are from Guinea, one of the countries most seriously affected by the Ebola epidemic, others come from Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Mali, Burkina Faso, all countries characterised by political turmoil of various types.

All of them have been forced to live in these woods for months or even years, waiting for their chance to pass the border fence.

The statistics show that some of them will certainly die in their attempts to reach Spain – either on the heavily fortified fences which encircle the enclaves or out at sea in a small boat or trying to swim to a Spanish beach.

Some of them will finally make it to Spain, perhaps after five or six failed attempts. In that case they will have overcome the first hurdle, escaping the “push-back operations” by the Spanish Guardia Civil, but they will still face the possibility of forced repatriation, particularly if they come from countries with which Spain has a repatriation agreement.

Many of them, however, will finally give up and decide to remain somewhere in Morocco, destined to a life of continuous uncertainty due to their irregular position in the country. You can meet them and listen to their stories in the main Moroccan cities, especially in the north. In most cases, they had escaped death in their attempts to reach Spain and do not want to risk their lives any longer.

Meanwhile a report on ‘Refugee Persons in Spain and Europe” published at the end of May by the non-governmental Spanish Commission for Refugees (CEAR), denounces how sub-Saharan migrants are dissuaded from seeking asylum in Spain, even if coming from countries in conflict such as Mali, Democratic Republic of Congo or Somalia, once they realise that they are likely to be forced to remain for months in a Centre for Temporary Residence of Immigrants (CETI) in Ceuta or Melilla.

In Melilla, for example, those who apply for asylum cannot leave the enclave until a decision has been taken on their application. Unlike Syrian refugees whose application takes no more than two months, CEAR said the average time to reach a decision for sub-Saharan Africans is one and a half years.

The CEAR report is only one of a long list of recent criticisms of the Spanish government’s migration policies from numerous NGOs and international organisations.

The main target of these criticisms has been the Security Law (Ley de Seguridad Ciudadana) passed this year by the Spanish Parliament with only the votes of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s Popular Party. The aim was to give legal cover to the so called devoluciones en caliente, the “push-back operations” against migrants carried out by the Spanish frontier authorities in Ceuta and Melilla in violation of international and European law.

On the Spanish mainland, said the CEAR report, migrant’s right of asylum is seriously undermined by the bureaucratic lengths of application procedures and the political choices of the Spanish authorities.

Calls from CEAR and other NGOs to end “push-back operations” seem very unlikely to be taken into consideration soon by the Spanish government and Parliament, in view of the general elections later this year.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Urban farming is mushrooming in Africa as starvation hits even town and city dwellers. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Sep 2 2015 (IPS)

There is a scramble for unoccupied land in Africa, but this time it is not British, Portuguese, French or other colonialists racing to occupy the continent’s vacant land – it is the continent’s urban dwellers fast turning to urban farming amid the rampant food shortages that have not spared them.

Inadequate wages have aggravated the situation of many, like Agness Samwenje who lives in Harare’s high density Mufakose suburb, and they have found that turning to urban farming is one way of supplementing their supply of food.

Samwenje, a pre-school teacher who took over an open piece of land to cultivate in vicinity to a farm, told IPS that “this mini-farming here is a back-up means to feed my family because the 200 dollars I earn monthly is not enough to support my family after becoming the breadwinner following the death of my husband four years ago, leaving me to care for our three school-going children.”“There is increased rural-to-urban migration in Africa as people seek better employment opportunities which, however, they rarely find and subsequently turn to farming on open pieces of land in towns in order for them to survive because they have no money to buy foodstuffs” –Zambian development expert Mulubwa Nakalonga

“I now spend very little money buying food because crops from my small field here in the city supplement my food,” she added.

For others, like jobless 34-year-old Silveira Sinorita from Mozambique who now lives in the Zimbabwean town of Mutare, urban farming has become their job as they battle to feed their families.

“Without employment, I have found that farming here in town is an answer to my food woes at home because I grow my own potatoes, beans, vegetables and fresh maize cobs, whose surplus I then sell,” Sinorita told IPS.

Pushed to the edge by mounting food deficits, urban farmers in other African countries have even gone beyond mere crop farming. In cities such as Kampala in Uganda and Yaoundé in Cameroon, many urban households are raising livestock, including poultry, dairy cattle and pigs.

Urban farming is mushrooming in Africa’s towns and cities at a time the United Nations is urging nations the world over to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger in line with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), more than 800 million people around the world practise urban agriculture and it has helped cushion them against rising food costs and insecurity, although the U.N. agency also warns that the number of hungry people has risen to over one billion globally, with the “urban poor being particularly vulnerable.”

However, urban farming in Africa is often met with opposition from the authorities where land is owned by local municipalities and agricultural experts say that opposing it makes no sense in the face of growing food insecurity.

“Poverty is not sparing even people living in the cities because jobs are getting scarce on the continent and as a result, farming in cities is fast becoming a common trend as people battle to supplement their foods, this despite urban farming being prohibited in towns and cities here,” government agricultural officer Norman Hwengwere told IPS. Zimbabwe’s local authority by-laws prohibit farming on vacant municipal land.

FAO has also reported that Africa’s market gardens are the most threatened by the continent’s growth spurt because they are typically not regulated or supported by governments, and a recent study has called for governments to become more involved.

In a 2011 research study titled ‘Growing Potential: Africa’s Urban Farmers’, Anna Plyushteva, a PhD student at University College London, argues that greater government involvement is needed for urban agriculture to emerge out of marginality and illegality and deliver greater environmental and social benefits.

“Without official regulation, urban farming can create some serious problems. At present, informal farmers and their produce are exposed to contamination with organic and non-organic pollutants, which is a serious threat to public health,” said Plyushteva.

