Johann Hari

Here are two questions that, in grief-stoked, pain-choked Britain, we can no longer answer correctly. Who should win an argument: the person who can weep hardest and loudest, or the person who has the best case? Which is more important in determining how our politicians and police should behave - emotional intensity, or factual evidence? In a cool clear light, the answers to these questions are obvious. But they are increasingly being shunted aside, replaced with a grisly and intimidating "grief politics", organised and orchestrated by our red-top newspapers, that are designed to ensure that pain talks louder than reason.

This culture is now so ingrained that it is very hard to talk about it without seeming callous and cruel, and feeling sunk in guilt. I found myself in the horrible situation this week of having upset Sara Payne, a woman whose daughter, Sarah, was murdered in the most unimaginably evil way a few years ago. I am opposed to her campaign - picked up by the News of the World - to imitate America's Megan's law, which discloses the names and addresses of paedophiles to their neighbours. I argue, on the basis of all the available evidence, that shunning and shaming released paedophiles makes them more likely to relapse and rape another child, while tightly integrating them into support networks makes them less likely to reoffend.

Payne said this view "shocked and disgusted" her, and was "an insult to Megan [who was also murdered by a paedophile] and all the good work done by her parents in protecting children". When you are accused by a grieving mother of insulting murdered children, you would have to be a monster not to pause. But increasingly, our public debate withers and dies in that pause. The grief has spoken; end of argument.

This inability to have a serious discussion of Megan's law is only one small symptom. Grief politics has spread over Britain like black tar over the past decade. Look, for example, at the handful of parents who became convinced in the 1990s that their children had been made autistic by the MMR vaccine. They held up Dr Andrew Wakefield as their Gallileo, the only scientist to speak the truth against the wicked medical establishment. The fact that Wakefield had no reliable scientific evidence at all - and is now being investigated for professional misconduct - did not stop them.

Of course, it's not hard to empathise with these parents. Their campaign gave their grief meaning. If real political change came from their child's disability, it would mean their loss was not for nothing. It is harder to understand why their views were taken seriously and amplified by the right-wing press, who used their grief to persuade hundreds of thousands of parents not to use the MMR vaccine. The result? We are facing a measles epidemic, and dozens of children may die. Privileging pain over reason has, it turns out, led to a disaster.

This refusal to think about consequences - the decision to take grief as a full stop to any controversy - was recently epitomised by the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. She said nobody should try to answer Cindy Sheehan - a woman whose son Casey was murdered by insurgents in Iraq, and who now wants full troop withdrawal - because losing a child gives her "absolute moral authority".

As it happens, I agree with Sheehan that we need rapid withdrawal from Iraq, because a majority of Iraqis want us out now. (Only 1 per cent look to the multinational forces in Iraq to enhance their security, according to the latest poll.) But why does Sheehan's personal grief make that case stronger? Other people who lost children in Iraq have reacted by saying they believe the US should "nuke Baghdad". Does that deranged demand have "absolute moral authority" too? Grief does not necessarily overlap with being right, and it often militates against even being coherent.

And yet I understand the temptations of grief politics. When a grieving parent supports your cause, it is very hard not to pick them up and use them as a handy rhetorical device to silence critics. In arguing for, say, tougher gun laws, it's hard to resist smearing the tears of the Dunblane parents into your opponents' faces.

Recently I was arguing against Lembit Opik, the Liberal Democrats MP, about speed cameras, and I began to wax lyrical about the parents I have met whose kids were killed by Clarkson-style speedophiles. "How could you look them in the face and argue against speed cameras?" I asked, a lazy, hazy act of moral blackmail in place of the far better reasoned argument I could have offered.

It's interesting to note that the press is very selective about which griefs we pick out and build into a crusade. Almost everyone has heard of the Betts family, whose daughter Leah died because she did not know how to use ecstasy properly. Her family reacted by calling for even tougher prohibition. But how many readers have heard of Fulton Gillespie? After his son Scott died injecting adulterated heroin into his arm, Fulton began to rethink the "lock 'em up" approach he had always held towards drug users. Slowly, he came to believe that heroin legalisation is the only way to make drug users - and the rest of us - safer. So where's the "Legalise Heroin" campaign from the News of the World, waving Fulton into the nation's faces? Do they think anybody who supports drug prohibition is spitting on the corpse of Scott Gillespie? It seems that some griefs are more equal than others.

It is only the parents who call for harsh retribution and violent crackdowns that we hear about. We all know about the mother of James Bulger, who has tried to track down the two deeply disturbed children who murdered her toddler. But who knows about the Swedish parents whose child was murdered in very similar circumstances around the same time? They regard the child murderers as victims too, and they hold no vindictive grudge. No story there, then.

