Declarations and proclamations, cease-fires and even treaties signed, sealed, ratified, and delivered by the combatants are useless in the fight to preserve human rights when one or even more parties to them decide they can be ignored.

That's exactly what Laurent Nkunda has done to the January 2008 peace accords he signed to end the strife in Kivu provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo. His forces continue to rape and pillage the region despite his vow to abide by the agreement. The rights of civilians in the Congo mean nothing without a champion to enforce them. The United Nations has tried, but MUNOC forces are spread thin trying to control an alphabet soup of rebels, war lords, and garden-variety gangsters in the eastern provinces.

Nkunda is a former psychology student who traveled to Rwanda to join the RPF and overthrow the genocidal Hutu-led government in 1995. After the Tutsi forces gained control of Rwanda, Nkunda returned to the DRC to fight alongside Laurent Kabila, who successfully overthrew Mobutu.

When the Second Congo War broke out in 2000, Nkunda became a Major in the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RDC), a group allied with Rwandan, Ugandan, Burundian, and other Tutsi-aligned forces operating in the DRC. This period of great unrest is the backdrop for my novel, Heart of Diamonds.

When the war officially ended in 2003, Nkunda joined his forces with the DRC army, but he soon rejected the government's authority and rebelled, taking his troops with him. It is believed that Nkunda is being at least partially funded by the government of Rwanda. In September 2005 he was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. Refugees International reports that his troops murder, rape, and pillage civilian populations in areas under his control and Amnesty International says his troops have adbucted children as young as 12, forcing them to serve as child soldiers.

The January peace deal provides the CNDP (Comité Nationale pour la Defence du Peuple, Nkunda's group) and other signatories with a general amnesty for "acts of war", but does not cover war crimes and crimes against humanity. Bloody clashes continue in North Kivu despite the peace agreement, with all sides in the conflict accused of gross human rights abuses. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that some 800,000 people have been displaced by fighting in North Kivu out of a population of 4.2 million.

For more thoughts on the state of human rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere, read all my contributions to “Bloggers Unite for Human Rights”

Rape - A Weapon Of Terror
Toys of Destruction
Human Rights Criminal On The Loose
Human Rights – Major Theme In Heart of Diamonds
Children of the Congo – Soldiers Still
A Century of Horror – Red Room
God Is Love
Eager To Learn
Is America A Human Rights Weakling?

To see what it’s all about, read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights then, to do your part, see these sixteen ways to make a difference.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations sixty years ago.  Bloggers around the world are marking the anniversary through an event called Bloggers Unite for Human Rights.  It's sponsored by Amnesty International, BlogCatalog, and Copywrite, Inc.

Bloggers Unite For Human Rights challenges bloggers everywhere to help elevate human rights by drawing attention to the challenges and successes of human rights issues on May 15. Topics may include any number of subjects — the wrongful imprisonment of journalists covering assemblies, governments that ignore the plight of citizens, even censorship of the Internet. What is important is that on one day, thousands of bloggers unite and share their unified support of human rights everywhere.

I'll be blogging that day about human rights here as well at Heart of Diamonds - Themes from the Novel, Amazon, Heart of Diamonds - Life in Africa, Daily Kos, Red Room, and MySpace. I'll also have a special photo on Photogafrica and even an appropriate cartoon on ToonLand. I hope you'll join me in reminding the world that Human Rights are hard to earn but easy to lose if we don't stay United.

Culprits on both the supply and the demand side have caused the current crisis in food prices that has sparked riots in Somalia, Haiti, Egypt, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso. Everything from weather to a new taste for richer foods are to blame, exacerbated by import curbs and agricultural subsidies by rich nations and export bans by poor ones. Even the well-intentioned but controversial move to biofuels has impacted markets. There may be a silver lining, though, as sky-rocketing prices and the resultant food riots around the globe might prompt some meaningful long-term changes in both trade policies and aid practices.

Weather is a well-recognized demon in the food markets, of course. Most recently, a prolonged drought in Australia's wheat belt has cut supply at the worst possible time. On top of that, though, is a long-building increase in demand for richer diets in the booming economies of China and India. Those same economies are in some part responsible for the soaring cost of oil, which makes food production and distribution an increasingly expensive proposition. The concurrent rise in the price of natural gas and potash, both used to produce fertilizer, hurts too.

Diversion of a significant part of the U.S. corn crop to ethanol production, that silver bullet meant to solve both global warming and America's addiction to foreign oil, also impacts food prices, although not significantly according to most experts. The USDA reports that American farmers grew 13.1 billion bushels of corn last year. Of that, 22% went to make about 7 million gallons of ethanol. That still left enough to feed the domestic market, push exports to record levels, and store a 10% surplus. While the price of corn has more than doubled in the last three years, it's still a very, very small factor, contributing less than 3% to the overall rise in food prices.