For independent Zambian development expert Mulubwa Nakalonga, the more people flock to cities, the more pressure they add to the limited resources there.

“There is increased rural-to-urban migration in Africa as people seek better employment opportunities which, however, they rarely find and subsequently turn to farming on open pieces of land in towns in order for them to survive because they have no money to buy foodstuffs,” Nakalonga told IPS.

“Often when people migrate from rural areas anywhere here in Africa, they cling to their agricultural heritage of practices through urban agriculture which you see many practising in towns today to evade hunger,” Nakalonga added.

In the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam, for example, urban gardens in some communities resemble those found in the country’s rural areas from which people migrated.

Despite the opposition elsewhere, some African cities are nevertheless supporting the urban farming trend. The Cape Town local authority in South Africa, for example, introduced its first urban agriculture policy document in 2007, focusing on the importance of urban agriculture for poverty alleviation and job creation.

As FAO projects that there will be 35 million urban farmers in Africa by 2020, it is supporting programmes in some countries to capitalise on the benefits. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example, FAO’s Urban Horticulture Programme is building on the skills of rural farmers who have come to the cities.

The FAO programme in DRC started in response to the country’s massive rural-to-urban exodus following a five-year conflict and now helps local urban farmers to produce 330,000 tons of vegetables each year, while providing employment and income for 16,000 small-scale market gardeners in the country’s towns and cities.

The country’s urban farmers sell 90 percent of what they produce in urban markets and supermarkets, according to FAO, helping to feed a swelling urban population as Congolese flee the countryside in search of security.

Meanwhile, in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, various groups and agencies have helped popularise the “vertical farm in a bag” concept in which city dwellers create their own gardens using tall sacks filled with soil from which plant life grows.

With hunger hitting both rural and urban African dwellers hard, an increasing number of them believe that urban farming is the way to go.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Africa's children still stand as the number one victims of suffering and destitution across the continent. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Aug 26 2015 (IPS)

“Poverty has become part of me,” says 13-year-old Aminata Kabangele from the Democratic Republic of Congo. “I have learned to live with the reality that nobody cares for me.”

Aminata, who fled her war-torn country after the rest of her family was killed by armed rebels and now lives as a as a refugee in Zimbabwe’s Tongogara refugee camp in Chipinge on the country’s eastern border, told IPS that she has had no option but to resign her fate to poverty.

Despite the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, African children still stand as the number one victims of suffering and destitution across the continent.“Poverty has become part of me. I have learned to live with the reality that nobody cares for me” – Aminata Kabangele, a 13-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo

“In every country you may turn to here in Africa, children are at the receiving end of poverty, with high numbers of them becoming orphans,” Melody Nhemachena, an independent social worker in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Based on a 2013 UNICEF report, the World Bank has estimated that up to 400 million children under the age of 17 worldwide live in extreme poverty, the majority of them in Africa and Asia.

According to human rights activists, the growing poverty facing many African families is also directly responsible for the fate of 200,000 African children that the United Nations estimates are sold into slavery every year.

“Many families in Africa are living in abject poverty, forcing them to trade their children for a meal to persons purporting to employ or take care of them (the children), but it is often not the case as the children end up in forced labour, earning almost nothing at the end of the day,” Amukusana Kalenga, a child rights activist based in Zambia, told IPS.

West Africa is one of the continent’s regions where modern-day slavery has not spared children.

According to Mike Sheil, who was sent by British charity and lobby group Anti-Slavery International to West Africa to photograph the lives of children trafficked as slaves and forced into marriage, for many families in Benin – one of the world’s poorest countries – “if someone offers to take their child away … it is almost a relief.”

Global March Against Child Labour, a worldwide network of trade unions, teachers’ and civil society organisations working to eliminate and prevent all forms of child labour, has reported that a 2010 study showed that “a staggering 1.8 million children aged 5 to 17 years worked in cocoa farms of Ivory Coast and Ghana at the cost of their physical, emotional, cognitive and moral well-being.”

“Trafficking in children is real. Gabon, for example, is considered an Eldorado and draws a lot of West African immigrants who traffic children,” Gabon’s Social Affairs Director-General Mélanie Mbadinga Matsanga told a conference on preventing child trafficking held in Congo’s southern city of Pointe Noire in 2012.

Gabon is primarily a destination and transit country for children and women who are subjected to forced labour and sex trafficking, according to the U.S. State Department’s 2011 human trafficking report.

In Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, a study of child poverty showed that over 70 percent of children are not registered at birth while more than 30 percent experience severe educational deprivation. According to UNICEF Nigeria, about 4.7 million children of primary school age are still not in school.

“These boys and girls, some as young as 13-years-old, serve in the ranks of terror groups like Boko Haram, often participating  in suicide operations, and act as spies,” Hillary Akingbade, a Nigerian independent conflict management expert, told IPS.

“Girls here are often forced into sexual slavery while many other African children are abducted or recruited by force, with others joining out of desperation, believing that armed groups offer their best chance for survival,” she added.

Akingbade’s remarks echo the reality of poverty which also faces children in the Central African Republic, where an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 boys and girls became members of armed groups following an outbreak of a bloody civil war in the central African nation in December 2012, according to Save the Children.

Violence plagued the Central African Republic when the country’s Muslim Seleka rebels seized control of the country’s capital Bangui in March 2013, prompting a backlash by the largely Christian militia.

A 2013 report by Save the Children stated that in the Central African Republic, children as young as eight were being recruited by the country’s warring parties, with some of the children forcibly conscripted while others were impelled by poverty.

