Keith Harmon Snow, independent journalist and human rights investigator, photographed here in D.R. Congo.
On 03.13.2010, I reported for KPFA Radio about Rwandan police undertaking special training to serve as "peacekeepers" in Haiti, which I had reported on Colored Opinions and the San Francisco Bay View, National Black Newspaper, in "Just what Haiti doesn't need: Rwandan police," http://bit.ly/9kJjp7 For KPFA, I recorded Keith Harmon Snow's response:
Rwandan Police in Haiti, http://bit.ly/a4pYqa
This seems to have struck a nerve, making Rwandan reality more real to people in this hemisphere, even way out here on the Pacific Coast. Progressives are very conscious of Haiti in the San Francisco Bay Area, and of Palestine, largely because these are the two hot spots that the popular KPFA Flashpoints Investigative Radio show focuses on most faithfully.
Consciously or not, we consume the resources of the Great Lakes region every day, including Starbuck's coffee and tea from Rwanda, and coltan and cassiterite from eastern Congo, smuggled across the border for export from Rwanda, for all the electronic gadgetry designed and manufactured in the San Francisco Bay Area. Apple Computer, Hewlett Packard, and Google headquarters are all roughly an hour away from the City of San Francisco, in Silicon Valley, as are many military industrial contractors, who rely on cobalt ore mined in the Katanga Copper Belt running through southeastern D.R. Congo into Zambia.
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