Digging for Survival: The Impact of Natural Resource Exploitation on the
Organization and Functioning of Armed Groups
by Alexandra den Hond
University of Amsterdam
Supervisors: Ram Manikkalingam and Fleur Ravensbergen
Master Track Politicologie: Internationale Betrekkingen, 2015
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 – Theoretical Framework
1.1 - Collier and Hoeffler: Greed and Grievance
1.2 - Vinci: Power and survival
1.3 - Fearon and Laitin: the requirement of feasibility
1.4 - Implications for this paper
Chapter 2 – Armed Groups and the DRC: a Brief History Chapter 3 – Conflict Resources
3.1 - The challenges of conflict resource research
3.2 - Coltan in the DRC
3.3 - Corporate responsibility and certification schemes Chapter 4 – Armed Group Organizational Structures: the FDLR
4.1 - Leadership
4.2 - Resources 4.3 - Establishment 4.4 - Safe haven
4.5 - Regional network and diaspora
Chapter 5 – The Impact of Natural Resource Extraction on Armed Group Behaviour
5.1 - Natural resource exploitation 5.2 - Strategic alliances
5.3 - Entering negotiations to stave off attacks 5.4 - Manipulation of the civilian population
Conclusion Bibliography 3 5 5 9 11 13 15 22 22 23 27 30 33 35 37 38 39 42 42 45 48 52 54 56
Introduction
Natural resources have played a role in conflicts and systematic human rights violations around the world. From the trade in illegal timber under the Khmer Rouge, to blood diamonds in Sierra Leone and Angola, to Taliban opium and ISIL oil, armed movements have seized upon opportunities to derive profits from local resources. A source of revenue is absolutely essential for any armed group to sustain itself long enough and carry out the activities required to pursue its objectives, be these purely economic or driven by politics or ideology. It is therefore not surprising that parties in a wide variety of conflicts have seized on available natural resources to enhance their chances of success, and that conflict resources have consequently been of interest to IR scholars who seek to understand the dynamics of armed conflict. While a significant body of work exists on the topic, there appears to be a vacuum in terms of the role of natural resources in the practical functioning of the armed groups who exploit them, leaving unanswered questions such as: how do armed groups organize to facilitate natural resource exploitation, and how does access to these resources influence armed group behaviour?
To answer these questions this paper will focus on the provinces of North and South Kivu in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Although, as has been mentioned, natural resource exploitation by armed groups occurs – or has occurred – in many past and ongoing conflicts, the DRC makes for an especially compelling case study because its north-east is extraordinarily rich in natural resources, from gold, diamonds and coltan to timber, charcoal and wildlife; the region has been rife with a proliferation of armed groups virtually from the dawn of the DRC's existence as an independent state, causing enduring instability, displacement and exposing civilians to a range of atrocities. The focus will of this paper will be specifically on the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda, one of the DRC's most institutionalized armed groups, which has derived a crucial portion of its income from natural resource exploitation throughout the fifteen years of its existence. Although, due to the constraints inherent in studying illegal activity carried out in a remote area, reliable statistics and primary sources are lacking, a wealth of
qualitative information on conflict resources in general and the FDLR in particular is provided by the bi-annual reports of the UN Security Council-mandated Group of Experts, which has been reporting on the conflict in the DRC since 2004. Through surveying the FDLR's activities over the years, this paper will discern the group's organizational characteristics and the strategic behaviour it has displayed in times of on-going military operations and in times of relative peace to facilitate its economic activities.
and Hoeffler's greed-grievance model in conjunction with Vinci's power-survival model, as greed and grievance can both be said to be in service of the ultimate goal of survival. In addition, Fearon and Laitin's notion of “feasibility” will be employed, as the presence of exploitable natural
1 – Theoretical Framework
There exists a wide array of theoretical scholarship that has been meaningfully applied to the functioning of armed groups and the role of natural resources in their activities. This paper will draw on the work of a number of authors to provide a framework of analysis for the scope of this paper. Primarily, this paper will be based on Collier and Hoeffler's “Greed and Grievance”-model in combination with Anthony Vinci's “Power and survival” model, holding that while armed groups' ultimate pursuit will be its own survival (which is the foundation of any other activities a group may undertake), both greed and grievance are common, if not imperative, means towards that end. In addition Fearon and Laitin's concept of “feasibility” will be applied, as no armed group is likely to form and carry out activities if their survival is not feasible to begin with.
1.1– Collier and Hoeffler: Greed and Grievance
In their seminal work “Greed and Grievance in Civil War”, Collier and Hoeffler assert that rebel organizations are quick to claim a “grievance” to justify their armed activities, but that the relationship to “greed” proves to have a much stronger correlation. Using their own set of data from conflicts of at least 1,000 battle-deaths which were active between 1960 and 1999, Collier and Hoeffler conclude that there is little evidence to support that conflicts are motivated by grievance alone, especially as the presence of ethnic and religious diversity decreases rather than increases the risk of conflict. Meanwhile the model of only greed holds up well and “the extent of primary
commodity exports is the largest single influence on the risk of conflict.”1 Amongst their
conclusions, Collier and Hoeffler therefore establish that “opportunities for primary commodity predation cause conflict” and that policy-making which intends to reduce the risk of conflict must therefore be aimed at reducing opportunities for enrichment of armed groups.2
First, it must be acknowledged that Collier and Hoeffler apply their model to “civil war”, while the activities of armed groups in the north-eastern DRC today, though destabilizing and inclined to large-scale violence, do not constitute a civil war according to the international
community or Collier and Hoeffler's criterium of a minimum of 1,000 battle-related casualties. But as Collier and Hoeffler posit, “Civil war occurs as a result of rebellion. Hence, the phenomenon to be explained is the emergence of a rebel organization.”3 This paper will therefore focus on the level
of rebel organizations without expanding to the potential next level of outright civil war, while
1Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, "Greed and Grievance in Civil War," Policy Research Working Paper, May 2000, 26.
