Virtual Slave Labor In Congo’s Cobalt Mines

Ann Garrison spoke to Maurice Carneyabout the virtual slave labor in the cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. AG: That’s the violence against hundreds of thousands of artisanal miners living in the most horrific conditions, the equivalent of slavery except that they can’t be bought and sold. They have absolutely no way out because men are making $1 a day, women 80 cents a day, and their children work in the mines instead of going to school.  Their environment has been so totally destroyed that their only option is to dig cobalt, shoveling dirt and banging at rocks, covered in poisonous dust, breathing it, and often dying of it. Many women work with babies strapped to their backs in the midst of this inferno. Siddharth Kara describes all this in his devastating new book, “Cobalt Red ,” where he asks one of these women to talk to him and she responds, “Who is going to fill this sack while I’m talking to you?” Another tells him that her husband died of a respiratory disease after she had two miscarriages, and that she’s glad God took her children because it’s better not to be born there.  MC: Yes, and Katanga was 80% of Congo’s economy at the time of independence, in 1960, when Belgians tried to amputate it from the rest of the country, and DRC’s first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, died trying to defend it. MC: The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885  enabled the corporations of foreign powers to have unfettered access to the riches of the Congo. It precluded any claim that the resources of the Congo belong to the Congolese people.  MC: The government is not utilizing them for the benefit of the Congolese in the way that, for  example, Chile, Bolivia, and Venezuela use national resources for the benefit of their people.