Last year, the United Nations reported that the recruitment of children in South Sudan’s on-going civil war was “rampant”, estimating that there were 11,000 children serving in both rebel and government armies, some of who had volunteered but others forced by their parents to join armed groups with the hopes of changing their economic fortunes for the better.

Meanwhile, back in the Tongogara refugee camp, Aminata has resigned herself. “I have descended into worse poverty since I came here in the company of other fleeing Congolese and, for many children like me here at the camp, poverty remains the order of the day.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

By David Kode
JOHANNESBURG, Apr 24 2015 (IPS)

Pierre Claver Mbonimpa is not permitted to get close to an airport, train station or port without authorisation from a judge.  He cannot travel outside of the capital of his native Burundi, Bujumbura. Whenever called upon, he must present himself before judicial authorities.

These are some of the onerous restrictions underlying the bail conditions of one of Burundi’s most prominent human rights activists since he was provisionally released on medical grounds in September last year, after spending more than four months in prison for his human rights work.

David Kode

Mbonimpa was arrested and detained on May 15, 2014, and charged with endangering state security and inciting public disobedience. The charges stemmed from views he expressed during an interview with an independent radio station, Radio Public Africaine, in which he stated that members of the Imbonerakure, the youth wing of the ruling CNDD-FDD party, were being armed and sent to the Democratic Republic of Congo for military training.

The arrest and detention of Pierre Claver is symptomatic of a pattern of repression and intimidation of human rights defenders, journalists, dissenters and members of the political opposition in Burundi as it heads towards its much anticipated elections in May and June 2015.

The forthcoming polls will be the third democratic elections organised since the end of the brutal civil war in 2005.  The antagonism of the CNDD-FDD government and its crackdown on civil society and members of opposition formations has increased, particularly as the incumbent, President Pierre Nkurunziza, silences critics and opponents in his bid to run for a third term even after the National Assembly rejected his proposals to extend his term in office.“The international community and Burundi’s donors cannot afford to stand by idly and witness a distortion of the decade-long relative peace that Burundi has enjoyed, which represents the most peaceful decade since independence from Belgium in 1962”

Tensions continue to mount ahead of the polls and even though the president has not publicly stated that he will contest the next elections, the actions of his government and the ruling party clearly suggest he will run for another term.  Members of his party argue that he has technically run the country for one term only as he was not “elected” by the people when he took to power in 2005.

Civil society organisations and religious leaders recently pointed out that Constitution and the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement – which brought an end to the civil war – clearly limit presidential terms to two years.

As the 2015 polls draw closer, state repression has increased, some political parties have been suspended and their members arrested and jailed. The Imbonerakure has embarked on campaigns to intimidate, physically assault and threaten members of the opposition with impunity. They have prevented some political gatherings from taking place under the pretext that they are guaranteeing security at the local level.

Civil society organisations and rival political movements have on several occasions been denied the right to hold public meetings and assemblies, while journalists and activists have been arrested and held under fictitious charges in an attempt to silence them and force them to resort to self-censorship.

Legislation has been used to stifle freedom of expression and restrict the activities of journalists and the independent media.  In June 2013, the government passed a new law which forces journalists to reveal their sources.

The law provides wide-ranging powers to the authorities and sets requirements for journalists to attain certain levels of education and professional expertise, limits issues journalists can cover and imposes fines on those who violate this law.  It prohibits the publication of news items on security issues, defence, public safety and the economy.

The law has been used to target media agencies and journalists, including prominent journalist Bob Rugurika, director of Radio Public Africaine.

The government does not see any major difference between opposition political parties and human rights activists and journalists and has often accused civil society and the media of being mouth pieces for the political opposition, describing them as “enemies of the state”.

In the lead-up to the last elections in 2010, most of the opposition parties decided to boycott the elections and the ruling party won almost unopposed. However, the post-elections period was characterised by political violence and conflict.

Ideally, the upcoming elections could present the perfect opportunity to “jump start” Burundi’s democracy.  For this to happen, the media and civil society need to operate without fear or intimidation from state and non-state actors.  On the contrary, state repression is bound to trigger a violent response from some of the opposition parties and ignite violence similar to that which happened in 2010.

The international community and Burundi’s donors cannot afford to stand by idly and witness a distortion of the decade-long relative peace that Burundi has enjoyed, which represents the most peaceful decade since independence from Belgium in 1962.

It is increasingly clear that the people of Burundi need the support of the international community at this critical juncture. The African Union (AU), with its public commitment to democracy and good governance, must act now by putting pressure on the government of Burundi to respect its democratic ideals to prevent more abuses and further restrictions on fundamental freedoms ahead of the elections.

The African Union should demand that the government stops extra-judicial killings and conducts independent investigations into members of the security forces and Imbonerakure who have committed human rights violations and hold them accountable.

Further, Burundi’s close development partners, particularly Belgium, France and the Netherlands, should condemn the attacks on civil liberties and urge the government to instil an enabling environment in which a free and fair political process can take place while journalists and civil society activists can perform their responsibilities without fear.  (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo are as dangerous and lawless as ever, with police and the state offering citizens little or no protection from armed groups.

‘Secure Insecurity,’ a report released Friday by Oxfam, claims citizens in some parts of the DRC are “forced to pay for protection that the state should be providing to its citizens as their right.”

The report says some police charge citizens for their services – US$5 to report a crime, US$10 or up to the equivalent of US$40 to investigate – but even when state protection is freely available, it is often ineffective.

“As a woman in her early thirties told Oxfam: ‘When I went to see the chief about a case of rape in our district, the chief told me that justice doesn’t concern women’,” the report stated.