The best way to honour the dead - Sarah Payne, Leah Betts, Scott Gillespie, Casey Sheehan - is to make sure that fewer people join them in the grave. That requires us to stand back and take serious, rational decisions on the basis of evidence, not emotion. Sometimes those decisions will clash with the whims of their parents, who are locked in grief and pain and loss. It will seem cruel to tell them that sometimes a senseless death is simply a senseless death and nothing more, and that nothing good will come from their loss. But adopting policies that provide a false meaning and a fake coda, like Megan's law or the MMR madness, will end with even more dead kids. Creating more Sarah Paynes does the memory of Sarah Payne no favours.

POSTSCRIPT: Comments on this article for publication can be sent to letters@independent.co.uk

If they are just for me, send them to johann *at* johannhari.com

I am in Peru working on a story at the moment so please forgive me if I take a while to reply.

So Gordon Brown has announced the renewal of Trident – the delivery system for our very own Weapons of Mass Destruction – and without a pause the debate has immediately sunk into the incessant babble about the Labour leadership. Does this mean Gordon will be challenged from the left? Is this a rapprochement with Tony? No doubt in the middle of a nuclear war itself, Nick Robinson would stand in the shadow of a mushroom cloud, his remaining flecks of hair falling from his head along with layers of skin, and ask earnestly how this will affect the Blair-Brown relationship.

This decision is far too important to be left to Westminster Village trivia. It goes to the heart of the single greatest threat to the future of the human species, along with global warming. It is only four years now since India and Pakistan were so close to nuclear war that Britain had to order its citizens to evacuate the sub-continent. We are about to see a nuclear standoff between Israel and Iran in the heart of the most volatile region in the world. This is the reality of the Second Nuclear Age, a time when mini-cold wars are proliferating across the world’s hot spots, each offering their own protracted Cuban Missile Crises and their own dark possibility of triggering a nuclear winter.

That’s why our politicians are right that the Trident question is a “vital matter of national security” – it’s just that they fail to see how. Let’s start by asking the most basic question. What are the threats to Britain’s security, and can Trident help? The most obvious danger to your physical safety and mine is from 7/7-style jihadi groups staging another attack on the civilian population. Before these non-state actors, nuclear weapons stand limp and useless. It is hardly an option to deploy Trident against Leeds, the home of Mohammed Sidiqh Khan.

The second risk – real but very, very slight – is from a hostile state, Iran or North Korea or some as-yet-unanticipated foe, at some point in the future trying to threaten London. There is a way to deter this tiny risk without having ready-to-fire nuclear weapons, which we’ll get to in a moment.

That leaves us with the third risk, by far the greatest. It is of a nuclear exchange somewhere else in the world severely damaging the global environment. Every bomb held by a nuclear state today is between eight and seventy times more powerful than the bombs that burned Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The scientific evidence suggests that if more than a handful are ever used anywhere, Britain’s climate will be dangerously disrupted and could be irreparably destroyed. So it is obviously a matter of urgent national security to reduce nuclear proliferation and ease nuclear tensions.

This is tough to do if we are conspicuously clinging to – and even improving – our own nuclear weapons systems, claiming they are “essential for our national security”. If we use this argument, how can we object when the people of Iran and India and Pakistan say the same? If nukes make us safer, why not, say, Egypt, Taiwan or Brazil? Why not everyone? What makes us special, other than raw power? Brown has offered an unwitting argument for universal proliferation. As Mohammed El Baradei, the Nobel Prize-winning head of the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA), says, “It is very hard to preach the virtues of non-smoking when you have a cigarette dangling from your lips and you are about to buy a new pack.”

You do not have to believe in some (currently) utopian plan for total disarmament to swing the momentum across the world from a rapid build-up to a gradual scaling-down. I recently spoke to Robert McNamara, who was Kennedy’s defence secretary at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He explained how this momentum could be achieved in the American context. “I was placed on a panel where I was arguing for disarmament and the other guy was arguing in defence of nuclear weapons. I said to him, ‘At the moment the US has 2000 nuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert to be fired in 15 minutes. That’s enough to destroy the world 16 times over. Why don’t we cut back to, say, 200, enough to destroy the world just once? Wouldn’t that be a good start?’ And he agreed. So let’s cut back to that, then we can have a debate about the zero option.”

Few people have pointed out that there is a similar way to achieve that momentum in the British context. It would allow us to retain a deterrent effect against any future aggressive state, and reduce the (far greater) danger from proliferation at the same time. In nuclear circles, it is called ‘the Japanese option’.

At the moment, Japan has a virtual nuclear arsenal. Dr Andrew Dorman of King’s College London explains what this means: “Japan currently has a civil nuclear programme and advanced rocket technology. Estimates range from six months to two years for how long it would take Japan to build a nuclear capability. Likewise, Britain could retain its design teams and maintain the capacity to build and reconstruct its nuclear force, but not actually have one day to day.”

