Michael K. Busch

A Solution to Congolese Violence--Or An Empty Gesture?

My thoughts on DRC were picked up this morning by the Focal Points blog at Foreign Policy in Focus. They can be accessed here.

Caring for Congo, or an Empty Effort?

As part of the sweep­ing finan­cial reform bill signed into law this past week by Pres­i­dent Barack Obama, a sur­pris­ing leg­isla­tive rider took effect seek­ing an end to the inter­nal con­flict plagu­ing Demo­c­ra­tic Repub­lic of Congo (DRC). The pro­vi­sion, which resulted largely from inten­sive lob­by­ing efforts by the Enough Project to stop geno­cide, is designed to pre­vent desta­bi­liz­ing ele­ments within the DRC from feed­ing off the country’s lucra­tive trade in pre­cious met­als. The DRC boasts rich deposits of tung­sten, tan­ta­lum, and tin—met­als com­monly found in cell phones, lap­tops, video game con­soles and other elec­tronic devices — prof­its from which have long been seen to fuel the activ­i­ties of non-state com­bat­ants there. 

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Macho Libre

From the looks of it, you might think that For­eign Pol­icy—the once ven­er­a­ble jour­nal of inter­na­tional polit­i­cal analy­sis — had come under the edi­to­r­ial guid­ance of Mar­vel Comics. The magazine’s lat­est cover fea­tures a Hitler-mustachioed Robert Mugabe, a vacant-eyed Kim Jong Il, and three other dastardly-looking dudes you’ve likely never heard of stand­ing shoulder-to-shoulder under the ban­ner “The Com­mit­tee to Destroy the World,” and look­ing dis­tinctly like a group of neigh­bor­hood toughs get­ting ready to kick your ass. A smaller head­line in the cor­ner informs read­ers that this is “The Bad Guys Issue,” while another hints that zom­bies are also threat­en­ing world peace, leav­ing one to assume that the exis­ten­tial threats fac­ing inter­na­tional rela­tions demand a lot more in the way of Cap­tain Amer­ica and his Avengers and a lot less Ban ki-Moon and the League of Inef­fec­tive Bureaucrats.

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