Stories included in the report also claim the Congolese army and police regularly beat and assault citizens.

Oxfam says the report “reveals how little progress has been made towards building legitimate and credible state authority in many parts of eastern DRC, a disturbing conclusion.”

One woman from the Ruzizi Plain area of Uvira is quoted as saying “we don’t know where to turn, we just want some fresh air; we want peace.”

Oxfam claims “the world’s attention largely moved away from the [DRC]” in February 2013, after the signing of the Peace, Security and Cooperation Framework, in which the government promised to reform security services and build the state’s authority nationwide.

However, a series of renewed conflicts between rival army and militia groups since October 2014 have killed 250 people in the country’s east.

Militia groups have also demanded crops from farmers, set up illegal roadblocks and charged money for passage through, and extorted money from vendors returning from markets. State officials have also been accused of extortion, forced labour, and demanding payment for protection.

‘The population needs to live in peace and security in the areas that are under our [the government’s] control,” a police commander in North Kivu told Oxfam.

“We have deployed a police unit, but it’s too small to assure the security of the population on that hill.”

Conflicts over land, between different ethnic groups, has also led to “theft and slaughter of livestock, killings, kidnappings, destruction and expropriation of fields, preventing access to land and forced displacement.”

Oxfam urged the Congolese government to make the provision of state services in rural areas a priority, as well as reform security services, and ensure security and military salaries are paid.

Follow Josh Butler on Twitter @JoshButler

Edited by Roger Hamilton-Martin

Which story line sounds the more credible – that linking the rebel movement ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) to policies pursued by Iran or that linking the Sunni extremist force to Iran’s adversary Saudi Arabia?

In June this year, fighters belonging to ISIS – a rebel movement that had previously established its foothold in the oil-rich areas of north-eastern Syria – succeeded in capturing Mosul, a city surrounded by oil fields in northern Iraq. Ever since, commentators in the world’s media have been speculating on the origins of the dreaded organisation’s military success.

It is admitted that the occupation of Mosul and vast tracts of the Sunni-dominated portion of Iraq would not have been possible except for the fact that ISIS forged a broad grassroots’ alliance expressing deep discontent by Iraq’s minority Sunnis with the policies of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s government. Nor would Mosul have fallen but for the dramatic desertion by top-officers of Iraq’s state army.

Peter Custers

Yet various observers have meanwhile focused on the political economy behind the advance of ISIS. Some experts from U.S. think tanks have discussed the likely sources of ISIS’ finance, pinpointing private donors in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Other writers instead have connected ISIS’ reliance on black market sales of oil in Kurdish territory with Iranian exports of crude, described as “illegal”.

I propose putting the spotlight on the methods of war financing used by ISIS, but first it is necessary to highlight the movement’s complete sectarianism.

Soon after the occupation of Mosul, rebels blew up and bulldozed shrines and mosques in the city belonging to Shia Muslims. Pictures on the demolition of these buildings were circulated widely by the world’s mainstream media. Unfortunately, few Western journalists cared to draw attention to the role which destruction of shrines has played in the history of Islam.

Contrary to Catholicism, the veneration of saints at Sufi and Shia tombs and shrines basically reflects heterodox tendencies within the Islamic faith. On the other hand, Sunni orthodoxy and especially its Saudi variety, Wahhabism, either condemns intercession or, at the least, considers the worshipping of saints at tombs to be unacceptable. Islam’s minority of Shias, and its mystical current of Sufism, freely engage in such worship – and this throughout the Muslim world.“ISIS is … a ‘religiously inspired’ Sunni extremist organisation with an utterly secular objective: to control the bulk of oil resources in two Middle Eastern states in order to re-establish acaliphat, an all-Islamic state-entity guided by a central religious authority”

ISIS’ work of demolition in Iraq can in no way be equated with practices of Iran’s Shia rulers. Instead, they express the extremist movement’s affinity with policies long championed by Saudi Arabia. Ever since the founding of the Saudi state, numerous Shia and Sufi shrines have been rased to the ground at the behest of this country’s Wahhabi dynasty.

What does the political economy behind ISIS’ military advance in Syria and Iraq tell us about the organisation’s affinities? First, in one sense, the ISIS strategy might be interpreted as rather novel.

Whereas the extraction of raw materials is a war strategy pursued by numerous rebel movements in the global South – see, for example, UNITA’s extraction of diamonds in the context of Angola’s civil war, and the trade in coltan by rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo – rarely has a Southern rebel movement succeeded in turning crude oil into its chief source of revenue.

Indeed, whereas ISIS originally relied on private funders in Saudi Arabia to build up a force of trained fighters, the organisation has consciously targeted regions in Syria and Iraq harbouring major oil fields and (in the case of Iraq) oil refineries. By laying siege to the oil refinery at Baiji, responsible for processing one-third of oil consumed in Iraq, ISIS hoped to undermine the state’s control of oil resources.

Further, some 450 million dollars was stolen by ISIS fighters from a subsidiary of Iraq’s central bank after the occupation of Mosul. This reportedly was all income from oil extraction. Some observers put the cash income which ISIS derives from smuggled oil at one million dollars a day!

ISIS is thus a ‘religiously inspired’ Sunni extremist organisation with an utterly secular objective: to control the bulk of oil resources in two Middle Eastern states in order to re-establish acaliphat, an all-Islamic state-entity guided by a central religious authority.

Yet though ISIS’ methodology of reliance on oil for financing of its war campaigns is novel for a rebel movement, such use of oil is not unique in the context of the Middle East. Ever since the 1970s, most oil-rich countries of the region have squandered a major part of their income from the exports of crude by (indirectly) exchanging their main natural resource against means of destruction – weapon systems bought on the international market.