The Japanese option would guarantee that if we ever needed a nuclear deterrent again – and a risk is not going to suddenly emerge overnight – we could very quickly assemble one. But we would have saved a fortune in cash (why not spend it on securing the massive amounts of nuclear material still barely guarded in the former Soviet Union?). And, more importantly, we would have sent a very strong signal that having dozens of weapons of mass destruction waiting on standby – to be fired at fifteen minutes’ notice – is not our idea of security. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, our best hope for a less radioactive world, would begin to breath a little on its intensive care bed.

And if Britain went Japanese, this might help us a little in the current stand-off with Iran. At the moment, the Iranian problem is being widely misrepresented as a problem with Ahmadinejad specifically. He is indeed a repellent fundamentalist (with the emphasis on the ‘mentalist’), but when it comes to acquiring nukes, he is simply following the wishes of his people. The polls show that a fat majority of Iranians want a nuke (even the liberals the world looks to as an alternative) and in a world where even Gordon Brown says it is essential for a nation’s security, who can blame them? So even when Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs are eventually toppled in a democratic revolution, the Iranian desire for nuclear weapons will still be there – unless we change the wider, global nuclear context.

In a world where everyone is replenishing and polishing their nuclear warheads, the Iranian people want one of their own, and they are not alone. If we continue on this course, sooner or later one of these countries will end up getting and using them. In a world where a major nuclear power is slowly standing down its nuclear arsenal, that might just change. Last week, Gordon Brown threw away any chance we have of finding out – and his decision made Britain far less safe.

POSTSCRIPT: Comments on this article for publication can be sent to letters@independent.co.uk

If they are just for me, send them to johann *at* johannhari.com

Esta es la historia de la guerra más mortífera desde que los ejércitos de Adolf Hitler desfilaron a través de Europa. Es una guerra que no ha terminado. Pero también es la historia de un rastro de sangre que nos llega directamente a nosotros: a tu control remoto, a tu teléfono móvil, a tu mp3 y a tu collar de diamantes. La República Democrática del Congo está llena de cables que conectan con mundo occidental, misteriosas conexiones que muestran cómo una guerra tribal, aparentemente aislada, es en realidad algo muy diferente.

Esta guerra ha sido olvidada como una implosión africana interna. En realidad es una batalla por el coltan [1] los diamantes, la casiterita [2] y el oro destinados a la venta en Londres, Nueva Cork y París. Es una batalla por los metales que hacen que nuestra sociedad tecnológica vibre y suene y se haya llevado casi cuatro millones de vidas en cinco años y destrozado una población del tamaño de la británica. No, esto no es solo una historia sobre el Congo. Esto es el cuento de un corto viaje en la larga guerra congoleña que nosotros, en occidente, hemos propiciado, animado y financiado, es una historia sobre nosotros.

I. Violaciones sobre violaciones

Empezó con un hospital lleno de mujeres a las que violaron a punta de pistola y a las que después dispararon en la vagina. Esto es el Hospital Panz, en Bikavu, el único hospital que está intentando atajar el estallido de violencia sexual en el Congo oriental. La mayoría de las mujeres se han envuelto completamente en mantas, de forma que solo se les puede ver los ojos. Uno de los médicos, el Dr Denis Mukwege afirma, “A un diez por ciento de las víctimas les ha ocurrido esto; estamos intentado reconstruir sus vaginas, sus anos, sus intestinos. Es un proceso muy largo”.

El médico explica, en francés, la lengua nacional, la historia secreta del hospital. “Empezamos con una catástrofe que simplemente no podíamos entender. Un día, al principio de la guerra, asaltaron la furgoneta UNICEF que él usaba. Unos días después una abuela trajo aquí, sobre sus espaldas y tras ocho horas andando, a su nieta. Nunca he visto nada igual. La operé en una mesa sin equipamiento, sin medicamentos.”

Ella fue la primera. “De repente empezaron a venir tantas mujeres con lesiones de violaciones y heridas que nunca jamás lo hubiera podido imaginar. Nuestra mente no es capaz de imaginar lo que han sufrido esas mujeres”. Estos ejércitos en disputa han descubierto que violar es un arma muy eficaz en esta guerra. Naciones Unidas estima que en esta pequeña provincia de Kivu Sur han violado a unas 45.000 mujeres, solo el año pasado. “Destruyen la moral de los hombres a cuyas mujeres han violado. Dejando inválidas a las mujeres, dejan inválida su sociedad”, explica. Hubo tantas milicias por los alrededores que el Dr. Mukwege tuvo que mantener en secreto su trabajo, las mujeres estaban aterrorizadas por temor a ser secuestradas otra vez y asesinadas. Así que, durante años, las estuve tratando clandestinamente, asumiendo el riesgo.