2 Ibid., 27. 3 Ibid., 3.
assuming that the main rational choice-processes motivating such groups will remain analogous. Rebel organizations, according to Collier and Hoeffler, share important characteristics with, most significantly, armies and organized crime. Like armies, they must be able to overcome problems of cohesion and hierarchy, be willing to fight protracted fights with an enemy whose goal is their destruction, and yet motivate others to join their ranks; like criminal organizations, they have to fund their activities “despite not being directly productive” and having no tax revenue to resort to. The fact that “the analogy with crime is standard in the present economic theory of rebellion” highlights the importance of generating revenue – bringing the exploitation of natural resources to the forefront. Although virtually all rebel organizations claim a grievance, having the government respond to armed violence by assuaging the perpetrators' grievances is extremely rare and, according to Collier and Hoeffler, such purely grievance-motivated rebellions would therefore be expected to be correspondingly rare. Instead, “many rebellions appear to be linked to the capture of resources.”4
Assuming that “greed” is an important motivator and wealth accumulation is armed groups' fundamental goal, this has a number of practical implications. The issue of generating revenue influences, amongst others, the size of a rebel organization, as the group seeks the balance between what is large enough to carry out its activities without being too easily squashed by either
government armies or other non-state armed groups, and yet not exceed the size that can be
sustained financially, both of which are conditions for a group's survival. “Hence, financial viability at the size which just satisfies the survival constraint is the condition for the initiation of a
rebellion”, according to Collier and Hoeffler, with the obvious implication that groups will grow as large as they can afford.5 Additional features, besides financial resources, which impact the
activities of rebel organizations include geographic features and the availability of the necessary start-up capital. The geographic setting (most notably the presence of mountains and forests) of armed group activities is of practical importance, making it difficult for counter-insurgents to track armed groups down and engage them in battle. In a separate paper, Collier mentions the DRC as an example of a country whose geography “makes it unusually hard for government forces to control because the population lives around the fringes of a huge area, with the three main cities in the extreme west, extreme south-east and extreme north.”6 Availability of resources to cover the
start-up costs of a budding rebel organization is required to boost the size of the organization start-up to within the survival constraint and give it enough size to start resource predation. Collier and Hoeffler
4 Ibid., 2.
5 Ibid., 6.
6 Paul Collier, "Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Their Implications for Policy," Development Research Group
consider that outside funding is often crucial, whether the patrons are diaspora communities, international businesses or foreign governments, who make available the resources needed to start rebellions up to the point where they become self-sustaining, especially when the patron in question expects to make money out of the deal.7
Although Collier and Hoeffler find the strongest correlation to greed, grievance is not to be completely disregarded. Many rebel groups wield the fundamentally Leninist theory that the population in the areas its recruits stem from is being oppressed without being aware of it, from which it follows that part of the mission becomes to make the local population aware of this
“grievance”, citing as an example the Eritrean People's Liberation Front which engaged extensively in ideological training of its combatants. While grievance may therefore shape a rebel group's discourse and behaviour to a certain extent, this is not a cause or accidental by-product of the conflict so much as it is a conscious choice to enhance the efficiency of armed groups who seek to win new recruits and gain local support.8 The official aim of a self-proclaimed grievance-rebellion
is to assuage a grievance so strong that it motivates people to take (potentially violent) action, amongst which Collier and Hoeffler count “inter-group hatred, political exclusion, and vengeance.”9
A frequently cited grievance to be wielded by rebel organizations is one of oppression or
marginalization (whether founded in reality or not) of one's ethnic group. The practical implication here for an armed group's functioning is that they cannot afford diversity amongst their members. If recruitment spans ethnic and religious divides it will be more difficult to forge their combatants into a cohesive fighting force that are unified by ethnic solidarity, and Collier and Hoeffler go so far as to assert that “social fractionalization should reduce the incidence of civil war” although
acknowledging that rebellions will often appear to be caused by ethnic differences.10 Greed and
grievance need not necessarily exclude one another, however, but can both transition into each other and co-exist within a single rebel organization. As Collier and Hoeffler write,
Where the conditions for greed-rebellion exist but those for grievance-rebellion do not, a group initially motivated by grievance may become dependent upon primary
commodity predation for survival, thus transforming itself into a greed-rebellion. Conversely, greed-rebellions need to manufacture subjective grievance for military cohesion and may find an objective grievance an effective basis for generating it. Hence, the presence of primary commodity exports may sustain rebellions which are 7 Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, "Greed and Grievance in Civil War," 10.
8 Ibid., 9. 9 Ibid., 11. 10 Ibid., 8-9.
motivated by objective grievance, while the presence of objective grievance may sustain rebellions motivated by predation.11
In a paper Paul Collier presented to the World Bank in 2000, he delves further into the economic causes of civil conflict, focusing again on the greed-angle and using mostly the same database as for “Greed and Grievance in Civil War”. According to Collier, “the risk of civil war has been systematically related to a few economic conditions, such as dependence upon primary
commodity exports and low national income. Conversely, and astonishingly, objective measures of social grievance, such as inequality, a lack of democracy, and ethnic and religious divisions, have had no systematic effect on risk,” and asserts “that this is because civil wars occur where rebel organizations are financially viable.” This is one of the key characteristics that distinguishes intrastate war from interstate war: where governments have a theoretically constant in-flow of tax revenue to be invested in warfare, rebel organizations have to resort to less constant and more unorthodox means of financing their activities.12 In terms of greed versus grievance, Collier again
states that the function of grievance might almost be considered decorative. As he writes, “Popular perceptions are shaped by the discourse which conflicts themselves generate”, a fact of which all parties in a conflict are keenly aware. Armed groups will therefore actively offer explanations for their actions, using language of victimization and oppression in order to enhance their chances of success. For unlike organized crime, rebel organizations are dependent on public relations in order to generate foreign financial support and encourage their troops to fight.13 Collier concedes that
there are without doubt members of armed groups, and their supporters, who sincerely believe in the grievance-discourse and that there is a wide range of factors that can influence a groups'
motivations, but holds that according to the economic theory of conflict which he proposes, none of these motivations will lead to relevant action unless a rebel organization can sustain itself
financially, for “War cannot be fought just on hopes or hatreds.” Greed and grievances will exist in all societies in roughly equal measures, and all groups are capable of recognizing such grievances, so it is only when predation is feasible that action erupts.14 For this reason, Collier states that from
an economic point of view very little stock is to be set by grievance as opposed to “revealed preference”, namely the notion that “people gradually reveal their true motivation by the pattern of their behavior, even if they choose to disguise the painful truth from themselves.” If behaviour is consistently at odds with the grievance, which is less reliable to start with because it will cater to 11 Ibid., 14.
