We're All Raping the Congo, One Cell Phone Call at a Time

I thought I'd branch out from Mexico and talk about a really failed state, The Democratic Republic of the Congo. The NY Times gave Joseph Kabila "middling reviews" in a feature piece this weekend but its hard to imagine anyone better, or much worse, in his position.

There's a piece from NY Newswire on Huffington Post today that introduces the first motive factor in the decade long war that's ravaging the Congo: the country's incredible mineral wealth, especially columbite-tantalite, or coltan, which is used in millions of cell phones.

Congolese miners have been killed, and women raped during the 11-year war over mineral deposits in the eastern Congo, Mbangu said. One of the deposits is a natural metallic ore, columbite-tantalite, or coltan, that, when refined, stores an electric charge in a capacitor used in common electronic devices.

The Congo region, which contains as much as 80 percent of the world's coltan reserves, yielded 300 tons and $5.42 million last year, up 50 percent over 2007, a recent U.N. Security Council report said.

Calls to ban the trade in "conflict minerals" have triggered a response warning that cessation of trade will cost even more lives. Meanwhile collapsing diamond prices have caused De Beers to pull out of the Congo.

The second key fact is the way the 1994 genocide in Rwanda spilled over into the Congo. While some blame the French even calling Sarkozy a second King Leopold, other culpable actors are more local. The Times (UK) has a piece on the expose of Rwanda's role in the slaughter:

Rwanda originally invaded eastern Congo in 1996 in pursuit of the Hutu genocide perpetrators who fled there to evade justice. Uganda came too, in pursuit of its own rebels. Timothy Reid, a senior United Nations peacekeeping official in Rwanda and Congo, calculated that even factoring in the profits of the mineral wealth Rwanda pillaged from Congo, the war there would have put it $100 million (£70 million) into the red, had it not been for the cushion of foreign aid.

After Rwanda pulled out of Congo officially, it continued the war there by proxy, supporting Tutsi rebels led by General Laurent Nkunda. It always denied the support, until December, when the damning results of a UN inquiry proved the link beyond question. The Nkunda forces had marched to the gates of Goma, slaughtering hundreds, in the company of uniformed Rwandan soldiers with covering fire from Rwandan tanks over the border. Rwandan soldiers have forcibly recruited children on his behalf - a war crime that landed Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese warlord, in the dock at The Hague as the first defendant of the permanent International Criminal Court.

I'm bracing myself to read “Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe”, looks like the best book on the topic so far.

Trailer for The Greatest Silence: Rape in The Congo (HBO Documentary)

Today, in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, rape is taking place on a scale that is almost unimaginable. In the last ten years, hundreds of thousands of women and girls have been raped - but their suffering goes unacknowledged. Instead, they are invisible, shamed and mute.

This is the story of one filmmaker's crusade to break the silence surrounding this shocking reality, armed with a firsthand connection with the women and men she meets.

Nat Wilson Turner April 7, 2009 - 5:19pm

Nat Wilson Turner's diary | printer friendly version |

( categories: Africa: Sub-Saharan )

Actually on the scale of a large country....

That "$5.42 million" is not "incredible wealth".

That's peanuts. Less than 10c per capita in a country where the GDP per capita is $170.

I'm not saying Coltan isn't a factor. I'm saying something isn't adding up.

John Carter April 7, 2009 - 7:03pm

I think a lot of things aren't adding up

For one thing the money is not being divvied up per capita -- its being grabbed by a few armed players.
Also the trade is largely illegal and untracked.
from Wikipedia:

The Rwandan occupation in the east of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was a key factor preventing DRC from exploiting its coltan reserves for its own benefit. Mining of the mineral is almost exclusively artisanal and small-scale. A 2003 UN Security Council report charged that a great deal of the ore is mined illegally and smuggled over the country's eastern borders by militias from neighbouring Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda.

Coltan smuggling has also been implicated as a major source of income for the military occupation of Congo. An activist website, Toward Freedom, states that the search for coltan has fueled a brutal conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo; they state that demand for coltan has caused Rwandan military groups and western mining companies to seek hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the rare metal, often by forcing prisoners-of-war and even children to work in the country's coltan mines. The Rwandan Army has made an estimated $500m in the last 18 months (as of October 2008) derived from Congolese coltan.