El Dr. Mukwege decidió salir a la luz cuando una mañana un padre destrozado le llevó a una niña de tres años a la que habían violado. “Le habían disparado en todas partes. No había nada que se pudiera hacer por ella”, afirma “El padre empezó a golpearse la cabeza contra una pared, gritando que no había sido capaz de proteger a su hija. Después supimos que ese hombre se suicidó”. Ese mismo día, vio a una mujer de setenta y dos años a la que habían violado delante de su yerno, una relación que se considera sagrada en la cultura congoleña. La mujer dijo “No me cure, no me cuida. Nunca podré volver y mirar a la cara a mi yerno”. Déjeme morir aquí, simplemente no me de de comer”. “Me di cuenta de que tenía que hablar”, afirma el Dr. Mukwege.

Sin embargo, su demanda pública no ha cambiado nada. Prácticamente no hay gobierno al que poder apelar, y menos a la policía. Solo existen unos violadores armados con AK-47.
En el centro hay unas 200 víctimas de violación que las enseñan a coser. Cuando comenzaron las violaciones, los maridos y los padres o bien huyeron y nunca regresaron o culparon a las mujeres y las evitaban. Las víctimas de violación casi nunca vuelven a integrarse en sus vidas anteriores. Es muy duro para nosotros convencer a las mujeres de que se marchen del hospital porque ¿a dónde van a ir?.

Aileen tiene 18 años pero todos los adolescentes en este país parecen mucho más jóvenes. El 10 de octubre, una milicia asaltó su pueblo y “decapitaron a la gente en la plaza central”. La milicia la secuestró; la retuvieron durante seis meses. “Me violaron todas y cada una de las noches” La pasaban de un hombre al siguiente. Se quedó embarazada. No tiene a donde ir ni el apoyo de su familia.
La violación de Aileen, y la de miles de mujeres es simplemente una parte de la gran violación de El Congo.

II. El final de los colonialistas belgas

Bukavu es una ciudad en el Este del Congo que se asienta a las orillas del Lago Kivi. Los sucios caminos que ellos llaman carreteras, está plagados de mujeres portando a sus espaldas pesados objetos de madera, carbón o cualquier cosa. En sus casas no hay ni luz ni agua.
Tina Van Malderen, una belga que llegó a Bukavu cuando era una niña, en 1951; a su padre lo trasladaron allí para trabajar para el gobierno belga. “Era el paraíso. En aquel momento sólo había europeos. No había africanos. La gente de color vivía en las zonas limítrofes, pero esto no era como África del Sur, no se les obligaba a vivir fuera. No querían vivir con nosotros, querían estar entre los suyos. Venían a la ciudad para trabajar. No compraban en nuestras tiendas, tenían sus propios mercados”.

Su familia era dueña de una cadena de tiendas y del único castillo en El Congo. Está incrédula cuando le pregunto si había algún tipo de crueldad hacia la gente de color en esa época. “Categóricamente, no. Nosotros queríamos a nuestros negros. Cuando tenían niños les hacíamos regales”. Percibiendo mi escepticismo, añade, “puede ser que en las plantaciones fueran un poco duros con ellos”. Los belgas unificaron El Congo en el primer gran holocausto del siglo XX, en un programa de esclavización y tiranía que asesinó a 13 millones de personas. El rey Leopoldo II se jactaba de los “objetivos humanitarios”.

Arrasó el Congo y lo convirtió en una colonia esclava con el objetivo de extraer caucho, el coltan y la casiterita de la época. A los “nativos” que no conseguían recoger suficiente caucho les cortaban las manos; los administradores belgas recibían y contaban cuidadosamente los cientos de bolsas de manos cada día.

Mientras, Tina cuenta que cuando ella llegó al país las gentes eran “salvajes que andaban medio desnudos”. Me acuerdo de la canción congoleña que un misionero sueco escribió en 1984: “Estamos cansados de vivir bajo esta tiranía”, cantaban “los salvajes”. “No podemos soportar que se lleven a nuestras mujeres e hijos/ y tener que tratar a los salvajes blancos./ Tenemos que combatirles/ Sabemos que moriremos, pero queremos morir./Queremos morir”. El concepto de crímenes contra la humanidad lo invento un periodista que fue testigo directo de los desmanes del gobierno de Leopoldo.

