Remember Goma? The town in what was then eastern Zaire was at the centre of Rwanda's "refugee crisis" in the mid-1990s. More recently, years it's been at the centre of another ugly and poorly-understood story - one with a link that could go straight to your mobile phone.
No, I hardly expect the devastating central African war, involving the armies of six countries' armies, to figure on your average WAP news service - there's too much fascinating soccer transfer speculation for that. The mobile-phone link goes deeper, to particles of a metal that makes your phone function. Around Goma, this metal is mined mine this shovels.
As File on Four (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday) explained, this doesn't mean a Golden Age for Goma. The huge escalation in demand during the late 1990s did set off a sort of gold rush, however, and the consequences have been devastating: violence, prostitution, the rapid spread of HIV, the devastation of protected habitats and slaughter of rare animal species, including the lowland gorilla.
Coltan, by the spoonful, has become the local unit of currency. But, one miner the programme spoke to said he didn't know what the metal was used for, and in this market, ignorance is not bliss. Whereas a gold miner gets up to 80 per cent of the market value of the commodity, a coltan miner may get 20 per cent, if he is very lucky. Literally billions of dollars of precious metal have left the region, but you wouldn't know it in the miserable schools and hospitals of Goma.
The conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a UN report says, has become about control of and access to mineral resources.
A Rwandan military officer has allegedly offered Congolese coltan for sale to international companies, and Amnesty International says Rwanda and its allies have forcibly removed peasants from the land to facilitate coltan mining, and used forced-labour and prisoners in the process.
Rwandan perfidy is a touchy subject in London, where the British government, and international-development minister Clare Short in particular, have closely allied themselves with the post-genocide regime in Kigali. And Short came out fighting, saying Rwanda has every right to be in the eastern Congo for its own protection, and pouring scorn on the UN and even Amnesty accusations against the country's practices there. When the questions turned to another British ally, Uganda, she lost patience entirely.: "It sounds to me as though you're making an irresponsible programme," she said, ending the interview.
It probably wasn't irresponsible, but it was unfortunate that it focused so hard on Rwandan and British sins, and left little time to look at the practices of an industry that is happy to exploit this sort of mess to get the metal. The industry group's PR about the need to avoid "illegal miners" has, predictably, shown more lip-service for gorillas than for people; indeed, corporate concern for human welfare would put the companies on a bit of a slippery slope all right...
Pressure can pay off, however. Until just last month, the Belgian airline Sabena was filling the bellies of its regular Kigali-to-Brussels passenger flights with barrels of coltan. A campaign in Belgium forced Sabena to abandon the practice. The slogan: "No Blood on My Mobile.".
Another lively series, Life as an Infant (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday), finished this week, ending up predictably on the side of early childhood as a profoundly important (in other words, potentially scarring) period of development: "How, and how well, you think, you learn, you control your emotions, you relate to others .... in short, everything that makes you human, depends in large part on the nature of the relationships that you have with those important people that care for you when you're very young."
One expert told us that infants and toddlers can really suffer from "depression", but another warned that such clinical diagnoses are culturally loaded: "...a lively, typical two-and-a-half-year-old boy, charging around the house, waving guns and shouting '"bang!"' and biffing sisters - this would have been seen 50 years ago as normal small male behaviour. But nowadays the temptation is to pathologise it, to say this is hyperactivity, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Sometimes it is, but usually it isn't."
Early childhood may be all-important, but part 1one of The Bob Dylan Story (BBC Radio 2, Tuesday) didn't bother telling us whether young Bobby Zimmerman was comforted quickly when he cried, or whom he biffed. Instead, we got the more typical pop-biographical opening: "Bob was born on May 24th, 1941, the first-born son of Abe and Betty Zimmerman. As a teenager, Bob was captivated by..." You might gather from all the Bobbing that this ain't no savage psychobiography.
The fawning territory was immediately apparent in the presenter's drawling introduction: "I'm Kris Kristofferson and over the next 10 weeks I'll be tellin' the story of ma inspiration, ma hero, and ma friend, Bob Dylan.". Still, the programme had good interview clips and was sound enough on the familiar and less-familiar musical influences and early career path. (This being annoying Radio 2, the songs were played out of order, and only Dylan's own tracks appeared, rather than, say, including a couple of Woody Guthrie's.)
Dylan-detractors will be pleased to hear that even in Greenwich Village in 1961 and 19-62, his sound was almost universally hated and bookings were near-impossible to come by.; For the first couple of years at Columbia Records, he was known as "John Hammond's folly", according to Hammond himself.
Those haters were wrong, of course, and the programme knows it. Would you believe Bob Geldof came up with a nice wee summary of Dylan's nature and contribution? "He was able to assimilate in one voice all the prehistory of popular folk music - blues and country - and in the process of musical alchemy, transform it into the spirit and voice of our age."
I was in Kerry when the news of the licence-fee increase came through. And seeing as Kerry is one of many places around Ireland that differs from the capital in having reasonably interesting local radio (apart from - oyi! - most of the music), I got the news, not from RTE, but from INN, the news organ shared by the "independent" local commercial stations.
As a result, I can't assess the alleged spin in RTE's coverage of the story. However, it can scarcely have been a match for INN, which led its report, not with the angry reaction of RT╔E at the meanness of the increase, but with the angry reaction of "independent" broadcasters at its generosity!
You would hardly have gathered from the report that the increase was a mere fraction of what RT╔E had requested; we heard instead about how the RT╔E monolith was having its position immeasurably strengthened because the Minister was advancing it more money without any effort to curb its competitive power. It seems there are problems with independence on both sides of the public/private divide.
Regular readers know this column is no fan either of the licence fee or the prospect of boosting it. As the present dispute makes obvious, and as numerous other incidents have shown, having this earmarked source of revenue scarcely makes RTE independent of political pressure. And, this being the case, I frankly can't see any other reason why an essential social activity (yes!) such as watching television should be subject to an unprogressive tax - any more than bin collection should be subject to such a tax, - however "nominal" it may appear from the precincts of the Dail and D4.
However, it's equally absurd to expect Montrose to abandon profitable forms of broadcasting in the name of a public-service ideal that it can't afford to embody. In the current climate, RTE has quite simply got to defend the messy historic compromise that gives it this dual mandate - a mandate that in its radio form makes 2FM the best pop- music station in the State; that brings us, with blessedly little advertising, the "commercial" likes of Marian Finucane and Liveline; and that helps to pay for the often-fascinating programmes that fill the fringes of the Radio 1, 2FM and Lyric schedules, even in this slightly threadbare summer season.
Listeners and broadcasters alike really need to resist the millennial morality that says anything which can actually make money should be doing so for a bunch of corporate directors. We may not care much about Digico, so the Government slipped that privatisation past us. It should not be allowed to do the same for 2FM, and should be pressured to provide adequate direct funding for RTE.