And while Iran under the Shah was equally enticed into opting for this form of trade in the 1970s, – it is the Wahhabi kingdom of Saudi Arabia which all the way through from the oil crisis of 1973 onwards and up to today has functioned as the central axe of such a trade mechanism.

Witness, for instance, the 1980s oil-for-arms (!) ‘barter deal’ between the Saudi kingdom and the United Kingdom, the so-called ‘Al Yamamah’ deal, and the 60 billion dollar, largest-ever international arms’ agreement between Saudi Arabia and the United States clinched in 2010.

Forward to 2014, and an Iraq desperately struggling to survive. A section of the world’s media has already announced its impending demise, predicting a split of the country into three portions – Sunni, Kurdish and Shia. On the other hand, some commentators have advised that the United States should now change gear and line up with Iran, in order to help the Iraqi government overcome its domestic political crisis.

Yet the United States and its European allies for long, too long, have bent over to service the Wahhabi state. Even as Western politicians loudly proclaimed their allegiance to democracy and secularism, they failed to oppose or counter Saudi Arabia’s oppression of, and utter discrimination against, Shia citizens.

For over 40 years they opted to close their eyes and supply Saudi Arabia with massive quantities of fighter planes, missiles and other weaponry, in exchange for the country’s crude. Playing the role of a wise elderly senior brother, the United States has recently advised Iraq’s prime minister al-Maliki, known for his sectarian approach, that he should be more ‘inclusive’, meaning sensitive towards Iraq’s minority Sunni population.

But has the United States’ prime Middle Eastern ally Saudi Arabia ever been chastised over its systematic discrimination of Shias? Has it ever been put to task for its cruel oppression of heterodox Muslims? And has the United States ever pondered the implications of the trading mechanism of disparate exchange it sponsored – for the future of democracy, food sovereignty and people’s welfare in the Middle East?

*  Peter Custers, an academic researcher on Islam and religious tolerance  with field work in South Asia, is also a theoretician on the arms’ trade and extraction of raw materials in the context of conflicts in the global South. He is the author of ‘Questioning Globalized Militarism’. 

Although traffic at the DRC, Zambia border post of Kasumbalesa has returned to normal following the death of two truckers at the beginning of 2014, many say they fear for their lives. Courtesy: Ephraim Nsingo

By Eprahim Nsingo
LUSAKA, Feb 21 2014 (IPS)

Truck driver Alfred Ndlovu transports cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) mineral rich Katanga Province to South Africa twice a month. He has been doing this for the last five years but now he is considering giving it up because he fears for his life every time he crosses the border.

“It is not good to always be in fear. The soldiers and police officers are supposed to protect us, not to punish us for refusing to give them bribes. We are one as Southern Africa and the Congolese security forces should not try to create unnecessary strife,” Ndlovu told IPS.

Conflict claimed two lives at the Kasumbalesa Border post between Zambia and the DRC since the start of the year. In January, a 28-year-old Zambian truck driver, Patrick Mwila, was shot dead by Congolese officials following a dispute over a bribe. And at the start of February, Zimbabwean truck driver Joseph Howard Mwachande, 52, was shot dead on the Zambian side of the border.“We are no longer interested in promises, we want to see action. We are pleading with the government, please help secure our drivers.” -- Chilufya Chansa, SADC Truck Drivers Association

The border is the DRC’s biggest link to trade routes in southern Africa and internationally. According to the Zambia Revenue Authority (ZRA), Kasumbalesa is Zambia’s busiest border in terms of traffic volumes. The ZRA says that traffic through the border has increased by over 120 percent in the last two years, with the border currently handling “an average of 600 trucks on a normal day and up to 800 trucks per day during serious congestion.”

But from Feb. 1 to 4, no truck crossed into the DRC from Zambia. Now even though the post has reopened, Chilufya Chansa, the interim coordinator for the Southern African Development Community Truck Drivers Association’s Zambia chapter, told IPS that the truckers felt unsafe crossing into the DRC.

“We are not safe. We are just moving by the grace of god,” Chansa told IPS. “Just last week, we had an incident where four trucks belonging to a South African company were attacked by gunmen wearing military uniforms. The gunmen ransacked the trucks and took the drivers’ personal belongings.

“We have been crying to the governments of Zambia and DRC to enforce security measures at the border and surrounding areas. Security wise, we are not safe. The border is still very porous,” he said.

On Feb. 7, a few days after Mwachande’s death, Zambian President Michael Sata issued a statement that his government had “swiftly engaged our Congolese counterparts on the need to avert similar occurrences in future by tightening security at Kasumbalesa and ultimately preventing criminal elements from taking advantage to peddle their narrow and selfish interests.”

Zambia’s Home Affairs Minister Ngosa Simbyakula said that the government was considering setting up a dry port where trucks would offload their cargo for onward transmission by the Congolese truckers.

“If security and safety of our drivers can’t be guaranteed in DRC, the idea of a dry port in Zambia will be seriously pursued so that trucks transporting goods to the DRC can offload here and allow trucks from that country to pick them up here,” Ngosa told journalists.

But Chansa thinks the government should talk less and do more.

“We are no longer interested in promises, we want to see action. We are pleading with the government, please help secure our drivers,” Chansa said.

“The government should take charge to help ensure that when we go to the DRC, we come back safe with everything still intact.”

Despite the truckers’ concerns, ZRA corporate communications manager Mumbuna Kufekisa told IPS that “the traffic situation at Kasumbalesa has returned to normal.”