Su sistema de trabajos forzados continuó hasta la retirada de los belgas en 1960, cuando Patrice Lumumba se convirtió en el primer y único dirigente electo del Congo. “Era un estúpido” dice Tina. “El primer día de la Independencia dijo que habíamos apaleado y humillado a los negros. Firmó su sentencia de muerte haciendo eso”.
Tenía razón. Lumumba afirmaba ser un socialista demócrata que quería acabar con las divisiones étnicas del Congo. Nunca sabremos si hubiera conseguido su sueño porque la CIA decidió que era una “perro rabioso” que había que derrocar. Al poco tiempo, uno de sus agentes llevaba en el maletero del coche por los alrededores de Kinshasa el cuerpo torturado del dirigente electo intentando buscar un lugar para tirarlo. El hombre de la CIA, Mobutu Sese Seko, ya tenía el poder y el dinero.

Mobuto se convirtió en otro Leopoldo utilizando el estado para robar y asesinar al pueblo congoleño con el beneplácito de la CIA. “Sigue robando, pero no robes demasiado” le aconsejó el pueblo congoleño, empezando una locura de cleptomanía en todo el país.
La familia de Tina empezó a inquietarse a principios de 1970 cuando Mobuto anunció el programa de “zairización”, un traspaso al estilo de Mugabe de los recursos de los extranjeros a sus arcas.

Tina no había vuelto al Congo hasta ahora; “Vi la casa en la que vivimos. Desde fuera todavía parece bonita pero cuando entré…”, mueve la cabeza. “Los negros no pueden vivir decentemente”. El Congo no ha cambiado en absoluto. Los negros ya no van desnudos, pero todavía son salvajes.” El único cambio producido durante décadas ha sido el robo de recursos concretos para el consumo de occidente: caucho con los belgas, diamantes con Mobuto, coltan y casiterita hoy.

III. La guerra de Playstation

Si quieres ver para qué han servido todas esas muertes, hay que ir hasta la ciudad de Goma, a cuatro horas de distancia por carreteras infernales y después por la costa hasta un lugar llamado Kalehe.
Verdes colinas surcadas de heridas abiertas en la tierra, cuyo término técnico es “minas artesanales” pero este eufemismo no es otra cosa que la conjura de imágenes de agujeros excavados con máquinas y cascos y luces. En realidad son inmensos agujeros en la tierra, en los que hombres, mujeres y niños, muchos niños, pican desesperadamente con martillos hechos a mano, o con sus manos desnudas en la tierra roja, esperando encontrar algo de coltan o casiterita. El coltan es un metal, de color inusualmente apagado, que conduce el calor.

Está en tu móvil, en tu ordenador portátil, en la Playstation de tu hijo y en el 80 por ciento de los aparatos del otro mundo más allá de la República Democrática de El Congo.
La mina está fría y la oscuridad tenebrosa es un contraste tremendo frente al fuerte sol congoleño. Los mineros pican sobre un techo que parece que va a derrumbarse en cualquier momento. Ingo Mbale, de 51 años, nos explica cómo se alimenta el deseo de los occidentales por el coltan. “Nos esclavizaron hace tres años”, dice. “Un capitán de la división de investigación y adquisición de comunicaciones [de una de las milicias] llegó y nos obligó a punta de pistola a trabajar en la mina para ellos. No nos dio dinero, era un trabajo de esclavos. Ahora no queda nada en muchas de esas vetas, las han agotado. Asesinaron a mucha gente. Nuestro oro, nuestro coltan y nuestra casiterita llegaban al mundo a través de Ruanda. “La milicia que asaltó Kalehe pudo seguir luchando y asesinado y violando únicamente porque alguien de fuera en el ancho mundo estaba dispuesto a comprar este coltan de las minas de esclavos y alguien más estaba dispuesto a venderles pistolas y artillería a cambio de su dinero contante y sonante.

Observando a esos hombres, la forma que ha tomado la reciente historia de El Congo, queda clara. Hay una historia oficial sobre la guerra en El Congo, y después está la realidad, descubierta por una trilogía de informaciones de un equipo de expertos de Naciones Unidas, que estallaron en la República Democrática de El Congo como una bomba. La historia oficial es demasiado complicada y es difícil de seguir porque, finalmente, no tiene sentido. Pero su primer capítulo es bastante cierto y fue así: En 1996, un maoísta con vista para los negocios, llamado Laurent-Desire Kabila, se cansó de controlar este pequeño lugar al este de Zaire, de donde traficaba con marfil y oro y sacaba dinero extra secuestrando occidentales.

Kabila decidió deponer a Mobutu, el tirano omnipresente y ovni-incompetente, y tomar el poder. De esta forma, con un ejército de niños soldados, conocidos como los Kadogo, y con el apoyo de los países vecinos, Ruanda y Uganda, la estructura de Mobuto cayó. Kabila se instaló en el poder como otro Leopoldo. Prohibió los partidos políticos y se metió de lleno en la corrupción.