12 Paul Collier, "Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Their Implications for Policy," 2. 13 Ibid., 3.
public opinion, then the grievance loses its explanatory power.15 In terms of economic conditions,
rebellion is empirically linked to three economic conditions: dependence upon primary commodity exports, low average income of the country, and slow growth. The primary commodity exports are most relevant to focus on for the scope of this paper, and Collier writes that primary commodity are, of all economic activities, those that lend themselves best to looting, and therefore for predation by armed groups.16 Low incomes are also relevant, however, because young men from impoverished
communities face little options; the governments of poor countries tend to enforce low taxes and therefore have insufficient revenue to offer disenfranchised young men a career in the government army, so that they have little to lose in joining rebel organizations instead.17
1.2 – Vinci: Power and survival
Needless to say, other scholars have responded (often critically) to Collier and Hoeffler's very influential theory. The most principle one whose revisioning will be used in this paper is that posited by Anthony Vinci in his paper “Greed-Grievance Reconsidered”. To answer his question: what motivates these groups?, Vinci claims that the overriding pursuits of armed groups are the drive for power, and the drive for survival.18 The eponymous reconsidering of the
greed-and-grievance model is that Vinci considers both to to be subjugated to the quest for power and survival, and are more likely to be means to achieve these objectives rather than objectives in themselves. Greed is incorporated in the drive for power because “The notion of power includes, among other factors, economic wealth, which is used to establish and maintain control of forces; military power, which can be used to directly control territory and people; and public legitimacy, which can be used to, among other things, pressure enemies.” Greed is therefore a strategic tactic, and the behaviour of armed groups in, for instance, pursuing control over larger territories and/or larger populations, serves to ultimately gain more power, and Vinci fears that a focus on pursuit of wealth in itself might cause one to overlook the ultimate goal.19 Vinci acknowledges that in its interaction with
these strategic tactics, power is a “fungible attitude”, meaning “that one type of power can be used for multiple types of interests.” The fungibility of power achieved through wealth accumulation is apparent: more material resources allows for the gain of larger numbers of fighters and control over a larger territory or population, which in turn allow for larger-scale predation and thus larger wealth
15 Ibid., 5. 16 Ibid., 9. 17 Ibid., 10.
18 Anthony Vinci, "Greed-Grievance Reconsidered: The Role of Power and Survival in the Motivation of Armed Groups," Civil Wars 8, no. 1 (January 24, 2007): 32.
accumulation.
The relevance of power (which Vinci defines broadly as comprising “anything that establishes and maintains control of men by men”) is that it is intricately linked to armed groups' other main drive: survival. As Vinci writes, “Survival is of central importance because it is the minimum goal of any political unit, as its leaders must assure survival if they are to pursue any other less vital goals.”20 We may therefore assume that most armed groups worth studying will
choose their strategic options in terms of survival, and therefore in terms of the gaining of enough power to secure their survival.
The value of this power and survival approach, according to Vinci, is that in the same way that Realism is useful because it can be applied to a wide range of types of states, the power and survival approach can be applied to the diverse proliferation of armed groups which operate in a volatile environment, which often have little in common with each other other than these two overriding goals.21 In terms of the policy implications of his revision of the greed and grievance
model, Vinci suggests that greed and grievance respectively ought to be less prominent in the considerations, being – as he believes – a means rather than an end. Specifically in terms of wealth accumulation, he believes that “it may be valuable to turn some of our attention away from
economic-based means affecting the outcome of internal wars, such as relying heavily on embargos of ‘blood diamonds’ or other looted goods to lower the value of continued fighting. Instead, it would be better to turn our attention to more traditional means of affecting a war which we are accustomed to applying in interstate relations.” This would include power-balancing through alignment with certain preferred actors to change the odds of success (in terms of power and survival) and thereby the strategic calculations of certain armed groups.22
The place of “greed” within Vinci's survival-power model has been explained, but Vinci also acknowledges that the motivations of armed groups are conventionally thought to be grievance-related, and particularly to “ethnic, tribal, or nationalist drivers in society” caught under the
umbrella term “ancient hatreds”.23 Vinci subscribes to the instrumentalist approach which considers
ethnicity/nationalism merely a “tool which can be used and manipulated for political reasons”. Although grievance may motivate (to some extent) individual members of armed groups he believes that such motivations cannot be ascribed to groups as a whole, stating “that armed groups are
unitary actors in that they have the administrative structures to function as a single unit. In general,
20 Ibid., 33. 21 Ibid., 35. 22 Ibid., 41-42. 23 Ibid., 29.
grievances at a group level are more instrumental than essential.”24 While grievance is therefore not
one of the driving forces that motivates armed groups, like Collier and Hoeffler he recognizes their practical uses in recruiting soldiers, motivating them to fight, and keeping the group as cohesive as possible.25 Vinci himself points out that his conclusions can coincide with theorists who emphasize
greed arguments, such as Collier who proposes not so much that greed is the cause of rebellion as that “economic factors allow for and facilitate long-term rebellion.”26
Support for the notion that survival is armed groups' ultimate motivation comes from Roos Haer in her paper “Organization of Political Violence by Insurgencies”, presented at the 12th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference. Haer bases her paper on the organizational process theory developed by Martha Crenshaw, which holds “that armed groups function like firms, which struggle for survival. Consequently, the end goal of the group is not a priori the ends for which it was formed, but rather the maintenance of the organization itself.”27 Haer acknowledges that
incentives are required to attract the recruits necessary to keep an armed group viable, and links these to Collier and Hoeffler's greed-grievance model. According to Haer, however, leaders of armed groups will seek to attract fighters who are motivated by grievances, because those motivated by “greed”, she alleges, make for disloyal and unmotivated fighters.28
1.3 – Fearon and Laitin: the requirement of feasibility
In their paper “Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War”, Fearon and Laitin contest the “conventional wisdom” that that a high level of ethnic or political diversity (or even outright grievance) coincides with a higher risk of conflict. Instead, they assert, “the main factors
determining both the secular trend and the cross-sectional variation in civil violence in this period are not ethnic or religious differences or broadly held grievances but, rather, conditions that favor insurgency.”29 In this they echo Collier in the belief that feasibility is the prime determinant of
conflict, as armed actors will not come into existence if the contextual setting does not allow them any means of formation.
Using the definition of insurgency as being “a technology of military conflict characterized by small, lightly armed bands practicing guerrilla warfare from rural base areas”, Fearon and Laitin
24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 30. 26 Ibid., 32.
27 Roos Haer, "The Organization of Political Violence by Insurgencies," Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public
Policy 18, no. 3 (December 2012): 2.
28 Ibid., 3.
29 James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War," American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (February 2003): 75.
hold that insurgency is a method of warfare that can be “harnessed” to a variety of causes, ranging from Islamic fundamentalists to ethnic nationalists to groups who pursue the traffic in coca or diamonds. Insurgency is at its most feasible and attractive, however, when the central government in question is financially, organizationally and politically weak and therefore ineffective at
counterinsurgency in a periphery that is often difficult to police and keep under active control, as is often the case in countries with a low per capita income. In addition to government weakness, rebel strength is of course of prime importance: insurgency is aided when the group operates in rough territory of which the rebels have superior local knowledge, and a large number of fighters. Fearon and Laitin also expressly mention “foreign base camps, financial support, and training” as factors which aid rebel groups.30 Responding to Collier and Hoeffler's conclusion that “greed” is supported
more than “grievance” as as predictor of violence, Fearon and Laitin “agree that financing is one determinant of the viability of insurgency” but argue that variables such as per capita income are relevant not so much to explain strength on the rebels' side, but rather weakness on the side of the state in terms of administrative, military and policing ability. Taking a “Hobbesian”, state-centred approach rather than an economic one they discard the connection to primary commodity exports in favour of the notion that in state power vacuums, “both fears and opportunities encourage the rise of would-be rulers who supply a rough local justice while arrogating the power to “tax” for themselves and, often, for a larger cause.”31 The “logic of insurgency”, according them, is that, at least in the
early stages of their establishment, rebels will be weaker than the government they are fighting, even in countries with low-capacity governments, and that their ability to survive depends on their ability to hide. According to Fearon and Laitin, factors that enable insurgency are therefore mostly very practical in nature and include: rough terrain and a poor road network, at large geographic distance from the centres of state power; foreign, cross-border sanctuaries; a local population who can be prevented from denouncing the rebels to government agents. In regards to the latter, Fearon and Laitin acknowledge that it is helpful for rebels if the local population feels an ethnic or class solidarity which prevents them from denouncing the rebels, but argue that this is not a necessity if rebels are able to make credible threats at retribution in the event of denunciation.32 Although
appearing to contradict Collier and Hoeffler's theory by focusing on state weakness rather than sources of armed group strength, Fearon and Laitin also point out that, to offset the need to hide from superior government forces, “[t]o survive, rebels need arms and materiel, money to buy them, or smugglable goods to trade for them”.33 In terms of contributing factors, they also include the 30 Ibid., 75-76.
