Amnesty International warns that two human rights defenders, Georges Kapiamba and Prince Kumwamba, both from from Katanga, a southern province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), have received several threats related to their human rights work since the evening of April 3.

Along with other activists, Georges Kapiamba and Prince Kumwamba have been planning to visit the town of Kilwa in Katanga province, the scene of a massacre by government troops in October 2004. Amnesty explains that “the visit [is] on behalf of an Australian legal firm pursuing possible …

An internal investigative panel has just prepared ‘a stinging indictment’ of the World Bank’s conduct in connection to the large-scale industrial logging campaign in the Democratic Republic of Congo; revealing that the Bank encouraged foreign companies to destructively log the rainforests; misled Congo’s government about the value of the forests; repeatedly broke their own rules and regulations to ensure the plan went ahead; and most damningly, threatened the lives of millions of Indigenous People and subsistence farmers who depend on the forests for survival.

The report is the result …

The following article, written by Gwalgen Geordie Dent, was published on May 14 at the Dominion

Canada in the Congo War
Role of mining, resource extraction has been neglected

Even for those who follow world events, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is little known in Canada.

The DRC holds two major distinctions. First, it is the richest country in Africa in terms of mineral wealth: gold, diamonds, cobalt and chromium all exist in abundance. Second, it is the country in which the highest number of people – roughly, 4 to10 million …

Congo - Apocalypse by Design
By Keith Harmon Snow, www.allthingspass.com
November 5, 2006

Josephine Aoka Bikenge is a widow who lives along the remote Lopori River, a major tributary in the Congo River Basin. Josephine and her three daughters tied their pirogues, dugout canoes carved out of massive trees, alongside my jungle raft and together we floated for three hours while I interviewed her about life and death in rural Congo. She had never spoken to a white person.

Josephine has never used a telephone—not even the hard-wired kind—or a computer. She has never been in a car, doesn’t own a bike. …