George Monbiot wrote in the
Guardian this morning that "it is hard to find anyone who gives a damn about the Congo."
According to the CIA, a little over 58 million people live in the DCR and the average life expectancy is just under 50 years. Odds are, it just got a little bit lower last Sunday.
George Monbiot writes that the civil war that has already claimed 3.8 million lives began again on Sunday. He writes:
The Rwandan army appears to have crossed back into north-eastern DCR. Rival factions of the Congolese army - some of them loyal to Rwanda - have started fighting each other. As usual, it's the civilians who are being killed - and raped and tortured and forced to flee into the forest. Last week, before the fighting resumed, the International Rescue Committee reported that over 1,000 people a day are still dying from disease and malnutrition caused by the last conflict. Nearly half of them are children under five.
Why is this happening? Well, put on your best Marilyn Monroe pout and sing along with me, "A kiss on the hand may be quite continental, but diamonds are a girl's best friend." Diamonds and coltan in this case. Monbiot reports that by 1999 "80% of the Rwandan military budget - around $320m a year - was coming from minerals stolen from the DCR."
Civilians have been forced to work in mines and women in particular have been forced to work as prostitutes. He cites reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the U.S. State Department among others, as documenting that
troops have repeatedly raped children as young as three; have sliced off the genitals of women who resist being raped; have forced women and children to work in terrifying conditions in the mines: scores have been buried alive. They have torched villages, looted homes, killed those who resist or those who appear to have helped the other side, and forced millions to flee into the jungle
Please don't be too shocked. Don't say `Oh my God, how terrible. I had no idea this was happening.' In isolation, that burst of feeling does nothing but make its owner feel virtuously compassionate. It is a soporific. This is just business as usual - it has been happening for the last few years and doubtless it continues to happen right now. But tomorrow you and I will go about our business as usual, unscathed. Perhaps on our lunch-hour, some of us will even pause to look in the window of a jewellery store and admire those glittering stones for a moment as we absently check our mobiles for new messages.
So, where do all those diamonds and coltan end up going? And what's coltan when it's at home?
According to a 2002 B.B.C report the DCR has 80% of the world's reserves of coltan . It's used to make pinhead capacitors that are used in mobile phones to regulate voltage and preserve energy. Globalissues.org put out an interesting article on the topic in 2001. It highlights the difficulties of tracing the origins of coltan shipments, but suggests that companies implicated in trading coltan from the Congo (whether directly or indirectly via neighbouring countries) then included Sabena Airlines (a Belgian airline company - just to remind us all that empires cast long shadows) and American Airlines. They shipped coltran to H.C. Starck and Coban (CBT) which in turn supplied "Alcatel (ALA), Compaq, Dell, Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard (HWP), IBM, Lucent, Motorola (MOT), Nokia and Solectron (SLR)" as well as AMD and INTEL. (It's worth noting that this info is from 2001 (so far I've failed to find more recent info - if you have got some please share it) and that some companies - in particular Ericsson, Motorola and HP may have taken steps since to ensure they are not taking coltran from the Congo. I still need to do more digging on this.
So how about those diamonds? Here's a fairly dense, more recent article on diamond concessions and sales in the DCR that's worth a look. To sum up, the main companies mining industrial diamonds are MIBA and Segamines (another Belgian company - and I think it safe to say that their involvement is again a legacy of empire). In 2002
a U.N. Security Council report named and shamed a wide array of companies implicated in the blood diamond and coltan trade (check out Annex 3 of the report). Culprits included Barclays, De Beers, and a plethora of others.
In any case, things look pretty bleak. Coltan and diamonds flow from the DRC to wealthy countries. Capital and arms flow from these countries to the militaries that control the DCR's mineral resources. And the blood just keeps on flowing too, thick and fast.