31 Ibid., 76. 32 Ibid., 80. 33 Ibid.
hypothesis that “land that supports the production of highvalue, low-weight goods such as coca, opium, diamonds, and other contraband, [...] can be used to finance an insurgency.”34 And yet
Fearon and Laitin conclude that they support the general idea that insurgency becomes more feasible when there is more funding available, but believe that primary commodity goods are not a good source of funding for rebels as they “are hard to exploit without control of a national
distribution system and ports.”35 As will be outlined in chapter three of this paper, however, armed
groups in the DRC effectively manage the exploitation of natural resources despite lacking nationwide control and institutionalized distribution systems.
1.4 - Implications for this paper
For this paper it will be held that both Collier and Hoeffler's greed and grievance-model and Vinci's survival-security model apply to the question of conflict resource extraction by armed groups. As Vinci proposes in relation to Collier and Hoeffler's theory, the two are compatible if one assumes that survival and security are the over-arching goals and motivations of armed group activity. The question of wealth accumulation through conflict resource extraction remains relevant because the “greed” component of Collier and Hoeffler's theory is very closely entwined with both survival and security, as material resources are absolutely imperative in order to obtain the
resources (both in terms of fighters and in terms of the weapons, food and clothing) required to remain operational in a conflict zone. As a logical conclusion, it will be held in this paper that armed groups will act and organize in ways that will enhance their ability to obtain the natural resources in order to further their survival.
Where does this leave grievance? In this paper, “greed” will be considered the more heavy-weighing of the two considerations, because material resources contribute more directly to the ultimate goal (survival) than does grievance. Where violent groups who aim only at material wealth accumulation already exist and can become very successful (in the form of organized crime), there are no serious armed groups worth studying that have exclusively a grievance to wield. Grievance can be taken into account as an aid towards achieving both power and survival, however, as the rationale of grievance's use in motivating and uniting recruits is convincing.
Feasibility is of importance for a study of the activities of resource-exploiting armed groups, as armed groups will be expected to interact with those contextual features that allow for their emergence and consequent activities. One of the factors that enhances the feasibility of armed group
34 Ibid., 81. 35 Ibid., 87.
activity will be held to be the availability of natural resources. The combination of these theories will form the framework along with armed group activity in the north-eastern DRC can be analyzed.
2 – Armed Groups and the DRC: a Brief History
The armed groups that are active in the north-eastern DRC today did not materialize in the course of a few decades. Rather, the roots of their formation were present from the very foundation of the state. Because such groups cannot be viewed without their context, this section will offer a brief modern history of the country. While volumes can (and have been) written about its
statebuilding process, this section will focus on those elements that are within the scope of this paper and are relevant to the phenomenon: the formation and activities of non-state armed groups, the role of natural resources, the role of centre-periphery alliances, and – to a somewhat lesser extent – the role of ethnic and nationalist grievances.
One can argue that armed groups and the rich deposits of natural resources have played a foundational role in the modern history of the DRC. After the former colony gained independence from Belgium in 1960, initial hopes were high for the country which, with its first democratically elected government and vast supplies of natural resources, appeared to have the means to support itself according to the state-building standards envisioned at the time by post-colonial idealists. Within just two weeks of its formal independence, however, the new-fledged country was plunged into its first national catastrophe as the newly formed Congolese National Army (ANC) broke into mutiny and its richest province, Katanga, attempted (ultimately unsuccessfully) to secede, launching what was at time the largest United Nations peacekeeping mission ever deployed. Patrice
Lumumba, the Congo's first democratically elected Prime Minister, quickly lost the sympathy of Western powers when it became apparent that he was willing to appeal to the Soviet Union for aid if the West were to fail to provide sufficient support. (Since his assassination in 1961, formally by Katangan secessionists, claims have continued to abound that his assassination was a Cold War strategic move orchestrated by the CIA). Although President Joseph Kasavubu remained in control for another five years, by this time effective control had already been assumed by Mobutu Sese Seko, former chief of staff of the Congolese National Army, who gained formal control, ousting Kasavubu, in 1965 when Mobutu essentially declared himself president.36 Even this early in the
Congo's history, “There remained small pockets of insurgency in the northeast of the country,” a region that has remained especially problematic ever since.37
Mobutu's reign was outrightly authoritarian and oppressive, despite semblances of
democracy (magnanimously allowing elections in which he was the only candidate) and somewhat
36 Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, From Zaire to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Uppsala, Sweden: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1998), 7.
37 Jeanne M. Haskin, The Tragic State of the Congo: From Decolonization to Dictatorship (New York, NY: Algora Publishing, 2005), 39.
eccentric, such as his unilateral re-naming the country Zaire in 1971, forcing the population to adept “new nonChristian names based on African tradition” and formally banning Western-style business suits.38 By this time the importance of natural resources had already become established, as the
economy of Zaire was based on the export of raw materials, including cobalt, copper, diamonds, uranium, rubber, timber, coffee, cocoa and tea, foreshadowing its role as a supplier of primary products.39 Bad management of these funds as well as IMF development funds led the country into
debt and poverty, however, as Zaire became increasingly subordinated to Mobutu's personal interests. From a foreign business perspective, “investment in Mobutu’s Zaire became increasingly undesirable in large part because of massive mismanagement, especially in the mining sector. Gecamines, the country’s mining company, was in severe decay.”40 An additional risk factor that
would ultimately topple Mobutu's thirty-year regime and contribute to conflicts in the north-east of the country that would drag on longer still, came in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, when Mobutu styled himself as a “savior of the Hutus”, over two million of whom were driven out of Rwanda by the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) and sought refuge in the neighbouring Uganda, Burundi and Zaire. Although it quickly became apparent that some of the worst perpetrators of the genocide were among the civilian refugees and assumed effective control of refugee camps in Zaire from where they organized attacks onto Rwandan territory, Mobutu allowed them to regroup and rearm on his soil.41 Openly favouring Hutu over Tutsi, he allowed Rwandan
genocidaires and their recruits from the refugee camps to massacre thousands of native Tutsi in the Kivu region. In what may be considered an early instance of regional centre-periphery alliance, Rwanda, in turn, facilitated the mobilization of Zairian Tutsi with weapons, supplies and training and in 1996 the RPA – soon to be joined by Uganda and Angola – invaded Zaire and sought an alliance with the Zairian Tutsi and Mobutu's political enemies, which then included an obscure “Marxist guerilla group” under the leadership of Laurent Kabila.42 The RPA aligned with Congolese
armed groups to break up the Rwandan refugee camps and drive tens of thousands of refugees back to Rwanda, to be either tried for crimes committed during the genocide or resettled, although thousands of Hutus are thought to have been massacred in Zaire in the process. But the coalition of Zairian rebels, calling themselves the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo (AFDL), moved beyond what was arguably a border conflict and seized their chance to make a bid for power over the country in what became the First Congo War. When Mobutu, well
