272 - The Killing Fields of the Congo: Another Horrendous Humanitarian Tragedy
Rebels and Mineral Spoils
Two days ago, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a hitherto little known local militia killed dozens of villagers. The attack occurred in Ituri Province, across the border from Uganda. This was neither the first nor the last atrocity in a part of Africa that is relentlessly falling apart. Warlord-led armed gangs have for several years mercilessly been attacking innocent rural-dwelling Congolese in Ituri and the neighboring provinces of North and South Kivu. At least 350,000 eastern Congolese civilians have lost their homes this year already and joined the ranks of displaced and unsheltered. Moreover, throughout the entire Congo – Africa’s second largest nation -- a staggering 23.4 million Congolese suffer from severe hunger, making the Congo the world’s most food insecure country.
The World Food Program says that the Congo’s hunger crises combine with raging violence against villagers to make the eastern Congo a region of immense risk and suffering. Across the entire Congo, 6.4 million people have fled their homes in the last decade. Since last October, the World Food Program says that 720,000 people were displaced and lost their livelihoods in North Kivu alone. It further estimates that nearly 3 million children in the region are acutely malnourished. Cholera is rife, too, and epidemics of Ebola recur.
The Cooperative for the Development of the Congo (CODECO) perpetrated the latest massacre in the eastern Congo but the Islamic State-affiliated Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) and the March 23 or M23 movement have for several years been responsible for innumerable fatalities in Ituri and North and South Kivu.
“Most of the victims [attacked by CODECO] were killed with machetes, but those who tried to flee were shot. In all these villages, people's belongings were taken, houses were burnt down," said Vital Tungulo, president of a Djugu community that was destroyed. (CODECO is a loose grouping of ethnically Lendu militias, united mostly for plunder.)
Several times earlier in June, the ADF machine-gunned three different villages in North Kivu Province, killing at least eighty hapless dwellers caught up in the civil strife. ADF affiliates itself to the Islamic State in West Africa; it also claims ties to the youthful Islamist insurgency in northern Mozambique. But exactly what that attachment to the Islamic State involves is unclear; there is little evidence of funding or training arriving either from West Africa or from the Islamic State in Syria or Afghanistan. However, the ADF appears to have initially established itself as a Muslim grouping opposed to the government of Uganda before retreating into the Congo, and seeking spoils ever since.
M23’s origins are more evident, starting about five years ago as a Tutsi offshoot of the government of Rwanda. It has since been menacing villagers in North Kivu, going as far as surrounding the major Congolese city of Goma, on Lake Kivu across from Rwanda. M23 threatened at one point earlier this year to capture Goma from both the UN peacekeeping forces that theoretically protect the city and from the army of the Congo which – again theoretically – is still lamely trying to exert control in the Kivus and Ituri.
A recent UN report suggests strongly that the official Congolese army has been selling weapons and ammunition to the eastern Congolese rebels. It implicates army leaders in the smuggling of cocoa from Uganda and blames officers and troops with an epidemic of sexual violence that “could amount to war crimes.”
M23 is also accused of being a Rwandan proxy and a purposeful destabilizer of the region. M23 is suspected of being established and funded by President Paul Kagame of Rwanda. It is Tutsi-led, as is Rwanda, and – originally at least – was established by Kagame to oppose former Hutu who had fled Rwanda and opposed Kagame from bases in the Kivus. Kagame is known for using such proxy forces to extend the reach of his autocratic rule into the neighboring Congo.
Four days ago, the M23 bombed a village in North Kivu, killing dozens. Together with the CODECO assaults and the continued ADF attacks, the 22 million people of the three most affected eastern Congo provinces are never far from danger. (About 105 million people live in the entire country.) Indeed, in addition to those three warlording gangs, another 117 or so rebel groups also operate in the three provinces.
These all could be considered inter-ethnic conflicts but, in reality, they are expressions of brutal competition for power and authority in a part of the Congo (1,650 miles from Kinshasa, the nation’s capital near the Atlantic Coast) that has been plagued with warlord-perpetrated battles for several decades, or more. The national government has not been able to extend its authority to this distant region since at least 1997.
But the region’s internal rivalries became even more desperate and deadly when a range of minerals found in the eastern Congo proved valuable for electronic equipment like mobile telephones and stealth aircraft. One is coltan — tantalite and columbite, combined — essential for the manufacture of hand-held devices. When refined, coltan becomes a heat resistant powder, metallic tantalum, which has the unique ability to store electrical charge. It is found in every mobile telephone and laptop and in sophisticated modern aircraft and automobiles.
The Kivus and Ituri also hold deposits of cobalt - critical for making of lithium batteries -- copper, tin, tungsten, and – hardly least – gold. Artisanal mining unearths coltan and these other extremely valuable resources. The contending rebel movements would hardly exist if rewards from controlling such mineral resources were not so immensely rewarding. CODECO, the ADF, and M23 effectively exist to grab those products from hard-scrabbing local miners who want the profits for themselves. The endless killings -- perhaps 14,000 this year alone -- are collateral damage of these many local battles.
How best to stop the carnage in the eastern Congo? The UN peacekeeping mission has tried. So has the official national army and, for months last year, so did an East African military force led by Kenya. UN representatives wring their hands. Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi visited last week and failed to find a path to peace.
What has not been tried in an enforceable manner so far is the cutting off of markets (in Rwanda and the United Arab Emirates) from the mineral sales that fund the rebel movements. Tight export controls at Congolese border crossings and the exclusion of the kinds of wildcat mineral purchasing that now occurs would be essential. By starving the warlords of their profits, peace might have a better chance.
This is of course brilliant, so well-informed and utterly frightening. Sadly, all too few are taking note of this and so many other obscure conflicts that do not make the evening news or p. 1 of Western media...take Sudan, for instance, where an unparalleled civil war has already cost in excess of 150,000 lives !