En 1998, Kabila pidió a los ruandeses y a los ugandeses que sacaran sus tropas. Aquí, la historia oficial empieza a alejarse de la realidad. Los ruandeses se retiraron durante quince días pero después organizaron la invasión del Congo, arrasando una tercera parte del país. La razón oficial para este asalto parece razonable. Después del genocidio en Ruanda de 1994, una masacre que hizo palidecer a Auschwithz, en la que decenas de miles de hutus con machetes atravesaron la frontera del Congo y establecieron bases permanente. ¿Cómo puede ningún país permanecer con sus asesinos armados y agazapados en sus fronteras? “Tenemos que evitar que los genocidas se reagrupen”, afirmó Paul Kgame, el presidente de Ruanda, con el apoyo del ejército ugandés siguiéndole de puntillas.

Desde su palacio en Kinshasa, Kabila hizo un llamamiento a sus amigos para resistir el ataque ruando-ugandés. Los dictadores de Zimbawe, Namibia y Angola enviaron ejércitos que marcharon por El Congo para luchar y la Primera Guerra Mundial del Congo empezó. Los ejércitos y las milicias vagabundeando por el Congo se convirtieron en rebeldes sin causa, peleando entre ellos porque estaban allí simplemente porque sacarles hubiera sido una humillante derrota. En esta versión, la guerra en el Congo es un caos que empezó con las mejores intenciones. El deseo de Ruanda de perseguir a los genocidas solo fue una espiral de violencia sin control. Presentan la masacre masiva como un gigantesco un error cósmico. Esto es también una gran mentira.

Una vez que El Congo estuvo asolado de muerte, Naciones Unidas comisionó a un equipo de expertos internacionales para viajar al país y descubrir las razones ocultas de la guerra. Averiguaron que la historia del gobierno ruandés escondía una verdad mucho más oscura. Los ruandeses tenían un motivo, desde el primer momento: arrasar la gran riqueza mineral de El Congo, para robar las minas y vendérnosla a nosotros, esperando que el mundo, como muy pronto ocurrió, olvidara en las noticias de la televisión esta guerra, provocada por control remoto, por el coltan. Los otros países vinieron no porque creyeran en repeler la agresión, sino porque querían un trozo del pastel congoleño. El país fue asolado por “ejércitos de negocios”, comandados por hombres que “planificaron cuidadosamente el rediseño del mapa regional para redistribuir la riqueza”, declaró Naciones Unidas.

Los expertos de Naciones Unidas supieron esto porque las tropas ruandesas no se dirigieron hacia las áreas en las que se escondían los genocidas. Se dirigieron directos hacia las minas como esta en Kalehe, y esclavizaron a las poblaciones para que trabajaran para ellos en las minas.

Jean-Pierre Ondekane, el jefe de las fuerzas ruandesas en Goma, apeló a sus unidades para que mantuvieran buenas relaciones con “nuestros Interhamwe [genocidas] hermanos”. Establecieron una Oficina del Congo que sacaba miles de millones de dólares del país y se ingresaban en cuentas bancarias ruandesas. Naciones Unidas averiguó que un grupo de empresas británicas, estadounidenses y belgas colaboraron con este crimen. Recomendaron la investigación de empresas como la angloamericana PCL, Barclay’s Bank, Standard Chartered Bank y De Beers. El gobierno británico apenas hizo un seguimiento de la información, de las empresas anglo-estadounidenses que Human Rights Watch había demostrado que estaban “en el mismo equipo que algunos de los peores asesinos en la región” y dejando a otras, como De Beers, en una categoría “sin resolver” y sin castigar.

¿Y la razón por la que la invasión fue tan beneficiosa? La demanda global de coltan estaba en alza debido a la enorme popularidad de las Playstations de Sony, repleta de coltan. Como Oona King, uno de los pocos políticos británicos en denunciar lo que ocurría en el Congo nos explicó, “a los niños en El Congo se les manda a las minas para morir, mientras que los niños en Europa y en Estados Unidos matan imaginariamente alienígenas en sus salones”.

Translation for Rebelion magazine

Forget Forest Gate or Finsbury Park. The police have been searching for Weapons of Mass Destruction in all the wrong places. Hidden all over this city – in underground bases we almost never see – there is a form of WMD that in the past millennium killed more humans than all the wars and revolutions combined. It can slay people in 35 different ways, making them collapse in a jaundiced fever or die in a burning building. It is responsible for a quarter of all deadly fires. It almost wiped out this city once before, killing 75,000 of us. It is probably deep underneath you right now. Oh, and thanks to Thames Water, it is proliferating faster every day.

