What is rarely mentioned is the great global heist of Congo's resources
Thursday, 30 October 2008
.
The deadliest war since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe is starting
again - and you are almost certainly carrying a blood-soaked chunk of the
slaughter in your pocket. When we glance at the holocaust in Congo, with 5.4
million dead, the clichés of Africa reporting tumble out: this is a "tribal
conflict" in "the Heart of Darkness". It isn't. The United Nations
investigation found it was a war led by "armies of business" to seize the
metals that make our 21st-century society zing and blink. The war in
Congo is a war about you.
Every day I think about the people I met in the war zones of eastern
Congo when I reported from there. The wards were filled with women who had been
gang-raped by the militias and shot in the vagina. The battalions of child
soldiers - drugged, dazed 13-year-olds who had been made to kill members of
their own families so they couldn't try to escape and go home. But oddly, as I
watch the war starting again on CNN, I find myself thinking about a woman I met
who had, by Congolese standards, not suffered in extremis.
I was driving back to Goma from a diamond mine one day when my car got a
puncture. As I waited for it to be fixed, I stood by the roadside and watched
the great trails of women who stagger along every road in eastern Congo,
carrying all their belongings on their backs in mighty crippling heaps. I
stopped a 27 -year-old woman called Marie-Jean Bisimwa, who had four little
children toddling along beside her. She told me she was lucky.
Yes, her village had been burned out. Yes, she had lost her husband
somewhere in the chaos. Yes, her sister had been raped and gone insane. But she
and her kids were alive.
I gave her a lift, and it was only after a few hours of chat along on
cratered roads that I noticed there was something strange about Marie-Jean's
children. They were slumped forward, their gazes fixed in front of them.
They didn't look around, or speak, or smile. "I haven't ever been able to
feed them," she said. "Because of the war."
Their brains hadn't developed; they never would now. "Will they get
better?" she asked. I left her in a village on the outskirts of Goma, and her
kids stumbled after her, expressionless.
There are two stories about how this war began - the official story, and
the true story. The official story is that after the Rwandan genocide, the Hutu
mass murderers fled across the border into Congo. The Rwandan government chased
after them. But it's a lie. How do we know? The Rwandan government didn't go to
where the Hutu genocidaires were, at least not at first. They went to where
Congo's natural resources were - and began to pillage them. They even told
their troops to work with any Hutus they came across. Congo is the richest
country in the world for gold, diamonds, coltan, cassiterite, and more.
Everybody wanted a slice - so six other countries invaded.
These resources were not being stolen to for use in Africa. They were
seized so they could be sold on to us. The more we bought, the more the
invaders stole - and slaughtered. The rise of mobile phones caused a surge in
deaths, because the coltan they contain is found primarily in Congo. The UN
named the international corporations it believed were involved: Anglo-America,
Standard Chartered Bank, De Beers and more than 100 others. (They all deny the
charges.) But instead of stopping these corporations, our governments demanded
that the UN stop criticizing them.
There were times when the fighting flagged. In 2003, the UN finally
brokered a peace deal and the international armies withdrew. Many continued to
work via proxy militias - but the carnage waned somewhat. Until now.
As with the first war, there is a cover story, and the truth. A Congolese
militia leader called Laurent Nkunda - backed by Rwanda - claims he needs to
protect the local Tutsi population from the same Hutu genocidaires who have
been hiding out in the jungles of eastern Congo since 1994. That's why he is
seizing Congolese military bases and is poised to march on Goma.
It is a lie. François Grignon, Africa Director of the International
Crisis Group, tells me the truth: "Nkunda is being funded by Rwandan
businessmen so they can retain control of the mines in North Kivu. This is the
absolute core of the conflict. What we are seeing now is beneficiaries of the
illegal war economy fighting to maintain their right to exploit."
At the moment, Rwandan business interests make a fortune from the mines
they
illegally seized during the war. The global coltan price has collapsed,
so now they focus hungrily on cassiterite, which is used to make tin cans and
other consumer disposables. As the war began to wane, they faced losing their
control to the elected Congolese government - so they have given it another
bloody kick-start.
Yet the debate about Congo in the West - when it exists at all - focuses
on our inability to provide a decent bandage, without mentioning that we are
causing the wound. It's true the 17,000 UN forces in the country are abysmally
failing to protect the civilian population, and urgently need to be
super-charged. But it is even more important to stop fuelling the war in the
first place by buying blood-soaked natural resources. Nkunda only has enough
guns and grenades to take on the Congolese army and the UN because we
buy his loot. We need to prosecute the corporations buying them for
abetting crimes against humanity, and introduce a global coltan-tax to pay for
a substantial peacekeeping force. To get there, we need to build an
international system that values the lives of black people more than it values
profit.
Somewhere out there - lost in the great global heist of Congo's resources
- are Marie-Jean and her children, limping along the road once more, carrying
everything they own on their backs. They will probably never use a
coltan-filled mobile phone, a cassiterite-smelted can of beans, or a gold
necklace, but they may yet die for one.
Johann Hari
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
The Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy"
Groupe de communication Mulindwas
"avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie"_______________________________________________
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