Painswick film makers want Cotswold hamlet

I was approached last week by film makers, Darkfibre, who have worked with Amnesty on campaign commercials. I well remember their shocking film about the CIA use of waterboarding - although hadn't realised they were local - if you didn't see it here is the link: http://www.vimeo.com/8681271

Photo: from Guardian - Cameron announcing inquiry into torture and rendition last week

Well now Darkfibre have been commissioned to make a film about the indiscriminate and endemic use of rape by militias and government armies in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The campaign includes Oxfam, Congo Now! and Human Rights Watch.

They explore the links between our use of rare metals mined in the Congo and the violence of happening there, etc - an issue I first raised in The Ecologist back in November 2001! See that letter here - and click on 'Congo' label below to see more recent posts.

I give this project a huge welcome as they hope to make a hard hitting film that brings viewers to the campaign site - a campaign that is being co-ordinated by Sam Roddick, the daughter of the late Anita Roddick (Body Shop). They already have an A list talent working on the film which will be 3 min long.

So why did they contact me? Well sadly not for an acting part! Indeed I've not done much of that although once upon a time I did do a play with Raymond Baxter - he was the guy who introduced Tomorrow's World. Anyway I digress Darkfibre are after an idyllic rural setting to film in during the first week of August. They have a very limited budget but are after a homely house/ cottage in a small hamlet (3-6 houses) that has beautiful rural scenery around it and possibly with a grain field next door.

They would film one day in the house, and one day outside and have half a day preparation before - they can pay a small amount for the use but for me this is a great opportunity to highlight this issue. Contact me or them at: marc(at)darkfibrefilms.co.uk - replace (at) with @ in email address.

See other films they have done:

One about Shell in the Nigerian Delta: http://www.vimeo.com/album/165507/video/11919930

Our full showreel is here: http://www.vimeo.com/album/165507

Act now to end blood diamonds

I have talked on this blog before about blood diamonds, blood coltan and blood gold, the nightmare in Congo and covering some of the horrors of the gold industry - well now comes a campaign from Avaaz in response to Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe seizing control of his country's diamond fields and using the profits from our wedding rings and jewelry to finance a vicious political militia.

The group of countries that regulate the global diamond trade are right now meeting in Namibia to decide whether to suspend Mugabe and stop him selling his blood diamonds on the world market.

We have must act now - all diamond producing countries know that their profits are dependent on the brand reputation of diamonds, and that increasing awareness of "blood diamonds" threatens that brand. A massive global petition will show them that the diamond-buying public is demanding action. Zimbabwe's diamonds used to be mined by local people. But in the last several months, Mugabe's thugs have brutally taken over, murdering up to 200 civilians. An international investigation in July found "horrific violence against civilians".

The profits from these blood diamonds are being used to finance a political militia that has already killed thousands of Zimbabweans, and threatens the fragile unity government in the country. Letting Mugabe keep these diamonds could finance a whole new war.

All of us are learning the ways in which our decisions about what we buy and do can affect the lives of our fellow human beings half a world away. An engagement ring should be something given and worn out of love, let's tell diamond regulators to keep it that way:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/diamonds_for_love_not_hate

Take email action on Congo

On Monday I wrote about Congo - see here - and finished the blog feeling impotent to do very much - there seemed no rallying cry - concerns already logged with the MP - well now Avaaz has launched an appeal to email your country's leader.

I always wonder about the impact of these email campaigns - but clearly they have played a part in the past - Congo is a nightmare and during this week of Remembrance the ongoing war there seems even more horrific. Only recently I re-saw that film Hotel Rwanda and the images come back as I read reports of the Congo now. Here is what Avaaz write - do please follow the link to sign the letter:

The people of Congo need our help. In recent weeks over 200,000 people have been driven from their homes, and murder and rape are rife. The United Nations peacekeeping mission to Congo has not intervened to protect civilians. As this email is sent, families are running for their lives, stuck between the brutal violence of both the rebels and the Congolese army, without food or shelter - their only refuges are crowded camps which now face epidemics of disease. This is a human tragedy of unimaginable proportions. But, European foreign ministers meeting earlier this week said it's too early to act.

