À 2 min 40, on voit deux Ti-lou de 13 et 15 ans qui sont des mineurs au Congo pour amasser les minéraux comme le coltan nécessaire aux fameux IPhone. Pour 2 ou 3 $ par jour...Tout est dans tout. Produced by the Pulitzer Center, Congos BloodyﾠColtan explores coltans role in Congos ongoing civil war. It was featured on Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakariaﾠin the Fall of 2006. Reporter/Producer: Mvemba Phezo Dizolele Producer/Editor: Nathalie Applewhite Editor: Chris Belcher Field Producer: Jeca Taudte Videographer: Cary McClelland The iPhone 6 is coming out soon. But you don’t need one. Your lining up to buy Apple’s latest product is enabling their abuse of workers around the world, including in the United States. Of course, Apple isn’t the only one guilty of this. The HP laptop I’m using to write this article was made in the same way. As is the Samsung smartphone I used to tweet this article after it was published. But Apple is the most glaring example that our need for shiny new gadgets perpetuates atrocities. Since 1998, seven million people have died in a civil war that continues to plague the Eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The war began when Rwanda-backed rebels attempted an overthrow of the Congolese government. The government teamed up with local militias known as the “Mai Mai,” who are known to occupy local villages, steal resources, and rape women. The DRC has become known as the “rape capital of the world,” in which marauders use rape as a weapon of coercion. Today, Mai Mai fighters and corrupt members of the Congolese military both enslave children in the DRC to mine columbite and tantalum, which together can form coltan, a necessary ingredient in modern laptops and smartphones. As this mini-documentary from the Pulitzer Center shows, children as young as 13 are forced to work in the mines for as little as 2 dollars a day. They wear no safety protection, carry a store-bought, battery-powered flashlight, and often die from brutal working conditions that result in suffocation, cave-ins, and death from sheer exhaustion. Multinational corporations like Apple, Samsung, Dell, and HP all depend on the Congolese mining operations for their raw materials, as 80% of the world’s coltan supply comes from the region. The children have no other option but to work in the mines, because school is beyond the financial means of ordinary Congolese families. The raw materials mined in Congo are then sent to factories in China – most notably, the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen. The factory has been described by local media as a “labor camp,” in which teenage students are sought out for employment and are forced to work more than double or even triple the overtime limit (36 hours a month under China’s labor laws), and workers are routinely uncompensated for injuries suffered on the job. Seventeen workers attempted suicide, and 14 died jumping from the roof of the building in 2010. The company responded by putting anti-suicide nets around the building, and forced employees to sign agreements stating that their employer would be exempt from lawsuits brought by family members in the event of their suicide. Foxconn claims to have raised workers’ wages to $298 per month, but workers say those pay raises never came.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 16:51:10 +0000
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