When watching the news– no matter what channel or city– the topic of violence will be present as it is inevitable that it occurs; however for years, American main stream media has choose to leave out a genocide. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 1990 had a civil war between 1996 and 1998 due to the Rwandan genocide in 1994, where, an ethnic cleansing of the Tutsis. The non-extremist Hutus group took the lives of 500,000-800,000 Tutsis’ diving the country up. Since the civil war, the DRC has been threatened with insurgency by several different militant groups, mainly being the M23 group.

 M23 is a well- organized and merciless rebel group that has seized the main roads of Goma, the region’s capital since October. The group is being countered by Congo’s army because poor lack of discipline causes them to have drunken fighters, however, with the help of allies, the Wazalendo’s, a once-rival militias that the government scrambled together in order to help repel against the M23’s. The second ally is around 1,000 Romanian mercenaries, deployed around Goma and Sake in order to keep the city safe from any future attacks from M23. Over half a million people have been forced to leave their homes in the past 2 months, mostly into camps that are spread across Goma. The living conditions within these camps are close to inhumane, the camps set up around Goma are estimated by the World Food Program to be able to feed 2.5 million people, however that does not include the 6.3 million people that go to bed starving within Eastern Congo.

What many don’t know about Congo is that they are using the material cobalt, which is used in every single electronic smartphone, tablet, laptop, vehicle, machine, and toy., DRC has the largest Cobalt reserve in the world, 72t% of the whole world’s Cobalt is mined in Congo. The way that Congo is obtaining this Cobalt is best described as inhumane slave labor, Cobalt is obtained by people who are mining it. “Workers” on average make a dollar a day and many parents working in the mines are working side by side with their children. The children within the mines are not only exposed to life threatening conditions such as lack of work safety, digging with bare hands and working without masks, they are also left out of education and proper development. Even if the children aren’t working the atmosphere around them is enough for them to be exposed to severe health risks due to the exposure of metals from their parents. Out of the 255,000 Cobalt miners at least 40,000 of them are underage minors earning less than $2 for one of the most hard laboring jobs in the world. Major electronic companies still rely on Cobalt in order to power their product, companies such as Apple, BMW, Google, Samsung, Volkswagen, and Tesla all use Cobalt on their products. 

Worldwide spread of this genocide isn’t happening, many don’t know where their electronics are coming from, many are dying and suffering and the world is silent.