Europe can deploy a well-equipped protection force to be on the ground in two weeks - no one else can get such a capable presence in that fast. If Europe sent a neutral force to the region and helped put real pressure on Congo and neighbouring countries with UN and African officials, this humanitarian crisis could be addressed and a lasting peace made possible. This tough crisis will not be solved militarily but civilians desperately need protection now, and proper European engagement could help tackle the root causes.

The lesson of Rwanda was to step in before it's too late - Europe's politicians seem to have forgotten that. The people of eastern Congo need us now. Send a message to your leader and forward this email to friends and family-- we'll also place our message in newspapers around Europe. The situation is deteriorating by the day. The more messages that the European leaders receive this week, the more they will feel that their citizens and people around the world expect them to respond and protect the Congolese people. Follow this link to send your message now:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/european_action_on_congo/

The recent clashes between General Nkunda's militias and the Congolese army are the latest in a place where the population has been attacked and terrorised for years by armed groups. Over five million people have been killed. It's been termed 'Africa's world war', with Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia all getting involved. The fighting is fed by a lethal war economy based on the extraction of minerals such as coltan, cobalt, diamonds and gold, to which we're all connected through the worldwide market.

Allegations abound of Angolan and Zimbabwean troops fighting alongside the Congolese army -- Congolese army soldiers committing atrocities and working with militias including the Rwandan Hutu Forces, some of whose leaders were responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide -- and the Rwandan army supporting General Nkunda to muscle the Congolese government to fulfill its commitment to demobilise these same Hutu militias. So it is no surprise that African-only diplomacy is faltering.

The United Nations mission (MONUC) is in Congo to keep the peace between this web of armed groups, but recently it has made clear statements that it cannot protect civilians. We have heard reliably that MONUC are desperate for a rapid EU bridging force to do what they can't and start restoring international legitimacy, which has been lost through overstretch and perceptions of taking sides -- UN troops have fought alongside the Congolese army and are even accused of sheltering pro-government militias.

To have a credible and effective force the United Nations mission will soon have to be reformed and redeployed. In the longer term, the international community needs to be a strong and honest broker to ensure implementation of peace agreements and confront the underlying issues feeding this war. If Europe sends a short-term, neutral force to the region now to protect civilians, it can start to change the terms of this brutal game -- providing a basis both to defend the defenceless and to apply political leverage to all sides. Click below to send a message asking your own country's leader to support action now:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/european_action_on_congo/

We cannot let the best chance to stop the terror in Congo slip by as European leaders turn their backs. Congo needs concerted engagement now. Europe is providing millions in aid to Congo and Rwanda to ensure reconstruction and development, but without a more forceful and permanent push, there will be no peace to keep.

Congo: the nightmare continues

Fighting continues between rebels and pro-government militia in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The humanitarian nightmare grows - cholera threatens - the latest news is that Southern African leaders have said they want to provide immediate support to the Democratic Republic of Congo's army in its fight against rebel forces.

Photo: Peace flag from recent Peace Day in Stroud

250,000 have been forced to flee their homes and three refugee camps - holding 50,000 people were also destroyed and found empty. This year alone, a quarter of a million have become refugees internally within Congo. Sadly the DR Congo has faced virtually continual conflict - indeed casualties are higher than any conflict the world has seen since the Second World War - over 5 million people have been killed since 1988.

The leader of the rebel faction, Laurent Nkunda Batware, was indicted for war crimes in 2005 and is still under investigation by the International Criminal Court. The conflict has seen massive human rights abuses conducted by both the government and rebel forces.

Here is SchNEWS comment: "While there has been international outrage about the West’s lack of help with aid or peace-keeping forces, the fighting in Congo is often layered with racist, or plain idle, clichés of ‘tribal conflict’ - when in fact there is no focus on the West’s complicity in it. Those responsible for perpetuating the conflict runs from the local militia to government officials through to international corporations. "Complex international linkages, legal and illegal, public and private, fuel the war economy and direct the political organisations that perpetrate the violence. The DR Congo contains a wealth of natural resources – gold, diamonds, coltan, cassiterite – sold to corporations such as Anglo-American, Standard Chartered Bank, De Beers and over a hundred others. Those who exploitatively control and profit from Congo’s resources feed it to consumer markets: Each of us carries a slice of Congo – from the coltan in our mobile phones to the cassiterite used in consumer disposables such as tin cans."