“The queue on the Zambian side has [typically] less than 200 trucks and all of them are new arrivals. We had to put up some management intervention measures to mitigate the situation,” he said.

“We are still making sustained efforts to ensure efficient trade facilitation across our frontier. We will also continue engaging our valued stakeholders, the drivers and clearing agents, to ensure minimum disturbances at the border by employing proactive and  peaceful conflict resolution strategies,” Kufekisa added.

However, Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa secretary general Sindiso Ngwenya told journalists that the skirmishes were affecting regional trade, and called for the removal of armed security personnel manning road blocks for goods in transit.

“If we can remove them and put them where they should be, I don’t think we would be having these problems,” Ngwenya said in a statement.

The U.S. government is being urged to roll back a longstanding policy that has banned foreign aid funding from being used for health care services for victims of sexual violence in conflict situations.

A group of leading U.S. and African NGOs gathered here Wednesday to launch a global campaign that, if successful, would provide millions of women and girls in crisis and conflict areas around the world with post-rape access to comprehensive health care.

The Centre for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), an advocacy group, was joined by the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch in calling on the administration of President Barack Obama to clarify or repeal four-decade-old legislation, known as the Helms Amendment, that forbids U.S. foreign aid recipients from using this funding to perform abortions “as a method of family planning.”

“The 1973 Helms Amendment is a law that says no funds are allowed for abortions overseas as a matter of family planning – full stop,” Serra Sippel, the president of CHANGE, told IPS. “But when we talk about abortion in the case of rape, that’s not family planning, so the law [actually] doesn’t forbid foreign assistance to pay for these cases.”

At the new campaign’s launch, Sippel said nearly 50 women between the ages of 15 and 49 are raped every hour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), “where rape is used as a war weapon.”

Unwanted pregnancies resulting from rapes in conflict situations have become a particularly visible feature of the ongoing violence in the DRC, where people living in the eastern part of the country remain subject to marauding militias in a war that has claimed nearly three million lives. This situation is exacerbated by the ongoing social stigma surrounding rape across many parts of Africa.

“I will tell you about a 20-year-old girl who was raped and who, since abortion in the DRC is illegal, kept the baby, hiding her pregnancy because rape causes so much shame there,” Justine Masika Bihamba, the founder of the Women’s Synergy for Victims of Sexual Violence (SFVS), a network of 35 women’s rights organisations in the DRC, told IPS.

“But when she gave birth, she went with her mom – who didn’t want her to keep the child – and wrapped the baby in flannel and abandoned it along the road.”

When a hunter passed by and found the baby, he called for help.

“But everyone was afraid,” Bihamba continued, “and no one had the courage to come and cover the child. When they brought it to the hospital, they found out that the child was dehydrated and was about to die.”

The story underscores how difficult it can be for rape survivors to move on with their lives. Often, Bihamba said, women try to hide a post-rape pregnancy because evidence of her assault would brand her as “inferior” to other women, perhaps making it difficult later on to find a husband.

Changing the law

The new campaign, “Break the Barriers”, is now set to step up pressure on the Obama administration to support and allow access to safe abortion services for the millions of women and girls who face sexual violence in areas plagued by conflict. Currently, the confusion surrounding the Helms Amendment makes this difficult.

The problem, advocates suggest, is that the law has been interpreted by U.S. government agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), to include post-rape abortions, despite the fact that the text only refers to family-planning purposes.

(USAID was unable to respond to requests for comment by deadline.)

“President Obama doesn’t actually need congressional action to do this,” CHANGE’s Sippel said. “We are simply asking him to clarify, through an executive order, that the law doesn’t bar funding for abortions in cases of life endangerment.”

Yet others say more drastic change is required.

“We think that the Helms law is just bad law,” Liesl Gerntholtz, the executive director of the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch, told IPS. “It deprives women of critical services and it really doesn’t advance human rights in any way.”

Gerntholtz says the Helms Amendment should be repealed.

Future roadmap

But the U.S. government has also recently taken a series of measures that recognise sexual violence as a frequent characteristic of conflict. In 2011, the Obama administration issued an executive order, the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, which sought to “protect women from sexual and gender-based violence and to ensure equal access to relief and recovery assistance.”

Yet advocates point out that women’s security worldwide remains unacceptably weak. Recent U.N. statistics find that the first half of 2013 saw 705 registered cases of sexual violence in the DRC alone, while the World Health Organisation notes that nearly 50,000 women and girls continue to die from unsafe abortions every year.

The Obama administration also recently embraced U.N. Security Council Resolution 2122, adopted in October, which is set to strengthen women’s participation in “all phases of conflict prevention, resolution and recovery,” in addition to ensuring better access to comprehensive reproductive services.

But, activists say, more needs to be done.

“We would like to see the U.S. develop a roadmap and strategies that will enable [reproductive services] to reach the most vulnerable,” Ruth Ojiambo Ochieng, the executive director of the Uganda-based Isis-WICCE, a women’s rights group, told IPS.

But while the newly launched campaign puts a strong emphasis on what the U.S. government could and should do, there are obstacles to what U.S. activism can achieve. Perhaps most importantly, abortion remains illegal in many countries.

In the DRC, for instance, abortion is criminalised by two articles of the country’s criminal code, which punish “women who get an abortion, but also anyone who assists them with the practice,” SFVS’s Bihamba told IPS.

Even if the Helms Amendment were to be repealed or clarified, U.S. and international humanitarian agencies would likely face legal hurdles in the provision of abortion on the ground.

Still, advocates hope that a strong U.S. stance on the issue will send an important signal globally.