Nat Wilson Turner April 7, 2009 - 7:46pm

Ok... that number makes more sense.

Sure the wealth goes to a few. Rwandese Gini is 45.

But national foot soldiers get payed "a little better, sometimes less, than the local GDP per capita".

Rwanda GDP $355 per capita. Pop 10 megabod. Coltan at $500megabuck comes to around $50 per head. Yip, that sort of numbers buys you soldiers.

ie. Suspect U.N. Security Council report is massively underestimating.

John Carter April 7, 2009 - 7:57pm

note the Times piece as well

That asserts that the Rwandan government would be in the red on their invasions of the Congo without financial assistance from western governments (Britain and the U.S.).
And its not just coltan -- they're also plundering the Congo of diamonds, copper, and cobolt.

Nat Wilson Turner April 7, 2009 - 9:50pm

oops, cobalt

got it mixed up with kobold the dungeons and dragons monster.

Nat Wilson Turner April 7, 2009 - 9:51pm

yes I'm a dork.

Nat Wilson Turner April 7, 2009 - 9:51pm

I remember this from undergrad days

At one point it was a colony, so this homocidal Mad Max crap is someone else's fault. Then it was cruelly shoved into the wood-chipper of independence, so this is someone else's fault. They've got marketable minerals falling out of the walls, so the resultant guns-to-butter ratio (and absolute quantities thereof) is someone else's fault.

Now we face a bitter choice: buy what they have to sell, making us guilty for current conditions, or enact trade restrictions, making us retroactively guilty for the past and criminally-negligent guilty for whatever happens in the future?

Also, screw the Kimberlite Sith Lords. The best thing about diamonds is how easy it is to rinse the blood off of them.

Lupo the Butcher April 7, 2009 - 9:55pm

looking for excuses to be indifferent?

because the personal responsibility angle is pretty weak one here. I'd say Mugabe bears as much blame as any single person but he was propped up by the West.
The Congolese were doing just fine before the Belgians came along.

Nat Wilson Turner April 8, 2009 - 8:11am

Failed state?

Saying the Congo has failed might imply it was once a succesful state. It never was, not even under Belgian rule.

And it has many more minerals than tantalum.

Synoia April 8, 2009 - 12:20am

not much changed since 2006

also from 2005 Congo plans to clamp down on 'blood' mineral. For lots of background see this compilation thread from 2004: Congo DRC: News Update not all links will still be available

Congo's tragedy: the war the world forgot

In a country the size of Western Europe, a war rages that has lasted eight years and cost four million lives. Rival militias inflict appalling suffering on the civilian population, and what passes for political leadership is powerless to stop it. This is Congo, and the reason for the conflict - control of minerals essential to the electronic gadgetry on which the developed world depends - is what makes our blindness to the horror doubly shaming. Johann Hari reports from the killing fields of central Africa

Friday, 5 May 2006

This is the story of the deadliest war since Adolf Hitler's armies marched across Europe - a war that has not ended. But is also the story of a trail of blood that leads directly to you: to your remote control, to your mobile phone, to your laptop and to your diamond necklace. In the TV series Lost, a group of plane crash survivors believe they are stranded alone on a desert island, until one day they discover a dense metal cable leading out into the ocean and the world beyond. The Democratic Republic of Congo is full of those cables, mysterious connections that show how a seemingly isolated tribal war is in reality something very different.