38 Ibid., 44. 39 Ibid., 45.
40 Dean Montague, "Stolen Goods: Coltan and Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo," SAIS Review 22, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2002): 108.
41 Jeanne M. Haskin, The Tragic State of the Congo: From Decolonization to Dictatorship, 77. 42 Ibid., 78.
into his sixties and ailing from cancer, returned to Zaire after treatment abroad he found that the rebels – by then led by Kabila – had made “spectacular gains in the north, east and south”; they had been joined by Katangan rebels, increasing numbers of government troops, large numbers of
disenfranchised Zairian young men, and received support from the political opposition in
Kinshasa.43 Another important ally of the AFDL, which by then had assumed control of the most
resource-rich areas of the nation, were powerful foreign business interests. It is important to emphasize that at this time Mobutu was still the formal head of state of Zaire, and the AFDL an alliance of armed groups without formal legitimacy or status. Yet, at this time, “a pattern of illicit investment” was established by international mining interests who secured large mining deals with the AFDL early on in the war. In this way, “legitimate” mining operations could be established in rebel-occupied territories which provided revenue to the AFDL. “As major cities located in mineral rich areas [...] fell under AFDL control, mining corporations swarmed into rebel held territory”, writes Montague. “[E]conomic negotiation between the AFDL and western corporations effectively took precedence over previous agreements negotiated by the Mobutu administration”, so that for international investors at least Laurent Kabila had been “crowned […] as the de facto leader of then Zaire while he was still a rebel leader.”44 Among these foreign investors, according to Montague,
were DeBeers Consolidated Mines (known for the diamond industry) and Anglo-American
Corporations. Needless to say, this directly violated the Zairian constitution according to which “the soil and subsoil belong to the state, and [...] prospecting, exploration, and exploitation required permits from the Ministry of Mines and Energy.” In addition to these foreign corporations seizing an opportunity to interfere in the Congo's natural resources to their own benefit, similarly Rwanda and Uganda took advantage by creating “companies with close government and military ties to facilitate the extraction of resources. They have, directly or indirectly, appointed local rebel faction leaders and field commanders to serve as conduits for illicit trade originating from the occupied territories of the eastern DRC.”45
Kabila, the rebel leader-turned-dictator, proved to make many of the same mistakes that Mobutu did, not only in terms of installing an oppressive and undemocratic regime but also in terms of fostering racial grievances and allowing foreign influences in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as the country was named under his reign. He showed manifest favouritism towards Zairian Tutsi, and gave Rwandan (Tutsi) soldiers, who were instrumental in his rise to power, prominent positions in his personal safety and the patrolling of the capital of Kinshasa. His decision to install Congolese francs – and ban transactions in all foreign currency – led exporters, including traders in
43 Ibid., 79.
44 Dean Montague, "Stolen Goods: Coltan and Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo," 109. 45 Ibid., 106.
natural resources such as diamonds, to smuggle goods out of the DRC to avoid being paid only in nontransferable Congolese francs. This furthered the trend of smuggle along the north-eastern border of the DRC which was to persist to this day, and in addition crippled the new government which lost out significantly on the revenue.46
As the country quickly deteriorated into chaos and poverty and his competence as a leader was increasingly drawn into question, Kabila – in a bizarre shift – turned against his former ally, Rwanda, and the Tutsi as a whole. After he called for all Rwandans and Congolese Tutsi to leave the country, violent clashes and massacres between Tutsi and other ethnicities broke out throughout the DRC, including in the state army, escalating quickly into the Second Congo War in the autumn of 1998. Part of the state army mutineed against Kabila, and Uganda and Rwanda once again
mobilized a rebel movement in the Kivu region, the Rassemblement Congolais pour Démocratie (RCD)47 which, incidentally, would continue to be active in the border region for years to come.
Angola, defecting on its former alliance with Rwanda and Uganda, sided with Kabila, along with Zimbabwe, Namibia, (both of whom had manifest interests in the DRC's mineral wealth) Libya, Chad and Sudan, so that the situation rapidly expanded.48 In 1999 a summit organized by South
Africa led to the signing of the Lusaka ceasefire agreement by the DRC, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola, Rwanda and Uganda (but no rebel groups), calling for, amongst others, the cessation of hostilities, the withdrawal of foreign troops, the disarmament of armed groups and the
normalization of relations between border countries.49 In the mandate of the Mission de
l'Organisation des Nations Unies en Republique Democratique du Congo (MONUC), the UN force sent to the DRC to help enforce the Lusaka agreement, no mention is made of the tracking down and dismantling of armed groups still at large in the DRC, even though such measures had been discussed during the Lusaka talks. Haskin speculates that Kofi Annan may not have been able to garner the necessary support for such an extended mandate in the wake of the Somalia debacle and the Rwandan genocide, an omission which in hindsight may be considered to have been one of most detrimental to the peace process.50 In this time Kofi Annan also recommend the establishment of the
Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as it was already apparent at the time that mineral exploitation – especially in the Kivus – was a problematic source of funding for rebels and a source of tension between the DRC and Rwanda and Ugunda, respectively.51 Widespread violence around the country 46 Jeanne M. Haskin, The Tragic State of the Congo: From Decolonization to Dictatorship , 85.
47 Ibid., 87. 48 Ibid., 93. 49 Ibid., 94. 50 Ibid., 110. 51 Ibid., 113.
persisted despite the efforts of the MONUC mission, with civilians becoming the frequent victims of atrocities of varying scales among different national and ethnic actors.