The biggest culprits, though, are national policies that warp the supply-demand equation. The rich nations aren't the only ones to blame, either. Both India and Vietnam, the world's number 2 and 3 rice-exporting countries, have imposed limits or complete bans on rice shipments outside their borders in order to shield their own populations from the perceived shortages. Indonesia enacted similar measures. The ripples have been felt as far away as the U.S., where major retailers have put limits on the amount of rice that customers can buy. Considering that worldwide rice production was up in 2007, this can only be a result of increased demand.

Unfortunately, export restrictions also reduce local farmers' incentives to grow more since lack of access to international markets reduces their return. Meanwhile, an even greater portion of the world's food supply must come from high-cost producers in North America and Europe, both big exporters, but both also heavy subsidizers of their own farmers. The rich nations' protective import restrictions further reduce the poor farmers' chances of competing in world markets, thereby giving them little reason to plant at more than subsistence levels.

All this has created turmoil in world food markets, which may in turn create some real policy changes at several levels. The current round of global trade talks broke off twice in the past two years, mainly over the issues of subsidies and price controls. With food riots spreading, however, it's becoming harder and harder to justify crop price support systems. Business Week reports that there's optimism about change from both sides of the table, quoting positive statements from Indian and U.S. trade officials. Even the American Farm Bureau Federation says there's room for change in their normally protectionist stance. They are far from the only parties to the talks, however, so nothing is certain.

Another long-overdue change may come in U.S. food aid policy, which has persistently required developing nations to use the rescue funds to purchase American crops and transport them on American ships. George Bush's recent call for not only another $770 million in emergency food aid but for 25% of that to be purchased from local producers in recipient regions is a positive sign. It remains to be seen, of course, whether the super-influential U.S. farm lobby will allow that to happen.

World Malaria Day is a growing, important celebration that draws attention to a disease that kills a million people, most of them children, every year.  While great strides have been made in some places, mainly through the distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets and other preventive measures, children in the Democratic Republic of Congo remain highly vulnerable.

According to the World Health Organization, less than 1% of DRC children under five years of age sleep under protective nets.  This results in most of them suffering six to ten malaria-related fever incidents per year.  The disease also accounts for 45% of childhood mortality, which overall runs to 20%.  In short, malaria kills nearly one in ten children in the Congo every year.

As Valerie Grey learns in Heart of Diamonds, continuous armed conflict in the country is responsible for many of these deaths.  Medical supplies can’t be distributed when roads, railroads, and airstrips have been destroyed.  Treatment can’t be delivered by medical personnel who have been chased from their clinics and hospitals.  People driven from their homes, plagued by malnutrition, inadequate shelter, and lack of sanitary facilities are weak and less capable of warding off disease.  War creates a breeding ground for death by malaria just as surely as swamps full of stagnant water breed anopheles mosquitoes.

Although the intensity of conflict has decreased since the truce of 2003 and democratic elections of 2006, millions of displaced persons still struggle to survive and hot spots remain in the eastern and western provinces. Collapsed infrastructure has severely weakened the health system in the DRC, and the strengthening process is a slow one.  

The DRC, unfortunately, has little to celebrate this World Malaria Day.

I heard some really good news last night at a meeting of the Westchester Library System Board of Trustees (on which I serve).  The WLS delivery system, which enables patrons at any of our 38 member libraries to check out material from any other library in the system, has been routing more than 200,000 units (books, DVD's, CD's etc.) PER MONTH this year. To put that in perspective, Westchester County (just north of NY City) has about 950,000 residents, of whom slightly more than half have a library card. These numbers don't include books checked out in person at the member libraries--which typically run much, much higher as you might imagine.  When I became a trustee about five years ago, we were delivering less than half that number through the intra-library loan program.  Somebody out there, at least in Westchester County, NY, is doing a lot of reading.

There was big news in the diamond market recently. Auction house Sotheby's failed to auction off a 72.22-carat, "D" flawless white diamond at its Hong Kong sale. The large diamond had a pre-sale estimate of $10-12 million, but attracted a final bid of only $9.24 million, according to Sotheby's press officer Rhonda Yung.  It later sold for an undiclosed sum to a private buyer, Sotheby's reported, which was a great relief to all.