This is an issue I've raised before on this blog and elsewhere - see my blog from last year - Blood Diamond, blood Coltan and blood gold and my letter published in The Ecologist in November 2001 here - an an update re the link with mobile phones here. We have just had a weekend of Remembrance - let us hope some sanity can come to this region.

Uganda: a Zimbabwe in the making?

On Tuesday I was fortunate to meet a Ugandan man who had just returned from visiting family there - what he had to say was deeply shocking and echoed by yesterdays piece by Green party spokesperson Peter Tatchell writing in The Times. He writes that:

"Uganda is drifting towards dictatorship, just like Zimbabwe a decade ago. The Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, is a new Robert Mugabe in the making, a budding tyrant who is subverting democracy and human rights (according to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) through voter intimidation, hounding opposition politicians, detention without trial, torture, extra-judicial killings, media censorship, corruption, suppression of protests, homophobic witch-hunts, and crackdowns on universities and trade unions.

"And how is he rewarded for these abuses? By being given the honour of hosting the Commonwealth Heads Of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Kampala in two weeks' time. The Queen and Gordon Brown will accept the hospitality of a despot who has abolished limits on presidential terms in a bid to ensure that he remains president for life; framed the opposition leader Kizza Besigye on charges of rape and treason; and who is implicated in massacres in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and northern Uganda."

I was told in my meeting on Tuesday about the many secret detention centres and 'concentration camps' - conditions are terrible - indeed in the civil war in northern Uganda more than 1.5 million people have been herded into camps by the Ugandan Army - in the worst period, fatalities peaked at 1,000 a week - this Ugandan man saw one of these camps at close quarters in the war zone a few weeks ago - his descriptions were shocking.

Peter Tatchell concludes his piece:

"Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonwealth for breaching the Commonwealth's 1991 Harare Declaration on good governance and human rights. Uganda's violations have, in contrast, merited barely a murmur of criticism. Why the double standards? The Commonwealth's tacit collusion with Museveni's abuses is the most shameful betrayal of the Ugandan people since its feeble response to Idi Amin's murderous regime in the 1970s. If the Commonwealth won't defend its humanitarian principles against autocratic leaders, what is the point of its existence?"

I have written to David Drew MP seeking his support for action.

Blood Diamond, blood Coltan and blood gold

The Hollywood release locally of Blood Diamond starring Leonardo DiCaprio highlights some important issues. The film has received widespread media attention because it highlights how the illegal diamond trade has helped to fuel and finance armed conflict in parts of Africa.

I've not seen the film yet but at last this issue is getting wider coverage - but it is not just the diamonds. Over 5 years ago I had a letter in The Ecologist - dead chuffed at the time as it was my first in a national magazine/paper - anyhow in that letter I highlighted the issue of coltan and it's role in conflict in Africa. Mobile phones contain coltan and this mineral is more profitable than gold. It is the massive increase in mobile phones that has led to warring rebel groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) exploiting coltan to help finance war. Sadly coltan still plays a big role there.

Gold mining, too, bears the scars of conflict, destruction, and human rights abuse. DRC is again an example of where armed groups are fighting for control of gold mines and trading routes - civilians have been tortured and killed and gold sales are used to buy weapons. This is another issue Greens and others have been trying to highlight - see Glos Green party news release from 18 months ago.

Rather than bringing prosperity to the nation, gold has been a cause of enormous human suffering in the DRC. It is one of the dirtiest industries in the world. The production of a single gold wedding ring generates 20 tons of mine waste. As with "blood diamonds" and coltan, gold mining bears the scars of conflict, destruction, and human rights abuse - fuelling war in the Democratic Republic of Congo that led to more civilian deaths than any war since World War II. Indeed in places as diverse as Guatemala, Ghana, Peru, and Indonesia, local communities and indigenous peoples have encountered intimidation, abuse, and even violent suppression when voicing opposition to mining projects.