This war has been dismissed as an internal African implosion. In reality it is a battle for coltan, diamonds, cassiterite and gold, destined for sale in London, New York and Paris. It is a battle for the metals that make our technological society vibrate and ring and bling, and it has already claimed four million lives in five years and broken a population the size of Britain's. No, this is not only a story about them. This - the tale of a short journey into the long Congolese war we in the West have fostered, fuelled and funded - is a story about you.

much more at The Independent

_{"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined." -Henry David Thoreau}

Tina April 8, 2009 - 1:16am

also xlink searches

coltan http://agonist.org/?q=trip_search&keys=coltan

Congo http://agonist.org/?q=trip_search&keys=congo

_{"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined." -Henry David Thoreau}

Tina April 8, 2009 - 1:30am

AFRICOM management for deez flowz

who needs oil when you got this stuff? its all about making sure no surly cross-ethnicity nationalist types demand bigger pieces. much better to have the Good international Xe-backed private security forces control the security on the mining concessions. AFRICOM and the descendants of Executive Outcomes. Whoever Margaret Thatcher's son was tied in with. Those cats... that's the nut of this!

--
Hongpong.com

HongPong April 8, 2009 - 1:53am

Africa instead of being a bunch of small independent

countries should have combined like the EU did. Nationalism is killing Africa--development into a more modern society would have been quicker had their organizational abilities been keener. Economies would have grown instead of floundering. Economics do turn failing states into sustainable countries. Money does make the world revolve. Sadly, those with it prosper, those without do not. Populations living on low wages or none spells DOOM! The only road Africa or any other country needs to take is the one that increases their individual and collective supply of money; it also needs managing efficiently, not hoarded or kept in too few hands.

canuck April 8, 2009 - 9:10am

Nationalism is killing Africa -- umm maybe not

Actually I believe its Tribalism. There are few unified multi-tribe, nations in Africa. Ibos & Euoba, Zulus and Tswana and Sothos, and.., Matabele abd Shona, Tutsi and Hutu...

And the culture, My Family, My Group, My Tribe, in more or less that order. My nation hardly exists.

I wrote an essay on this while in high school, my commnets were quite sharp (based on living in Africa), and so was my punishment based on what people in England wanted to believe. This before the Biafra War, the Rwanda war in the early '70s, and most of the wars in the Congo.

African unity will happen well after the Arabs to the North show how it's done.

Synoia April 8, 2009 - 5:58pm

Synoia, Agree

that tribalism, is more accurate in the case of Africa--lack of centrality and not being able to put aside differences. The EU did manage to overcome individual, nationalistic barriers and act as a single economic power. It remains to be seen whether the coalition of nations experiment succeeds over the long term. Many different languages, religions, and cultures are represented. The selection of a common currency had to be a major stumbling block.

canuck April 9, 2009 - 2:50pm

U.N. Congo envoy appeals to Council for choppers

09 Apr 2009 23:10:38 GMT

By Patrick Worsnip

UNITED NATIONS, April 9 (Reuters) - The top U.N. official in Congo complained to the Security Council on Thursday that a continued shortage of helicopters would hamper the ability of peacekeepers to protect civilians in the violence-torn nation.

Alan Doss, special U.N. envoy to the Democratic Republic of Congo, said continuing threats to civilians in the east of the country underlined the importance of a reinforcement to the peacekeeping mission agreed by the council last year.

In response to renewed fighting in the area, the council in November approved a temporary increase of 3,000 troops and police in the mission, known as MONUC, to 20,000. It is already the world's largest U.N. force.

Doss told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday that none of the peacekeepers and military hardware he had requested had so far arrived. Bangladesh and Egypt have offered units.

Speaking to the council on Thursday, Doss welcomed the promised reinforcement, but added that "regrettably ... other critically important capacities are not yet in sight."

"Without the additional 18 helicopters required for rapid deployment and reaction, MONUC's capacity to respond rapidly to emerging threats and to protect civilian populations will be curtailed," he added.

The force's ability to support the Congolese national army, as required by its mandate, would also be "seriously constrained," Doss said.

SPECIAL FORCES

In addition to regular troops, Doss has asked for special forces and intelligence specialists to help MONUC root out rebels across eastern Congo, an area the size of France.

A lack of helicopters, and the specialists needed to operate them, has also hampered U.N. peacekeeping operations elsewhere, notably in the western Sudanese region of Darfur.

_{Seven days til freedom, woohoo!}

Tina April 9, 2009 - 9:27pm

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We're All Raping the Congo, One Cell Phone Call at a Time

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