Abstract
Globalization has increased both the supply and demand of international products and services, but it has had severe consequences on several nations that are particularly rich in natural resources. The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of these nations, in which the extremely high global demand for coltan, a mineral used for the manufacturing of electronic devices, has augmented the national conflict among the different armed groups and has aggravated the situation by directly or indirectly involving several international actors. Thus, this paper will focus on the dark side of globalization by analyzing the case of coltan trade in relation to the on-going conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is directly worsened by the interference of armed groups from Congo and other neighboring countries such as Rwanda and Uganda, and indirectly intensified by international corporations from industrialized countries that knowingly or unknowingly purchase conflict materials for further processing and distribution outside the DRC.
Introduction
Globalization has enabled the development of a comprehensive net of international trade that not only benefits the private sector by enhancing competition and increasing profit, but also consumers who are now able to purchase a large range of global goods and services that best satisfy their needs and preferences. However, not everything about globalization is good for the international order. Factors like the exploitation of natural resources or the offshoring of companies have particularly negative effects on the least developed countries, and it is precisely in these cases that globalization may only lead to the continuation and even aggravation of an existing conflict.
It is a well-known fact that many African nations are rich in reserves of different minerals such as diamonds, gold, cobalt, or tantalum, but this abundance has never contributed to the economic growth of such countries. On the contrary, the current ‘neo-liberal’ international economic order rather seems to use the pretext of an international market in order to exploit such resources for the benefit of the West.
An example of the eagerness of multinational corporations to make profit regardless of the conditions of the supply chain is the international trade of columbite-tantalite, also known as coltan, whose price has rapidly increased since the mid-2000s as a consequence of shortages in the global supply of tantalum and the increasing demand for the electronics industry (Amnesty International, 2003, p. 31). This growth in the demand of coltan has further intensified the violence and poor economy of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as the eastern regions of the country contain large coltan deposits.
The rise of global prices and the growth of demand led the Congolese—and not only them—to the realization of its economic importance, and thus hundreds of civilians decided to work in the mines despite the poor working conditions and this sector became extremely attractive for armed groups too, which saw a perfect opportunity to gather large amounts of capital that could then be reinvested in war effort.
Thus, this paper will focus on the dark side of globalization by analyzing the case of coltan trade in relation to the on-going conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is directly worsened by the interference of armed groups from Congo and other neighboring countries such as Rwanda and Uganda, and indirectly intensified by international corporations from industrialized countries that knowingly or unknowingly purchase conflict materials for further processing and distribution outside the DRC.
Coltan and Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo
The eastern Congolese provinces of North and South Kivu have been involved in a violent political, economic and ethnic conflict since the late 1990s. After L. Kabila became the President of Zaire in 1997 with the military support of Rwanda and Uganda, the new President decided to expel the Rwandan officers of his own army to regain the complete autonomy of the national armed forces. This attempt at expulsing his former allies led to a Rwandan and Ugandan-backed rebellion that took control of the northern and eastern regions of Zaire—which was newly renamed DRC—while Kabila’s army, supported by the Angolan and Zimbabwean armies, took hold of the southern and western regions (Cuvelier and Marysse, 2003, p. 9). This confrontation would mark the beginning of the Second Congo War, which has often been referred to as the First African World War.
Although the war supposedly ended with the 2002 Pretoria Accord between the Rwandan and Congolese governments, conflict began again in the Kivu region between the armed forces of Congo (FARDC) and several militias that fought both the national army and each other. Despite the peace treaty signed in March 2009, spread along the border between the DRC and Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi, the different guerrillas keep fighting on Congolese soil. These armed groups include the Tsutsi Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP), several local rebel groups like the Mai-Mai, the M23 Movement, the Islamist Allied Democratic Forces, and the Hutu Forces Démocratiques de la Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), responsible for the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
These armed groups have been fighting against each other as well as against the national armies from DRC and Rwanda for decades. The CNDP, originally led by General L. Nkunda, was backed by Rwanda and mainly fought the Congolese national army. The M23 Movement is also composed by Tutsi members and was founded after the CNDP signed a peace treaty with the DRC in 2009. The Mai-Mai are small, local forces claiming to act in self-defense, and have indistinctly allied both with the Congolese army and with the Ugandan and Rwandan troops. The Allied Democratic Forces are considered an Islamist terrorist group originated in Uganda and later expanding to eastern DRC. The FDLR is formed by members of the Hutu ethnicity, considered ‘enemies’ of the Tutsi, with many former Interahamwe members, the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 in which they killed up to one million Tutsi, Twa, and members of other ethnicities.