Laurent-Desiré Kabila was assassinated by one of his own bodyguards in 2001 and succeeded by his son, Joseph Kabila. The next year, the parties to the Inter-Congolese Dialogue, which consisted of not only the DRC government, political opposition and civil society, but also the armed groups RCD, MLC and various Mai-Mai, signed the Global and All-Inclusive Agreement on the Transition in the DRC, in which all agreed to lay down arms and work towards the building of transitional institutions to further transparent elections and human rights. In addition, the members agreed to collectively create “a restructured, integrated national army”, meaning that the newly established Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC) from its very conception contained members of armed groups and Mai-Mai.52Of interest is also the involvement
of the armed groups in this transitional government, for although Joseph Kabila was accepted as president and supreme commander of the armed forces, of the four vice-presidents who were put in place one hailed from the rebel group RCD-Goma and was put in charge of security and defense, and one from the rebel group MLC who was made responsible for economy and finance.53
Since then, Joseph Kabila has remained in place as the DRC's President by merit of winning two (albeit disputed) series of elections and overcoming several coup attempts. Although his reign has been more consistent and less violently oppressive than that of his predecessors Laurent Kabila and Mobutu Sese Seko, Joseph Kabila failed to significantly aid the DRC's development or gain complete effective control over all its territory, as armed groups never ceased to be active in the north-east of the country. In January 2015 small clashes have already erupted in the capital of Kinshasa in response to public fears that the Kabila administration's plans to hold a census prior to the next elections, scheduled for 2016, are an attempt to allow Kabila to run for a third term despite the fact that this would violate the nation's constitution. It is therefore well possible that more (nation-wide) outpourings of political violence will break out in 2016.54In the meanwhile, the DRC
continues to straggle as one of the least developed countries in the world. According to the UN Development Programme's 2014 report on the DRC, the country is still lodged firmly in the “low human development” category, ranking as number 186 out of 187 countries included in the report, with an average life expectancy at birth of 50 and 3.1 years of education on average. For the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) only data from 2010 were available, but these lead to the dispiriting conclusion that in 2010 74,4 percent of the population was multidimensionally poor, and
52 Inter-Congolese Dialogue, “Political Negotiations on the Peace Process and on Transition in the DRC,” (2002), page 2, accessed May 2, 2015. http://www.issafrica.org/AF/profiles/DRCongo/icd/transagmt.pdf
53 Jeanne M. Haskin, The Tragic State of the Congo: From Decolonization to Dictatorship, 131.
54 BBC News, "Deadly DR Congo Clashes over Joseph Kabila's Future,"BBC News (London), January 20, 2015, accessed May 20, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-30898405.
another 15.5 percent were close to multidimensional poverty.55 With only about 10 percent of the
population not experiencing deprivation or approaching it, complications continue to exist when it comes to the matter of natural resource exploitation.
MONUSCO has remained the world's largest UN peacekeeping mission, with 22,000 peacekeepers deployed in the DRC at the height of its activities in 2010. Neethling argues that one might even claim that MONUC and MONUSCO “assumed or at least co-assumed some of the responsibilities of the Congolese state” in protecting civilians from armed attacks by armed groups.56 In 2010 the MONUC was renamed MONUSCO, the United Nations Organization
Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to reflect “the view that the Democratic Republic of the Congo is now entering a new phase of its transition towards peace consolidation”.57 Unfortunately, this new phase has failed to truly materialize. Security Council
Resolution 2211, published in March 2015, extends the MONUSCO mandate until March 2016 and still notes “that eastern DRC has continued to suffer from recurring cycles of conflict and persistent violence by armed groups, both Congolese and foreign...”58 It also reiterates “its deep concern
regarding the security and humanitarian crisis in eastern DRC due to ongoing destabilizing activities of foreign and domestic armed groups” and “strongly condemns all armed groups
operating in the region” and names explicitly their attacks on civilians, MONUSCO-personnel and humanitarian workers, as well as persistent sexual and gender-based violence, the use of child soldiers, and summary executions. The resolution further “[d]emands that the FDLR, the ADF, the LRA, and all other armed groups cease immediately all forms of violence and other destabilizing activities, including the exploitation of natural resources, and that their members immediately and permanently disband, lay down their arms and release children from their ranks...”59
It must be added that, as another complicating factor, the state army (FARDC) is itself a perpetrator of much of the violence commited against civilians. As of 2003 the state government has increasingly accepted surrendering militia groups (including the FAC, MLC, RCD and various Mai-Mai)60 and is quite a complex and, one might say, haphazard collection of different loyalties,
backgrounds and dynamics. The national army does not have a history of high functioning,
55 United Nations, “Congo (Democratic Republic of the): HDI Values and Rank Changes in the 2014 Human Development Report,” United Nations Development Programme (2014), accessed June 2, 2015.
http://hdr.undp.org/sites/all/themes/hdr_theme/country-notes/COD.pdf
56Theo Neethling, "Rebel Movements in the DRC," African Security Review 23, no. 4 (2014): 340. 57 United Nations, “Resolution 1925,” Security Council (2010), page 3, accessed May 2, 2015.
http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/un-documents/document/DRC%20S%20RES%201925.php
58 United Nations, “Resolution 2211,” Security Council (2015), page 1, accessed May 29, 2015.
http://www.un.org/press/en/2015/sc11834.doc.htm
59Ibid., pages 10-11.
60 Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern, "Making Sense of Violence: Voices of Soldiers in the Congo (DRC)," The
however; especially during the later years of Mobutu's reign, when soldiers were no longer paid salaries, a culture of providing for themselves by imposing illegal fines and taxes, or even violent thefts from the civilian populations, emerged among the state army and is yet to fully fade away.61
This is one of the factors that complicates comprehensive action against the armed groups in the north-eastern DRC.
61 Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern, "Making Sense of Violence: Voices of Soldiers in the Congo (DRC)," The
3 – Conflict Resources
As early as 1962 the UN General Assembly signed Resolution 1803, entitled “Permanent sovereignty over natural resources”, which declares: “The right of peoples and nations to permanent sovereignty over their natural wealth and resources must be exercised in the interest of their
national development and of the wellbeing of the people of the State concerned.”62 Although it
became apparent during the period of decolonization that followed World War II that natural resources could (and, more importantly, should) be used to the advantage of local populations in underdeveloped countries, they are still widely appropriated by armed groups to fund their activities and thus further conflict. The International Criminal Court has criminalized pillage (theft in the context of armed conflict) as a war crime, but as armed groups are notoriously hard to capture and few armed group leaders have been brought to trial so far, it is still widely practiced by diverse groups including many in the north-eastern DRC.63
As Collier and Hoeffler have pointed out, primary commodity exports such as natural
resources lend themselves well to exploitation by rebel organizations because they are firmly rooted to one location; they cannot be relocated by either government forces nor by civilians who often fall victim to rebel organization violence, as would be the case with more mobile means of
production.64 As the proceeds from natural resource exploitation can be one of the most important
sources of power and means of survival for armed groups, this chapter will delve into some of the practicalities of natural resources and some of the debates surrounding their exploitation.