Ever since the first settlers pitched up on the banks of the Thames, London has been locked in a permanent war with the rat. There have been periods when they seemed close to winning, and periods when we pushed back their armies to the point of destruction. In the 1660s they brought the Black Death, and in the 1950s we brought coagulants – poisons that thin the rat’s blood so its internal organs haemorrhage to nothing. Almost unnoticed by Londoners, this war lurched into a new phase with the Tory privatisation of our water supply – the handing of a massive monopoly to an uncompetitive mega-corporation – in the late 1980s. We may be approaching our Dunkirk.

To understand how, I spent this week with the ultimate Reservoir Dogs. The pest control team at Westminster City Council, with their bags of lush turquoise poison and their infinite rat wisdom, are the men London’s rats fear in the dark. In their decades hunting our mortal enemy, they have accumulated a stock of war stories. Gary Sheppard, a tough, tattooed geezer with the bleak title of Pest Control and Mortuaries Manager, talks me through his showdowns. “One time I was called out to a very swanky flat in Marylebone. There was a man who was freaked out because he had spotted a rat in his bedroom. Well, the flat was meticulously clean, so it took a bit of detective work but we discovered the rats were climbing up the drainage pipes and through the window. We sealed it up, but a week later we get called back. The rats were still there. We were really puzzled, so we started digging around – and then we found it. There was a hole in the bed. It turned out the rats had built a big nest there. He had been sleeping on top of a rat nest for months.”

And, Gary warns sternly, the rats are advancing. Until privatisation, all of London’s councils fended back the rat armies through a procedure called sewer-baiting. “Basically, we would lift up the manhole covers and lower a load of poison down. It would always be eaten, so we knew it was needed.” But as soon as they became a company accountable to private share-holders rather than us, Thames Water simply stopped. It cost too much. Today, for all the sewers in London – and the estimated seven million rats that live there – they have just two small teams who mop up the worst infestations. They spend just one day a year dealing with the rats underneath Westminster, a local authority that stretches from Camden to Kensington and contains more than two thousand miles of drainage pipes.

The rats were gnawing across London with such renewed ferocity that Westminster Council had to do Thames Water’s job for it and begin sewer-baiting out of your tax-money. The number of rat infestations quickly fell by more than two-thirds. “But most local councils aren’t doing it,” Sheppard warns with a worried shake of the head. The Council has been begging Thames Water to act, but in the week when the corporation announced a 31 percent rise in profits, the pest control team told me, “They just don’t call us back or turn up to our meetings. They deny there’s a problem. One guy even said rats don’t like water so why would they be in the sewers?” When I tried to coax Thames Water to take me down to the sewers, they told me there was no point going down to look for rats because “you won’t find any”.

And while Thames Water is too busy counting its profits to do its job, the walking WMD are quietly colonising the great dark city beneath London.

Niall Ferguson has written this hilarious letter to the Independent, in which he engages with... um... nothing that I wrote:

"Sir: Johann Hari reverts to his earlier defective arguments ("The truth? Our empire killed millions", 19 June). He compares British camps for famine victims in late 19th-century India with Nazi concentration camps. He compares British imperial rule with Stalinist collectivisation. And he continues to misrepresent the arguments of my last book, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. All this betrays a combination of embarrassing ignorance and disturbing relativism.

I have already urged Hari to read more widely before inflicting his essays on us, but somehow, like an idle undergraduate, he can't find the time. On his website, he boasts that in researching his articles he read not only Davis's book, but also Noam Chomsky's Year 501 and The Discovery of India by Jawaharal Nehru. It would be hard to devise a less adequate reading list.

Curiously, the two books I accused Hari of not having read go unmentioned in his latest rant, as does my new book, The War of the World. Had they all mysteriously disappeared from the library on the day the essay was due?

Hari's relativism is more troubling. There is, as The War of the World makes clear, a real difference between mismanaging a natural disaster on the basis of an erroneous understanding of economics - which is what the Victorians did in India - and systematically pursuing "the liquidation of the kulaks as a class" or "the final solution of the Jewish question".

There was nothing remotely like Auschwitz in British India, just as there was nothing remotely like Solovetsky in 1950s Kenya. To argue otherwise is to commit the same error of categorisation made by those juvenile leftists who tediously liken Republican presidents to Hitler.

NIALL FERGUSON

JESUS COLLEGE, OXFORD"

I've been inundated with e-mails about this offering suport. It's hard to write a rebuttal because Ferguson literally offers no facts at all, just invective.

Tom Mill makes a useful point though:

"In his letter to The Independent (24 June 2006) Niall Ferguson does not dispute any of the facts cited by Johann Hari. Instead he accuses him of “embarrassing ignorance and disturbing relativism”.

In fact Hari’s position is anything but relativist. He has argued – I think quite convincingly – that the same moral standards be applied to our own history as we apply to our enemies. If anyone is a relativist in this debate it is Ferguson who considers that to suggest such a thing is to commit an “error of categorization”."