According to a report by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (2018), the conflict in the DRC has caused more than 13 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, around 5 million internally displaced people, and around 2 million children under five affected by severe malnutrition. Although some reports claim that the death toll since the beginning of the conflict lay at 5.4 million in 2008 (International Rescue Committee, 2007, p. 16), it is quite impossible to provide a trustworthy figure on real mortality rates caused by the conflict. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that the on-going war has created a huge humanitarian crisis that has only been aggravated by several outbreaks of Ebola, which as of June 2019 has been fatal for at least 1,479 people out of the 2,204 reported cases (World Health Organization, 2019).
Sexual and gender-based violence has been a predominant feature of the conflict in DRC. In the context of war, soldiers of any armed group may use rape as a weapon of genocide, as a weapon of humiliation for their enemies (Bourke, 2014, p. 20). In a report released in 2010, the UN estimated that around 200,000 women and girls had been sexually assaulted since 1998, and that “more than a third of these rapes [had] occurred in North and South Kivu provinces” (Kelly, 2010, p. 2). It is no surprise that the increase of rape in the DRC has also led to an increase of the prevalence of AIDS/HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. According to a report by the United States Institute of Peace (2001, p. 5), 60% of regular troops and militia men in the DRC are infected with HIV/AIDS, which is poorly treated once contracted due to the scarcity and high cost of an adequate treatment because of the almost non-existent prevention campaigns (Human Rights Watch, 2002, p. 71). Nowadays, around 400,000 people of all ages live with HIV/AIDS in the DRC (UNAIDS, 2019).
Apart from the political and ethnic issues leading to decades of armed conflict, one of the main causes of this endless war is the race towards the control of minerals such as coltan. Coltan is a highly resistant material that has gained much popularity in the last decades due to its suitability for smartphones, tablets, and other devices that require a capacitor to store electrical energy in an electronic field (The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, 2013, p. 15). Although there are some alternatives such as aluminum, ceramic, or film, none offers the capacitance, the stability, the size and the reliability that coltan does (Hayes and Burge, 2003, p. 24).
It is no coincidence that the epicenter of the conflict is located precisely in the eastern Congolese provinces of North and South Kivu, as they contain large deposits of coltan where mining activities have intensified since the mid-2000s. Similar to other developing countries, the mining system in Congo is based on artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) which turns out fundamental for up to 10 million people or 16% of the population, either because these people work as miners or because their livelihood depends on mining (World Bank, 2008, p. 7). Instead of receiving a fixed salary, however, most mines work as a barter economy in which miners retain a fixed percentage of the coltan they produce (The Hague Centre, 2013, p. 52), thus coltan replaces money in most economic transactions.
The ‘discovery’ of the economic importance of coltan mines led rural young men and boys to organize the work in these artisanal mining activities despite the dangers linked to the mining activity itself and those linked to power-thirsty militias (Mantz, 2008, p. 43).
However, the vast majority of coltan mines are controlled by armed groups like the Mai-Mai as well as by units of the Congolese army (FARDC). While paramilitary groups try to seize control of the mines to finance their activities, formal army units receive such low monetary incentives (Bleischwitz, Dittrich and Pierdicca, 2012, p. 7) that they also turn to illicit activities that would increase their income.
Apart from the mines being controlled by armed groups, militias like the CNDP and the FDLR impose roadblocks that are supposed to protect the civilians from insurgents, but in reality they serve mainly as checkpoints for robbery and extortion (Amnesty International, 2003, p. 17). For example, the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD), supported by the Rwandan and Ugandan governments, is known to have established a series of roadblocks between the towns of Mumba and Goma, that is, between the mine and the town where coltan is to be sold. The workers of the mine, who are often also responsible for the transport of the material from one place to the other, are then forced to sell coltan at reduced prices to army commanders or they might be even forced to surrender the goods (Amnesty International, 2003, p. 17).
