The concept of "CONGOCAUST"
The word is made up of Congo: referring to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Central African Country where Atrocious acts have the highest prevalence in the world and Caust, from Holocaust which is a Greek word that can be translated as “burning of a whole” or “engulfed in fire”.
Congocaust refers to huge loss of life in the DRC, through the scramble for raw material, over a prolonged period of time due to silent nature and need for secrecy as well as deceit surrounding the actions. The reasons for such events are primarily unrelated to community hatred. Unlike many other holocausts of parts of humanity, Congocausts is driven by the gluttonous need from commercial firms to acquire raw material at below market value.
In the 1890’s, when a great need for rubber from car industries broke out, Leopold II King of the Belgium Kingdom set up a silent but large scale killing and exploitation of Congolese locals, mostly by limb chopping and village burning in a bid to increase rubber production. This cost 10 millions lives in human fatalities over 23 years.
From the late 1990’s, the search for semiconductor technology caused peak demands on Cassiterite and Tantallum. The need to acquire cheap ( Keep the capital and the profit but expand humans if need be) exposed DRC which is sitting with 80% of the world’s known COLOMBO TANTALUM reserves. Just like Leopold II used mercenaries from as far as Dahomey while occupying Congo, many multinationals have enrolled the services of Rwanda and Uganda’s regular armies to occupy DRC with the help of local small scale companies in order to ensure ideal, near costless supply. The current and ongoing tragedy has already claimed over 6.4 millions at an estimated rate of around 1000 death a day from direct and related conflict related causes.
Such mass killings are possible through excessive militarization due to heightened tensions in the affected areas while refraining from industrial exploitations that demand support and draw attention. This situation forces the military to live off civilians who are then used as forced labours and carriers to points of supplies. Heavy militarization is key to the process because it guarantees better control of forced labourers, and intimidation on whistle blowers which helps conceal statistic on the cost to human life while maintaining a feeling of mutual neutralisation of armed factions and reporting bogus successes on arranged operations.
These raw material searches through conflict have tended, in the DRC post colonial, to exploit existing cracks in communities and turn them into armed conflicts. This approach has lead to mass killings and ethnic cleansing of groups sitting on the richest soil. This phenomenon in a Congocaust environment was fairly recorded with Leopold II who raised an army or orphans to quell away any attempt of revolts in the Congo. Seen as a mere commodity, or loots of war, these children are afforded no medical treatment, payment or sometimes food for their services rendered.
CongoCaust was used publicly for the first time on the 7th November 2009 and the 4th January 2010 in Yeoville (Johannesburg - South Africa) and in Pretoria by FOCAS member organisations, including ‘Retour au Congo’, ‘Umbrella’, ‘Bourse Okapi’, ‘Congo Heart of Africa’, ‘CongoRenaissance’, ‘Christians for Peace in Africa’, and partners (Bonne Gouverance and Mahala News). FOCAS is one of the leading Congolese platform in South Africa granted by the Soros foundation, Southern Africa Chapter known as OSISA.