3.1 – The challenges of conflict resource research
To answer the eponymous question of his paper “What Do We Know about Natural Resources and Civil War?”, author Michael Ross argues that the many studies about conflict resources have in fact yielded contradictory results. Partly to blame is the fact that it is extremely difficult to verify the validity of results, both econometric and qualitative, and the fact that resource wealth is in itself hard to measure. Using the ratio of a state's resource exports to its GDP, for instance, which is often used as a measuring stick, is of questionable validity considering that the violence preceding civil war as well as civil war itself cause other industries to suffer and thereby
62 United Nations, “Resolution 1803,” General Assembly (1962), 15, accessed May 29, 2015.
http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/9D85892AC6D7287E8525636800596092
63 Holly Dranginis, “Grand Theft Global: Prosecuting the War Crime of Pillage in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo” (Washington, D.C.: The Enough Project, 2015), 2.
render GDP unreliable.65 That being established, however, Ross does make several important
distinctions that hold relevance for the way armed groups will (attempt to) exploit natural resources. Whether or not conflict resources are likely to be used to prolong conflict depends on geographical factors, according to Ross, who makes three important distinctions: firstly, between resources that are geographically close to the national capital (and therefore likely to be firmly under state control) and those that are located in more remote areas where less effective state control is present and rebel control is more likely. Secondly, between “point-source” resources which are concentrated in a specific area and can fall under the control of a single group, and “diffuse” resources which are scattered over such a large area that no single group is likely to control them all.66 Thirdly, between resources that are “lootable” and “obstructable”. Lootable in
this case means that they “can be easily appropriated by individuals or small groups of unskilled workers” (such as diamonds and narcotics) and although they are unlikely to spark separatist
conflict in themselves, they make non-separatist conflict harder to bring to an end because relatively weak and undisciplined armed groups who would most likely have been forced to surrender
otherwise can now live off of the greater marginal benefits.67 Obstructable resources, on the other
hand, are those whose transportation is vulnerable to being intercepted by relatively small and poorly equipped groups, so that even weak parties can significantly needle the stronger party.68
Many resources can be simultaneously lootable and obstructable, however.
3.2 – Coltan in the DRC
The Great Lakes region of sub-Saharan East and Central Africa is rich in natural resources, but among the central African states the eastern DRC especially “is home to considerable
proportions of the world’s mineral wealth”: gold, silver, diamonds, uranium, petroleum, zinc, cobalt, copper, cassiterite, and coltan are all derived from the DRC's soil69, in addition to timber,
charcoal, fishing and poaching.70 Conflict resources in this region almost uniformly meet all three
of Ross's distinctions that make illegal exploitation more likely: they are diffuse, geographically far 65 Michael L. Ross, "What Do We Know about Natural Resources and Civil War?" Journal of Peace Research 41, no.
3, May 2004, 338.
66 Ibid., 350. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid.
69Jeffrey W. Mantz, "Improvisational Economies: Coltan Production in the Eastern Congo," Social
Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 16, no. 1 (2008): 36; Nadira Lalji, "The Resource Curse Revised: Conflict and
Coltan in the Congo," Harvard International Review, Fall 2007, 34.
70 United Nations, “Letter Dated 15 November 2010 from the Chair of the Security Council Committee Established Pursuant to Resolution 1533 (2004) Concerning the Democratic Republic of the Congo Addressed to the President of the Security Council,” Security Council (2010), 13, accessed June 2, 2015. http://www.un.org/Docs/journal/asp/ws.asp? m=S/2010/596
from the country's capital, and both lootable and obstructable. Although gold is currently the most-exploited substance, this section will offer a brief case study on a conflict mineral that is less well-known among the general public despite the fact that it is one of the essentials of the Digital Age: columbite-tantalite, shorted to coltan.
Part of what those in the industry and human rights groups call the “3 Ts” along with tungsten and tin, tantalum is present in virtually every digital device where, once processed into capacitors, coltan conducts the electric charge in high-tech equipment.71 Coltan is mostly associated
with cell phones, which is an extremely relevant field in itself as the mobile phone sector is booming in the West and only expanding in Africa, Asia and other regions. But the use of coltan extends much further than just telecommunication, into the fields of ICT, machinery, energy production turbines, energy storage, aircrafts and optical industry, all of which are likely to only increase in importance over the next decades. Already the US Department of Defense has classified coltan as a “strategic mineral”, and the US government has been involved in hoarding stores of it.72
The so-called “coltan rush” of the 1990s peaked around 2000, when the Christmas time demand for Sony's Playstation 2 drove the coltan prices up to ten times its usual height almost overnight, but has become lower and more stable since Australia started exploiting its coltan deposits and the US flooded the world market with its private strategic coltan reserves.73 Demand for coltan is likely to
remain relevant, however, especially because there are very few possible substitutes for coltan and those that exist (such as niobium in carbides) do not perform as effectively.74
To apply the distinctions of natural resources in conflict made by Ross in the previous section, it is important to note that coltan is a “diffuse” resource which is geographically far from the country's capital city, meeting two conditions which increase the likelihood of exploitation by armed groups. The so-called “coltan belt” of coltan-rich areas stretches close to the DRC's national border, approximately through the cities of Bunia, Goma, Bukavu and Kindu,75 and are scattered
over a fairly large area, most notably the provinces of Ituri, Katanga, and North and South Kivu, all of which are in the North-East of the DRC and geographically as remote from the capital of
Kinshasa as possible. For comparison: while Kinshasa is approximately 3,300 kilometres away
71 James H. Smith, "Tantalus in the Digital Age: Coltan Ore, Temporal Dispossession, and 'Movement' in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo," Journal of the American Ethnological Society 38, no. 1 (February 2011): 18; Dean Montague, "Stolen Goods: Coltan and Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo," SAIS Review 22, no. 1
(Winter/Spring 2002): 105.
72 Nadira Lalji, "The Resource Curse Revised: Conflict and Coltan in the Congo," Harvard International Review, Fall 2007, 35.
73 James H. Smith, "Tantalus in the Digital Age: Coltan Ore, Temporal Dispossession, and 'Movement' in the Eastern
Democratic Republic of the Congo," 18.
74 Raimund Bleischwitz, Monika Dittrich, and Chiara Pierdicca, "Coltan from Central Africa, International Trade and Implications for Any Certification,"Resources Policy 37 (March 12, 2012): 21.
from the heart of the resource-rich region, the Rwandan capital of Kigali is merely 175 kilometres away and the Ugandan capital of Kampala roughly 500 kilometres.76 Being a diffuse resource, the
deposits of coltan are too small and scattered for large-scale industrial mining to be very feasible, and is therefore done mostly on an artisanal, small-scale level (ASM). In these artisanal mines, the mining labour can be performed by low-skilled local miners, of whom there are estimated to be between 500,000 and 2 million in the DRC alone who are often mired in debt to local traders and subsist on extremely low wages (Bleischwitz et al estimate between 1 and 5 US$ a day in 2011)77,
not including the civilians who are sporadically forced into slave labour by armed groups.