The trade of coltan thus follows very complex channels that make the process extremely non-transparent. It may be sold to comptoirs or traders in border towns who usually work with the militias (Mantz, 2008, p. 42), or it may be illegally exported directly to Rwanda or other Central African nations. Once the coltan gets to the hands of armed groups, it will be sold to foreign refineries who will in turn sell the raw material to countries like the United States, Japan, or Europe (Mantz, 2008, p. 42).
Rwanda is the preferred route for the illegal trade of minerals like coltan for several reasons. Firstly, as opposed to the taxes imposed by the Congolese government for official exports of coltan, Rwanda does not tax exports of this material. Secondly, national law establishes that imported goods may be declared Rwandan products if they undergo further processing adding 30% to their value (The Hague Centre, 2013, p. 51). Thus, it is likely that most of the exported ore from Rwanda is of Congolese origin, but it is almost impossible to know whether it was imported legally or illegally in the first place.
Despite the war, the control of coltan mines by armed groups is extremely strategic because mining, unlike many other sectors like agriculture or manufacturing, is resilient to war. In particular, artisanal mining does not depend on sophisticated technologies or large investments that would disrupt the industry during wartime. In addition, it is not easy to destroy an entire mine in comparison to, say, crops or animals, and the geographic concentration of coltan mines in eastern Congo also allows for easier and more effective control (The Hague Centre, 2013, p. 66). Thus, the illicit trade of minerals is the most lucrative business for armed groups, which will control, smuggle, and sell coltan in exchange for money (or possibly weapons) that will then be used for their own military operations.
According to a report by a Panel of Experts of the UN Security Council (2001), there has been a “systematic and systemic exploitation” of natural resources carried out not only by Rwandan and Ugandan occupying forces, but also by the emergence of illegal networks within the Congolese government structures. As a matter of fact, the weakness of Congolese institutions often leads government officials and leaders of the military to get involved in corruption activities, therefore many different actors benefit from the current situation. There is no will nor incentive to change the system from within: “it is a self-perpetuating lock-in situation within a fragile state” (Bleischwitz, Dittrich and Pierdicca, 2012, p. 7).
Besides violence and corruption, exploitation of coltan mines by armed forces presents other unacceptable problems that still continue every day, including but not limited to child labor, poor labor conditions or even forced labor, and environmental degradation, as thousands of elephants and gorillas are killed to feed the workers of mining camps, who are provided Kalashnikov rifles to hunt wild animals (Hayes and Burge, 2003, p. 35).
The Role of International Corporations and Developed Countries in the Conflict in the DRC
The DRC contains roughly all the elements of the periodic table, materials which are worth around $24 trillion or the combined GDP of Europe and the U.S. However, “an estimated $6 million in resources leaves [the DRC] every day” (Carpenter, 2012, p. 5). Thus, due to the constant plundering by third countries, the DRC is today one of the poorest countries of the world.
The UN report S/2001/357 (2001) identified coltan mining as a source of funding for armed groups and referred to multinational corporations as the “engine of the conflict in the DRC”. In fact, although war might have begun due to political and ethnic issues, its perpetuation and continuation is only a matter of economic interests of the different Central African governments involved, the several armed groups that exploit and export coltan, and the private entities that import, refine, process and sell coltan or coltan-related products.
As it has been mentioned above, most of the Rwandan exports of coltan are directly imported from Congolese mines. This raw material will then be purchased by e.g. Kazakh, German and U.S. processing companies, and it will then be sold to German, Chinese and U.S. electronics companies which will finally sell coltan-containing products to the global public. Thus, even though most countries do not directly import or process coltan from the DRC, consumers in those countries will likely use products containing it (Moran et al., 2014, p. 5).
The problem of conflict materials like coltan, though, is that they reach the international market unnoticed. The intentional lack of transparency of the supply chain bypasses any certification process that could possibly allow to trace the end-product back to the mine (Montague, 2002, p. 105). While other conflict minerals like diamond require certification processes under international law, coltan does not, and thus it is extremely easy for transnational corporations to simply deny any alleged agreements with rebel groups or to feign ignorance over its origin (Carpenter, 2012, p. 10).
