Marcus Bleasdale

Paradoxically, the people living in the mineral-rich mining towns of Eastern Congo are some of the worst off: after successive waves of fighting and seven years of war, there are no hospitals, roads, or any NGO or UN presence at all. It is simply too dangerous to work there. The gold-mining town of Mongbwalu, about 100 miles northeast of Bunia and not far from the Ugandan border has been the site of some of the war’s worst atrocities. Congo’s rebels spurred on by Uganda and Rwanda, who use the cover of “ethnic” conflict to pillage resources, have battled for control of the town’s goldmines, using terror to drive local residents from the homes. The fighting between the Hema and Lendu – two warring ethnic groups whose so-called differences date back to distinctions made by colonialists – has caused hundreds of thousands to flee the town. Several years ago, at a roundabout in town, a rebel commander reportedly ordered a man to be cooked and ate his heart in front of a crowd commanded to watch. In 2003, two United Nations peacekeepers were killed there despite their repeated pleas to leave the town. Now, the town is virtually a no-go zone, abandoned by the UN and visited only by a local NGO. Mongbwalu is currently under the control of the same rebel group who are reportedly responsible for the murder of the peacekeepers. Recently, Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID), an NGO that monitors the role of multinational companies, particularly in Africa, released a report on the ongoing illegal exploitation of Congo’s natural resources. Despite a UN Panel that has, since 2001, named some of the worst offenders in Eastern Congo, multinational companies continue to benefit from Congo’s war. There has been a tremendous cover-up going on, and the activities that the UN panel expressed concern about are still going on; so is the conflict. Some companies that have decided to pull out and have shown letters from senior Rwandan government officials, saying that they would have to fund the Rwandan army to pursue their objectives. There are also allegations that one of the companies has sheltered rebel leaders after a recent uprising. Researchers and Human Rights groups state that there’s very little doubt and you cannot operate in these areas without political and military protection. What tends to happen is not big brand name companies, but intermediaries are there as fronts and a means of securing minerals. Among the companies RAID has named as benefiting from the ongoing conflict: De Beers, Avient, Alfred Knight and the list goes on. In 2004, according to RAID, an Australian-Canadian Mining named Anvil helped to fly Congolese troops into the town of Kilwa to quell a small-scale rebellion. Once there, an Anvil manager told RAID, the company supplied the army vehicles to move around the town. 100 people were killed; 30 were summarily executed and reportedly buried in shallow graves. That reported massacre is one tenth of one day’s violence in Eastern Congo. Mining in conflict zones causes irreparable damage to the make-up of society. Cholera, malaria, and hemorrhagic fever all occur in mining areas with statistical regularity, killing in greater numbers than the conflicts themselves. In Democratic Republic of Congo the inaccessibility of the majority of mining zones and the reluctance of international agencies to work in these areas extend the devastating nature of these maladies to epidemic proportions. Thousands, mostly children and women, die as a result of a lack of health care or sanitation. These mining areas deprive villages of their agricultural basis as most villagers prefer to mine rather than commit to relatively low agricultural returns, but they also fuel disease and death through lower standards of health care and sanitation. It is these conflicts that are the real killer, not through the use of a machete or AK47, but through the more fundamental breakdown of the very social structure of African societies.