The video i’ve chosen is not embeddable but can be found in full here:
please watch it in a new window and return here to post comments.
By Marcus Bleasdale and produced by Media Storm, which is sponsored by the washingtonpost.com
Transcript (new window)
My summary
Journalist Marcus Bleasdale has spent many years in the DRC documenting the tragedies of a country with vast natural resources and incredible potential for economic development. Yet it is a country plagued by invading warlords and internal and collaborative corruption of the government, the military and the natural resource extractors.
This corruption runs on fear and shame. operates by manipulating children (over 30,000 child recruits) as a weapon of destruction and using rape to instill humiliation and silence. It is fueled by the money illegally drafted from resource extraction. Mining workers are not told an accurate price of the resources and get only a small percentage of its true value.
This wealth extraction results in a ineffectual social structure (lack of education and basic health care) which in turn makes the pillaging easier and the impunity for pillagers greater.
Bleasdale concludes that despite the enormity of the problem, which he admits is a very daunting one, there is hope for change in education for the people of Congo and being aware of resource extraction.
My analysis
This video primarily represents the Congo through the eyes of the Bleasdale but also combines interviews and real life scenarios of the victims. This makes this complex story more accessible in the mere 11:31 time frame.
The subaltern are given a voice but it is mediated through a respected international journalist – something unaddressed in the video but necessary to keep in mind. This particular video seems to have a high respect for the first person story but realizes that the multitude of horror stories from the Congo would not be useful or effective. Rather than repeating itself the video progresses naturally through the causes and effects in order to provide an overall picture rather than an in-depth analysis of one issue.
The video identifies the natural resources that would normally be of extreme value to the people of the country have become a curse. Natural resources that are allowed to be exploited by the complacency of the International Community.
During a time when most major news outlets are regurgitating press releases about the war in Iraq / Afghanistan this journalist used his contacts to give a microphone and a face to an abandoned nation.
This video is postcolonial, albeit not overtly, but it shares the two major tenets with postcolonial theory advanced by Mbembe in the interview with Esprit Magazine
1 Firstly, it exposes both the european moral philosophy from its practical, political and symbolic the violence inherent in a particular concept of reason, and the gulf separating outcomes.
2 – postcolonial thinking stresses humanity−in−the−making, the humanity that will emerge once the colonial figures of the inhuman and of racial difference have been swept away
1 – by linking the political situation to the economic and development one by arguing that it is the damaged social structure – not something endemic about the population, or that it is simply tribal warfare this video advances a more contemporary outlook on the geo-political situation in the DRC
2- By focusing on what can be done, particularly in education Bleasdale emphases that a more educated population will be more questioning and critical of the government, which will lead to better governance and social structure. Rather than assuming more chapter 7 UN troops or divestment or assasination of key dictators Bleasdale is arguing for the longer struggle that will ultimately question the motives of the foreign mining operations.
The Rape of a Nation succeeds in its purpose of briefly illustrating the difficult and complicated geo-political and socio-economic issues in the DRC.
However while the video does mention gold and diamonds it doesn’t mention oil revenues – which are becoming a much bigger part of the problem in the DRC. See these resources on how the government is siphoning money illegally from the people of Congo.
Further reading/watching:
Another important point that he brings up is that the democratic elections did not stop violence and were not beneficial for the people of Congo. This may be true of many developing nations – see this short newsweek article on how risk of violence more than doubles in the year after an election in a developing nation.
Al Jazeera People and Power video (how the DRC government siphons money from the peoples resources)
for a much longer video interview + slideshow of Marcus Bleasdale’s video and photography – from talk and Q&A at UC Santa Barbara in 2008.
notably: The ethics and difficulty of selling this story to news outlets such as Time and Newsweek (4:01) and questioning the ability of the media to effect change (27:07)
Proof of DRC’s presidents son’s corruption leaked by global witness.
Alert Net profile of the conflict in Congo