After several investigations conducted by NGOs and the UN, different organizations and companies launched a series of initiatives to reduce and eventually eliminate imports of coltan coming from the DRC. However, most of these are of a non-binding nature and thus do not impose any obligations on the actors involved. For instance, the UN Security Council resolution S/RES/1952 of 2010 “recommends that all States, particularly those in the region, regularly publish full import and export statistics for natural resources including gold, cassiterite, coltan, wolframite, timber, and charcoal and enhance information sharing and joint action at the regional level to investigate and combat regional criminal networks and armed groups involved in the illegal exploitation of natural resources”.
Another initiative was proposed by the G8 Summit in Heiligendamm with the introduction of a geochemical method called ‘analytical fingerprinting’, a tool which is capable of identifying the origin of tantalum ore concentrates (Melcher et al., 2008, p. 617).
The OECD (2016) has also developed a five-step approach to ensure the protection of human rights by coltan-related companies through a Due Diligence Guidance including recommendations on the implementation of such requirements, which apply to all mineral supply chains.
Other initiatives like the Dodd-Frank Act implemented by B. Obama in 2010, the World Bank’s EITI++ of 2008 or the disposition of some tantalum manufacturing companies such as Kemet and Cabot Corporation to demand their suppliers to certify that the purchased mineral does not originate from the eastern regions of the DRC (Montague, 2002, p. 117), may help enhance transparency and gradually remove financial incentives for rebel groups smuggling and exporting coltan.
The only way to prevent armed groups from taking advantage of the Congolese resources while constantly violating several human rights is to completely cut the flow of illegally exported coltan into the international market. However, this is neither in the interest of the rebels nor in that of multinational corporations: coltan means money, and although everyone, everywhere, denies to be trading with blood-stained coltan, everyone, everywhere, is.
Conclusions
It is a well-known fact that the ‘first world’ would not exist without a ‘third world’, and the main economic actors are well aware of this. It is in their best interest to defend an international free trade system that unfortunately resembles the times of colonialism. It is hard to determine whether the failure of some former colonies to establish a democratic State derives from their inability to fairly manage their richness in resources or whether this failure is a direct consequence of Western intervention.
The post-Cold War international system, based on a clear Western narrative, has left no room for post-colonial countries to develop by themselves. The political, economic and even military intervention of Western states constantly interferes with the national economies and intensifies all possible conflicts that, like in the case of the DRC, often start with growing tensions between the many different cultures and ethnicities that were ‘forced’ to coexist within a new country whose borders were artificially drafted by the former colonialists.
The different economic alliances between multinational corporations and rebels are hard to pinpoint, but it is obvious that coltan still moves large amounts of capital as the demand for electronic goods keeps growing and growing all over the world. Hence, it is quite unlikely that the conflict in the DRC will end any time soon.
The huge humanitarian emergency that has been going on since 1998, which some claim is the deadliest conflict since World War II (Carpenter, 2012, p. 16), is still today extremely under-reported by mainstream media, and exact figures of death rates and coltan exports are practically impossible to be found probably as a consequence of the great power of large enterprises, which are not interested in disclosing this information to the public.
Despite the efforts and initiatives of the private sector as well as those of international organizations and States, coltan will still be an extremely lucrative business as long as electronic devices conform such an important part of our every-day lives. Globalization and free trade might be beneficial for the Western side of the coin, but it is lethal for the other side, the one we cannot see or choose not to see, like the dark side of the moon.
While we, as consumers living in the fortunate side, have now developed a new limb called cellphone, hundreds of thousands of innocent people are being killed, raped, subject to forced labor, forced to leave what they once might have called home. And as this happens, those who set the rules of the game, like always, fill their pockets with blood-tainted money and pretend to ignore the atrocities that they have consented and even amplified. It is not enough to point at armed groups as the only cause of these crimes. Multinational corporations and the West are as responsible for this massacre as rebels are, because as long as coltan keeps being exchanged for financial assets and arms, the flame of violence will be kept alive.
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