The majority of gold is used to make jewelry. Jewelers should ensure that they are not selling their customers gold that has been produced at the expense of communities and the environment.

In the US Jewelers are being encouraged to take an important step by endorsing the No Dirty Gold campaign's "Golden Rules" and supporting an independent certification system to weed out "dirty gold." In Britain we can do that too. Indeed as a result of this film there is already a greater awareness - let's hope it grows and all of us can ask if the jewels we buy are 'conflict free'.

Interestingly the World Diamond Council (WDC) - see the WDC's diamondfacts.org has in the past suggested that conflict diamonds are a historical anomaly. Lately they are found to be saying that less than 1 per cent of all diamonds now sold, are of the conflict variety. Clearly that is still too many - but the whole process still has no independent verification or enforcement systems. A recent UN report claimed that thousands of diamonds were still illegally entering the international market, smuggled through the legitimate markets of Ghana and Mali.

The WDC also makes much of the fact that '10m people globally are supported by the diamond industry', but when the typical daily wage of an African diamond miner amounts to 50p and a cup of rice you have to ask how equitable such support is, especially compared with the profits of the De Beers cartel.

Martin Rapaport (diamonds.net) in New York has just established the first fair-trade diamond mine in Sierra Leone. He says: 'Every member of the diamond and jewellery industry should see Blood Diamond'. He's right. This industry is urgently in need of a fair trade make-over - indeed as Greens have been arguing isn't it time all trade was fair and took account of issues like the environment??

International Day of Peace

See todays news release re Trident and link to Comment on the day.

Addition in light of comment below: there are many reasons for war - religious/ethnic differences play a part - see Martin Whitesides' piece in The Citizen today linked above - many other factors are also important - the arms trade, demand for resources like oil and water - and climate change - the situation in Darfur for example has been fueled by increasing drought cycles - the Sahara's southward expansion creating conflicts between nomadic and sedentary groups over shortages of water and land - there are other factors also at play but we'll save that for another Blog.

It is just not true to suggest nuclear weapons have helped with peace over the last 50 years - their production and environmental impacts of the nuclear industry itself are huge. There is also much evidence now about how close the US came to using nuclear weapons - can we really trust the likes of Reagan, Bush and others to come? And a world in which conflicts like the Congo (3 million dead), Iraq, Afghanistan etc etc rage cannot be a world of peace - many of these wars have been fuelled directly or indirectly by British and/or US policies - furthermore a world in which poverty is growing is not a world of peace :

• One third of deaths - some 18 million people a year or 50,000 per day - are due to poverty-related causes. That's 270 million people since 1990, the majority women and children, roughly equal to the population of the US.
• Every year nearly 11 million children die before their fifth birthday.
• 1.1 billion people had consumption levels below $1 a day and 2.7 billion lived on less than $2 a day
• 800 million people go to bed hungry every day.

History has also shown that any weapon allowed to be kept in existence will be eventually be deployed, and whatever weapon is deployed will be used. Even now, over a decade after the end of the Cold War, the Bush Administration has officially issued a new nuclear doctrine that envisions the use of new nuclear weapons, such as the mini-nuke and the bunker-buster, in a wide variety of circumstances against at least seven countries. Moreover, the world can’t forever endure a permanent double standard, where it’s legitimate for certain countries to possess nuclear weapons forever, but illegitimate for others ever to obtain them. Such a double standard is seen as hypocritical by the non-nuclear countries, and isn’t ethically or politically viable.

So long as tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and tons of nuclear weapon grade materials, continue to exist, it is inevitable that nuclear weapons will be eventually be used—by terrorists who obtain them, by accident, or by states who feel their ultimate national interests are threatened. Global nuclear weapons abolition under strict and effective international control is the only way to prevent their future use.

See comments from Stroud's Mayor Kevin Cranston - a retired Lieutenant Colonel and Army helicopter pilot - made after a meeting with the Mayor of Hiroshima.

An excellent report on global security and sustainable responses can be found by clicking here.