Terrence Wood from New Zealand says:

"I have just read Niall Ferguson's letter to the Independent regarding columnist Johann Hari. And I am highly impressed! As I am sure you are aware, here in the colonies we often cast our gaze back to the motherland in search of culture and it has warmed my heart immensely to see that your fair country appears to be on he verge of unleashing another great satirist on the rest of the world. An Oxbridge Ali G perhaps?

I giggled my hardest when Mr Ferguson described the role of the Victorian English in causing famine in India as: "mismanaging a natural disaster on the basis of an erroneous understanding of economics". If I was even the slightest bit inclined to believe that Mr Ferguson was a serious historian, I would point out that one really doesn't need to know that much about economics to understand that starving people need food, and that stopping them from getting this food will cause them to die. I would also note that exculpating the colonial power in this case by claiming they didn't understand economics is not too dissimilar to saying that Stalin only really brought about the gulag because he didn't understand political science. However, as Mr Ferguson is clearly a comedian not an academic, there is no need for me to mention these things."

Peter Wilby in the New Statesman writes:

"Is Johann Hari, the Independent's twentysomething columnist, a twerp? Does he write twaddle? Since I brought Hari into journalism - I gave him his first job, on the NS - I rather hope not. The charges have been levelled, in the Sunday Times, the Independent itself and, bizarrely, through the medium of the Daily Mail diary, by two historians of the British empire, Niall Ferguson and Lawrence James.

Hari's thought crime was to propose that the empire was "a psychopathic and murderous form of totalitarianism" on a par with Stalin's rule in the Soviet Union. I accept the youthful Hari (or "Horrible Hari", as Ferguson called him, borrowing from the title of a children's book series) is prone to overstating his case. But my interest is in how rapidly the press marginalises subjects such as the brutality of British colonialism and puts them into a box marked "loony".

You don't need to read lefties to learn about, say, the British response to the Indian Mutiny. A N Wilson's The Victorians records how bayoneted prisoners were roasted over fires and Muslims sewn into pigskins before execution. You may or may not find that as reprehensible as what Stalin or Mao did. Either way, I'm not sure comparing the numbers of victims resolves the argument.

Hari's column was concerned with another issue: the Indian famines of the late 19th century in which, he claimed, 29 million died. This figure comes from Late Victorian Holocausts by the University of California lecturer Mike Davis, which was reviewed sympathetically by, for example, Amartya Sen in the New York Times. Davis argues that, though weather conditions triggered the famine, the effects were greatly exacerbated by dogmatic free-market policies which, in some cases, included the active obstruction of relief efforts. The implication is this: if we are to hold Stalin and Mao responsible for the millions who starved as a result of their socialist agricultural policies (as many counts of their victims do), we ought to hold the British empire's rulers responsible for those who starved as a result of laissez-faire policies. Equally, if we are to defend the British, as James does, by pointing out that our colonial subjects held us in such esteem that they adopted our laws and even came to live here, we should also note that millions of former Soviet citizens revere Stalin to this day.

Again, I do not think detailed comparisons get us very far. These were different crimes committed in different circumstances; league tables of atrocity are pointless. But you will find few apologists for Stalin in the British media. Apologists for the empire are everywhere: Ferguson has a Channel 4 series, writes a column in the Sunday Telegraph and has been profiled or interviewed in several papers recently. Davis is hardly ever seen outside the pages of the New Left Review.

Does it matter? It certainly does. Nobody of any significance seriously proposes a return to Stalinism. But a dogma similar to the Victorians' belief in free markets rules most of the world. And Ferguson is so impressed by the British empire that he thinks the Americans should openly embrace a similar imperial role instead of pussyfooting around as (in his view) they do now. Hari's views may be open to challenge; they may even be wrong. But he is not, on this evidence, a twerp. "

You can send comments on Ferguson's letter to letters@independent.co.uk

In the middle of a summer where cinema-goers are wading through gloopy Hollywood treacle – if you see me going in to see Superman Returns, please, please kill me – it can take a small no-budget film to remind you of the raw power of cinema. The new Iranian film ‘Off Side’ is the simple story of women trying to smuggle their way into a football stadium in defiance of the senseless ban by the Ayatollahs. It is shot on hand-held cameras, with a cast of amateurs, in just a few locations. The American movie ‘Hard Candy’ has only two actors, spinning against each other in furious bursts in just two locations. The slow radioactive power of these low-tech films makes you realise how numbing all the CGI special effects pyrotechnics of Hollywood are. Alfred Hitchcock once said the greatest special effect in movies is a close-up of a human face. Nobody needs to tell the makers of these two mini-masterpieces.