Focus: Strategic Objectives
Somebody once asked John Dillinger why he robbed banks. Dillinger explained carefully, as if talking to a small child or a mentally challenged adult, “Because that’s where the money is.”
Since 1998 a bloody war has ravaged the eastern Congolese province of North Kivu. The next time someone asks you why, look them in the eye and explain carefully, “Because that’s where the coltan is.”
Not just coltan. There’s cassiterite there as well, and of course the ever-popular gold and diamonds. The Rwandan government will tell you that Hutu murderers, fresh from the genocidal massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda, fled across the border to Congo, which is true. They will then tell you the subsequent fighting, first by the Rwandan Army, and now by Laurent Nkunda and his rebel militia (Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple or CNDP), was simply an effort to hunt down and contain the Hutus, and protect the local Tutsi population.
The problem with that version of history is that the original Rwandan invasion of Congo in 1998 pretty much ignored the Hutu guerrillas and made a beeline for the eastern Congolese mines. What was so important about those mines? Coltan.
Coltan is a rare mineral extremely useful in building solid-state compact electronics – cell phones and laptops in particular. Eleven years ago there was an explosion of global demand for cell phones and laptops; the price of coltan went through the roof, and people started dying in the eastern Congo at the rate of over 40,000 a month. The war has been raging, off and on, since 1998, and as of January of 2008, 5.4 million people had died.
Five-point-four million.
That makes it, in human terms, the most costly war since World War II.
It started with a resource grab. But haven’t local ethnic and religious differences spiraled out of control, making the war escalate, the conflict increasingly tied up with tribal vengeance and regional hatreds?
Nope. It’s still pretty much just about raw materials, 18 of them to be precise: bauxite, cadmium, cassiterite, coal, cobalt, copper, coltan, diamonds, gas, gold, iron ore, lead, manganese, oil, silver, timber, uranium, and zinc. Eastern Congo has them and the industrialized world is hungry for them.
François Grignon, Africa Director of the International Crisis Group, says, “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.”
The price of coltan has recently dropped, but cassiterite (a tin ore used in disposable cans), is still in demand. Although there are international agreements in place restricting the traffic in “blood diamonds,” not many folks are talking about blood coltan or blood cassiterite.
So here we have one of the poorest regions on the globe, but sitting on minerals which have suddenly become useful to the industrialized world. The industrialized world’s response is to pay hard currency for the resources and ask no questions as to their origins-you know, global free markets. And when people start dying there by the millions, the industrialized world clucks it tongue, shakes its head, and asks-probably by cell phone or email-”What’s wrong with Africa?”
What, indeed?
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