Considering that the trade in conflict resources is illegal, it is important to note the chain of supply that is required to get resources such as coltan from the mine to international clients, which is where the funding that sustains conflict ultimately comes from. Unlike resources such as gold and diamonds (although those too undergo some processing), coltan is less of a completed end product in itself and has to undergo several processes before it can be used. It therefore has a more complex chain of supply that enables the obscuring of the exact origins of coltan, which for a long time – and to a certain extent still today – has facilitated the sale of illegally mined coltan.78 Without getting
too technical – as the chemical and industrial processes are not within the scope of this paper – the chain of industry is outlined by Bleischwitz, Dittrich and Pierdicca as comprising (in order of material flow) a mining component that typically extracts ore and produces a concentrate, a
processing segment that converts concentrate into an oxide or metal, a parts manufacturing segment that uses the oxide or metal material to produce such components as capacitors or superalloys, and an end-product manufacturing sector that uses the parts, such as capacitors, in electronic devices, such as cellular telephones.79
To set the chain of supply set out above in context: the mining component that starts the chain is, obviously, located in the DRC. Most mines in the DRC are what are known as artisanal or small-scale mines (ASM) which are “by their very nature lawless and entrepreneurial” and even the most organized among them are frequently controlled by armed groups, although the DRC's state troops, the FARDC, have also gained an ever-more prominent presence at mines.80 The method of
extracting coltan (and, for that matter, most other mineral resources) is fairly “primitive”: a patch of rainforest is cut down by local miners who uproot the remaining vegetation, dig their finds out of
76 Christopher J. Ayres, "The International Trade in Conflict Minerals: Coltan,"Critical Perspectives on Internaitonal
Business 8, no. 2 (2012): 181.
77 Raimund Bleischwitz, Monika Dittrich, and Chiara Pierdicca, "Coltan from Central Africa, International Trade and Implications for Any Certification," 21.
78 Ibid., 20-21. 79 Ibid.
the ground and wash them in a river, before taking them to market.81 The work is arduous as the ore
often has to be dug out of the ground without machinery, tools or advanced engineering input, and taken long distances through rough, forested terrain, often by trucks but sometimes carried
physically by labourers.82 It is precisely because the method of extraction can be accomplished
without particularly skilled workers or technology that it lends itself well to abuse by armed groups, and because there is little infrastructural network (no concrete and well-maintained “road, rail, and shipping network through a region the size of Western Europe”) the trade has adapted to small-scale operations.83 For this reason, tantalum ore is more popular for smugglers than, for instance, tin ore,
being lighter and easier to conceal during transport (as well as having higher profit margins).84
Although Laitin and Fearon have claimed that primary commodity exports are unlikely to be seized on by insurgents because they lack control state-wide means of distribution, in the case of this industry it is clear that through the abundance of (forced) human labour and impromptu networks between mining sites and trading centres, natural resources can still be exploited with sufficient efficiency to provide a meaningful source of revenue for armed groups. It is also important to note here that, to use Ross's terms, natural resources are both lootable and obstructable from the moment they are mined: the resources themselves can be directly confiscated at the mining sites by armed groups, and even if armed groups are not present at the mining site it is relatively easy to intercept transports of resources that are carried or driven across badly maintained roads in forested terrain.
The next step in the supply chain comes in eastern border cities like Goma and Bukavu, the provincial capitals of North and South Kivu respectively, where the resources are then bought by middlemen (known locally as comptoirs [accountants] who collaborate further with local militias to sell the resources across the border.85 The whole process of smuggling the ore out of the country is
thick with corruption, so that such middlemen can ward off interference by Congolese officials, supposedly instated to address tax evasion or lack of transparency in their financial dealings, with bribes, which are common and gratuitous.86 Of the four countries which share borders with the
DRC's resource-rich north-east, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania, all have been implicated in the trade in illegal resources like coltan, but Rwanda has historically been the preferred trade
81 Nadira Lalji, "The Resource Curse Revised: Conflict and Coltan in the Congo," Harvard International Review, Fall 2007, 35.
82 Jeffrey W. Mantz, "Improvisational Economies: Coltan Production in the Eastern Congo," 43. 83 Ibid., 47.
84 United Nations, “Letter Dated 12 November 2012 from the Chair of the Security Council Committee Established Pursuant to Resolution 1533 (2004) Concerning the Democratic Republic of the Congo Addressed to the President of the Security Council,” Security Council (2012), 40, accessed June 2, 2015.
http://www.un.org/ga/search/viewm_doc.asp?symbol=S/2012/843
85 Jeffrey W. Mantz, "Improvisational Economies: Coltan Production in the Eastern Congo," 42. 86 Ibid., 46.
route for conflict resources that are smuggled across the border. Apart from the advantage of a relatively porous border region that neither government has complete effective control over and which is densely forested, Rwanda has an advantage as a destination for illegal conflict resources. For unlike the DRC, Rwanda does not tax tantalum exports and is therefore more profitable than legal exports arranged through Kinshasa. Furthermore, Rwanda allows for imported minerals to be legally declared as minerals from Rwanda as long as they have been further processed to increase their value by approximately 30% in Rwanda, so that by the time they are exported it has become impossible to separate the legal from the illegal minerals.87
After having left the DRC for one of the bordering countries, the coltan then leaves Africa altogether. While during the nineties it had been mostly Western countries which imported
Congolese coltan, since 2000 the largest share of imports has been taken over by Asian countries, most notably China.88 Chinese processors who buy the mildly processed coltan from Rwanda or
other Central African countries tend to be small, low-profile companies who face less (international) pressure to provide reports of where they get their rough coltan, which they process further and then release onto the global market where it is bought by larger companies from around the world.89
3.3 – Corporate responsibility and certification schemes
As Mantz asserts, it is an inherent characteristic of modernity that “globalization,
particularly that which marshals technological and communicative advances, creates a world where societies can no longer be isolated; where constant interaction and exchange will usher a new era of interdependence.”90 Specifically, while the relationship of wealthy-poor exploitation between the
West and Africa (including the DRC specifically) goes back many centuries, globalization has made it increasingly easy for rich nations to get the industrial resources they require rapidly from virtually anywhere in the world, including from non-state actors (including armed groups) who can be
brought into direct touch with the international market. The relationship between armed groups, resources and industry is highlighted by the fact that, for instance, at coltan's price peak in 2000, both Sony and Citibank negotiated for coltan supplies directly with the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD), an armed group which was at the time active illegally in parts of the Eastern DRC with Rwandan backing.91
87 Raimund Bleischwitz, Monika Dittrich, and Chiara Pierdicca, "Coltan from Central Africa, International Trade and Implications for Any Certification," 23.
88 Ibid., 24. 89 Ibid., 25.
90 Jeffrey W. Mantz, "Improvisational Economies: Coltan Production in the Eastern Congo," 38.