“An executive order coming from the [Obama administration] would show the world that the U.S. government is stepping up to recognising that women who have been raped need access to abortion services,” CHANGE’s Sippel told IPS. “Global leadership by the U.S. government can really help push [countries] like the DRC to move forward and change their laws.”

By Anna Shen
NEW YORK, Oct 4 2013 (IPS)

When author Deni Béchard discovered bonobos shared almost 99 percent of human DNA, and based their relationships on cooperation and collaboration, he knew he had to write about them.

Courtesy of Deni Béchard

He was fascinated to learn that as a flagship species, bonobos are the only great ape that do not kill their own. More importantly, he wanted to understand how one innovative NGO could use them as a symbol for larger issues in conservation, and knew that saving them from extinction was of extraordinary importance.

In his just-published book, Empty Hands, Open Arms: The Race to Save Bonobos in the Congo and Make Conservation Go Viral (Milkweed Editions, 2013), he draws from a rich palette of profoundly committed Congolese conservationists who have lived through war and lost everything they cared about. Against great odds, with few resources, they continue to commit themselves to saving these great apes.

Béchard also chronicles the determined and heroic efforts of the Bonobo Conservation Initiative, an NGO that works directly with Congolese communities, while tackling the root causes of poverty and unemployment that lead to the hunting of bonobos in the first place.

One of his goals is to show how the choices of our leaders and our consumer appetites have affected that country. He does so, but also tells very human stories of the culture and history of the Congo, painting a vivid picture of the place and its people.

His book tour kicks off this week.

Excerpts from his conversation with Anna Shen follow.

Q: How did learning about bonobos change your vision of humanity?

A: As humans, we have a hard time seeing the boundaries of our culture or conceiving of the ways that we might radically change. Meeting bonobos – especially the famous bonobo Kanzi in the Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary – who can understand English and communicate with humans through the use of lexigrams, made me understand how dynamically great apes can change with their environments and with their cultures. Kanzi illustrates the power of culture to alter many of the traits that we associate with a species.

On a more dramatic level, the matriarchal and largely nonviolent structure of bonobo society, and the evolutionary circumstances that may have created it led me to consider the degree to which humans are a product of our environment. An abundance of resources and the resulting relative absence of competition may have allowed bonobos to develop more stable, peaceful societies in which all young are cherished.

Human societies have such a wealth of resources that no children should be privileged over others, and I have considered how quickly our culture would change if our priority were to use our resources for the benefit of the young – for their education, health care, and environmental well-being.

After a few generations of investing our national wealth into our young, what would we look like as a race? I think we would seem dramatically different. It’s essential for us to remember how much control we actually have over our environment and culture, the ways that we can use it to actively change our race for the better, and the speed at which we would see results.

Q: What are the similarities and differences between bonobos and humans?

A: Bonobos share many of the same traits as humans: empathy, imagination, loyalty, grief, hope, and love. The only difference between us, as far as I can tell – not having integrated into their society – is that their experience of life appears much more unmitigated.

Humans tend to bury their experiences in meaning; we tell ourselves stories, romanticising and dramatising, or trying desperately to give our loves and struggles – the narratives of our lives – greater significance. Learning about bonobos stripped a lot of that away and reminded me of the degree to which we are great apes, in a long evolutionary lineage, and that often, by trying to overload our lives with meaning, we lose touch with the simple animal impulses that drive us – impulses that are no less real or beautiful for being animal.

If anything, as the primatologist Frans de Waal suggests, what we see as our highest ethical values is encoded in our biology.

Q: What are a few of the approaches to conservation that might make it “go viral”?

A: What makes a conservation system self-replicating or “viral” is adapting it as closely as possible to the culture and conditions where it is being implemented. The organisation I was writing about for Empty Hands, Open Arms¸ the Bonobo Conservation Initiative, has its staff meet with various different social groups in a future protected area.

They get a sense of how local leaders view the forests and wildlife and possible conservation projects, as well as how the various members of the communities do. When it comes to time to set up projects, BCI’s staff supports a leader who is from the area that will become a reserve, someone who understands the values of the people, and they frame conservation in terms of the spiritual traditions of the communities.

The end result is that the people feel a deep sense of ownership for projects. Their successes are celebrated, and the conservationists who come from outside often defer to their knowledge. The local people so thoroughly embrace conservation that neighboring communities see the benefits and begin surveying endangered wildlife in their own regions and setting up their own protected zones with relatively little support from outsiders.

Q: Are you optimistic about the future of conservation in Africa?

A: I see cases for both optimism and pessimism. I meet more and more people from countries worldwide who care about their environment and the preservation of their natural wealth, and I think that if we can shift to a more intimate, integrative model of conservation, seeing people as the solution and not the problem, then we have the potential to do a great deal of good.

At the moment, the arrogance of those with the planetary wealth is one of the major stumbling blocks, as the West has little respect for the knowledge, vision, and passion of impoverished people in developing countries. Our sense of entitlement, and especially our sense of exceptionalism lead us to behave in racist ways and to act without learning how we can most effectively take action.

But this is gradually changing, and I think that we are learning to listen more than we used to.

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Ornela Mbenga Sebo during the interview with IPS in Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 1 2013 (IPS)

Ornela Mbenga Sebo, a young Congolese woman, escaped in 2011 from a rebel camp in an unidentified location in Africa where she was being held as a slave and stowed away in the garbage bay of a merchant ship, with no idea where it was headed.

When the ship reached its destination two weeks later, she found out she was in Santos, an Atlantic ocean port in southeast Brazil.

She is one of hundreds of people from the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) who have sought refuge in Brazil.

Mbenga Sebo was born in Walikale, in the eastern DRC province of North Kivu. Armed groups and the army are fighting over the gold, cassiterite, coltan and other minerals in that region.