It's a crying shame Sotheby's couldn't persuade the original bidder to cough up more than $9.24 million for the pretty sparkler. Perhaps the benighted bidder, having failed to meet the undisclosed reserve price, might care to spend that sum on something worthwhile, like the well-being of the people who were exploited to find such baubles. I don't know if the rock came from one of the diamond mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the per capita annual income is less than $1 per day in that troubled nation, which means the disappointed buyer's tidy $9 mil would support more than 30,000 people for a year.

Rape and its terrible impact on its victims and their families is one of the themes of Heart of Diamonds, but my fiction is only a shadow of the outrageous reality. To see the real story, watch Lisa Jackson’s horrific yet uplifting documentary, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, airing Tuesday, April 8 on HBO.

If you can’t watch the program, read the filmmaker’s testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary on April 1. Her words, along with those of Karin Wachter of the International Rescue Committee, Dr. Kelly Dawn Askin of the Open Society Justice Initiative, and Dr. Denis Mukwege, Director of the Panzi General Referral Hospital in the DRC, tell a story of a literal crime against humanity whose scope is almost beyond comprehension.

The crime is rape, which has become a true weapon of mass destruction in what has been rightly called the Third World War, the conflict in the Congo which has claimed five million lives—ten times the number of lives lost in Darfur, to make a shameful comparison.

Statistics can’t express the truth of rape, although hundreds of thousands of women and girls, from one-year-old babies to 80-year-old grandmeres, have been assaulted, abused, enslaved, and tortured in the Congo. Much of the truth, in the form of first-person narratives, is told in the documentary. Following are some chilling stories from Lisa Jackson’s testimony that also tell the real truth of rape:

Veranda is 35 years old and has survived two attacks; she was first raped by Rwandese militia -the Interahamwe group -and again by thieves dressed in Congolese Army uniforms.

Safi lives in the hills above Bunyakiri and was raped at age 11 while her home was being looted by soldiers. Her huge eyes still have a slightly stunned look as she tells me that when she grows up she hopes to be a nun.

Maria Namafu was 70 years old when she was raped by three soldiers. When she told them “I am an old woman” they said “you’re not too old for us.”

Faida was kidnapped from her home in Bunyakiri, enslaved and raped repeatedly by Interahamwe soldiers. She died from the resulting infections in 2007.

Writing fiction, at least the way I approach it, isn’t much different from reporting. The events and characters described are imaginary, of course, but the groundwork has to be done to make them believable in the same way a journalist has to research his or her facts before the true story can be told.

The first thing I do when I get a magazine assignment is to look at the general background of the topic. I’ll check what’s been recently written about it, look into the long-term history, and generally poke around until I get the lay of the land. Then I’ll do my on-the-ground (or telephone) work. I interview experts, participants in events, and principal players in the field, do some site visits, attend meetings, or try to be there when events unfold so I can see how people react to them.

For a short 800- to 1200-word magazine feature, this can take anywhere from two hours to two days, depending on how much I already know about the subject, how quickly I can reach people, and how tough the logistics are. For something longer or more complex, it might take two weeks or two months, although that’s certainly the exception—media moves too fast.

Then and only then do I put pen to paper.

The process for Heart of Diamonds and my other books was much the same. I spent a full year reading well over a hundred books about Africa and the Congo, its history, geography, politics, economy, wildlife, and most of all its people. I watched every documentary I could find on DVD and VHS and even listened to all kinds of music ranging from historic recordings at the Smithsonian to the latest hits on the Congo-Pop scene.

Then I went to Africa to see for myself. I was looking for how the landscape made me feel, how it smelled, what the sun looked like in the morning and what sounds you heard at midnight. I didn’t go to the DRC; it was just too dangerous since I was working on the book before the 2003 cease-fire. Instead, I made two trips to neighboring countries, Uganda and Zambia, and visited the border.

I recently heard a great story from Dr. Mary Ann Reilly, an associate professor of literacy at Manhattanville College as I was interviewing her for a magazine article. She said it happened while she was in a large chain bookstore looking for a book on non-European myths in the children's section. A helpful clerk assured her they had something, but then couldn't find anything. Finally, the exasperated clerk said, "If you want enlightenment, go to the library. We're just here to sell things."


As a library trustee, in addition to a writer (Heart of Diamonds, a novel of the Congo), I thought that was one of the truest statements I've ever heard.

As a writer, I love independent booksellers who recommend my books to their customers--a valuable service for the reader, too. We don't always know exactly what we want and it's great to get exposure to someone else's ideas face-to-face.

But I also appreciate the ability Amazon gives me to communicate directly with readers through my author's blog and the readers' reviews as well as the system's ability to quickly deliver specific titles to people who know what they're looking for. The algorithms for suggesting other titles work well, too (most of the time).