But until 2011, she appeared to be safe from the violence. Her family had a comfortable life. Her father taught at the university, and she was studying journalism and working in a bank. She had learned English and French and had travelled abroad.“We walked for two weeks. I found other people who were also escaping: people who were sick, children, women and men.” -- Ornela Mbenga Sebo

Her odyssey began in January 2011, when she was 21. Walikale became the target of an attack by insurgents, who slaughtered local residents and set fire to homes and public buildings.

She was at work when the rebel invasion began. She hid there until things calmed down, before running home. But her house was burning and there was no sign of her family.

Alone, with just the clothes on her back, she walked for weeks with other people who were running away from the violence. Her aim was to reach the capital, Kinshasa, where her grandparents lived.

“I was on foot,” she told IPS. “We walked for two weeks. I found other people who were also escaping: people who were sick, children, women and men.”

The DRC, a vast, resource-rich country in Central Africa, has been caught up in armed conflict between government forces and different armed groups for decades. Some of the insurgent groups have ties to neighbouring Rwanda and Burundi.

In 2010, a United Nations fact-finding mission documented a range of human rights crimes, including mass rapes, by the militias and the army itself in Walikale.

Mbenga Sebo described the terror she felt as she walked through ghost towns, abandoned and destroyed, only inhabited by the bodies strewn along the streets.

“It’s so vivid in my mind that when I talk about it it’s like I’m back in that place again,” she said.

The biggest danger was running into armed groups, “who roamed from town to town looking for people to kill,” she said.

On more than one occasion she pretended to be dead, to save her life.

But she ended up being captured and taken to a camp, where she was kept as a slave along with dozens of other people.

The armed men who seized her were Rwandan, she said. They loaded her and the rest of the group she was travelling with onto three helicopters. The trip took about two hours. From what she could see from the air, the camp they arrived at was not near a town or any populated area.

Charly Nzalambila, a Congolese volunteer with Caritas Brazil who helped transcribe Mbenga Sebo’s story to submit to the authorities in Brazil, believes the men were members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda.

When they were communicating by radio, her captors spoke Swahili and some English, Mbenga Sebo said.

She spent all day hauling buckets of water to supply the rebel camp. The insurgents “forced the women to sleep with them, wash their clothes, and cook their meals. I slept on the ground. They would beat me. I suffered moral, physical and mental abuse,” she said.

But one day she met a young man who took pity on her and helped her escape, showing her that the camp was near a port. He told her they were in Tanzania, but IPS was unable to verify this.

Late one night in February, she climbed over the wall surrounding the camp, and made it to a merchant ship. “It was a matter of life or death,” she said.

The only thing she found to eat were some peanuts. Two weeks later, after discovering that she had landed in the Brazilian port of Santos, the second surprise was realising that she could understand the local language – Portuguese – because she had once spent a year in Angola with her family.

She quickly made contact with people from Angola and DRC living in Brazil, and not long after her arrival, she was living as a refugee in Rio de Janeiro.

This country of 198 million has no limits on the number of people who can be granted refugee status. According to the law on refugees, passed in 1997, even people who have entered the country using false documents can apply for refugee protection.

Destination unknown

Fleeing overseas with no clear destination may not be so uncommon among Africans desperately escaping violence and armed conflict.

“Many young people fleeing these situations end up in Brazil by chance,” Angolan refugee Fernando Ngury told IPS in 2007, 10 years after the law on refugees took effect.

“Many stow away on ships that they believe are heading to Europe, and find themselves instead in Brazil. But some are thrown overboard at sea,” said Ngury, the head of the Centre for the Defence of Refugee Human Rights (CEDHUR).

According to the latest official figures, there are 4,715 people from 74 different countries who have been granted refugee status in Brazil today. The largest groups are made up of nearly 1,700 Angolans, 700 Colombians and some 500 people from the DRC.

Of the 4,715 refugees, 2,012 still receive assistance from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

There are also 1,441 people who have applied, and are still waiting, for refugee status.

The process of requesting refugee protection in Brazil begins at the National Committee for Refugees (CONARE), in the Justice Ministry.

Rebuilding

Now 23, Mbenga Sebo is rebuilding her life little by little. Today she shares a house with four Congolese roommates in a suburb of Rio. As a refugee, she has the right to work and has full access to public services, such as healthcare and education.

The fact that she speaks several languages helped her get a job as a receptionist at the Technological Park of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where she has also made friends.

Recently, through the online social networking site Facebook, she received wonderful news: that her parents and siblings are still alive.

She learned that her family had managed to flee by bus to Senegal, with the savings they had in their home. Today they are living in Chicago. Her mother is working as a waitress in a hotel and her father is unemployed.

Her dream is to join her family in the U.S. Her friends and office mates are trying to raise funds over the Internet to buy her a plane ticket for Chicago.

She said she had no intention of returning to the DRC. “I love my country, I am African, but I would only go back if the situation changes and it is safe. And even then, only to visit my grandparents, who are still there.”

Her workmate, George Patiño, told IPS: “She is an example of strength, conviction and hope.” It was his idea to turn to crowdfunding, on the Brazilian web site Vakinha, to send Mbenga Sebo to Chicago.

Patiño hopes to raise the necessary 2,500 dollars in three months. The Ornela Mundi campaign was launched on Vakinha Sept. 5, and 26 percent of the funds needed have been raised so far.

“She has always managed to overcome, and she’ll find happiness in the end,” Patiño said.

Mbenga Sebo’s story deserves to be told in a book, according to Brazilian journalist Ana Paula Laport, who is preparing to write her biography.

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