Focus Media (Kigali)
12 November 2008
opinion
Yet another session of hand-wringing talks about conflicts in the Congo has taken place. This was the one day regional summit in Nairobi last Friday, whose so-called purpose was to address the current fighting in the DR Congo.
Facing off: General Laurent Nkunda and DRC President Joseph Kabila (Internet photos)
In attendance were several regional heads of state-the presidents of Rwanda, DR Congo, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and Congo Brazzaville. Also talking was UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. As was Jean Ping, Secretary General of the African Union. As was Jendayi Frazer, US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs.
We cannot list all the notable dignitaries present to wring their hands over the latest impending humanitarian crisis in the Congo. They were very many.
As usual when all one is required to do is talk you will find many parties willing to participate. Think about it: how much money and people's time was wasted on this palaver?
The summit ended with a call for "tougher measures to end the conflict." Wow!
One of the more notable statements was: "the importance of implementing earlier agreements immediately, especially the Nairobi communiqué of November 2007 which called on the DRC to disarm and repatriate rebels of the FDLR".
Presumably the FDLR were quaking in their pants. But I am not betting on that.
Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete went one better. He "strongly called" for the immediate disarmament of the FDLR.
Who exactly was the man talking to? Congolese Joseph Kabila who had an expression of utter boredom the whole time? The UN "peacekeeping force" MONUC which has proved more adept at trading arms with the FDLR for gold and other precious minerals?
Now consider this for a moment. The very important people gathered in Nairobi are fully aware that FDLR-that charming umbrella group of people
(Interahamwe, ex FAR, Magrevi, Ibiswikiri etc etc) whose main aim in life was, and is to massacre anyone whose offence is to have been born a Tutsi-effectively call the shots in eastern Congo.
Those dignitaries jaw jawing in Nairobi know the FDLR long ago took over swathes of eastern Congo with the full knowledge of Kabila, and his father before him and Mobutu Sese Seko before both of them.
They know Kabila knows even if he wanted to he could never disarm the FDLR. The Congolese army basically has always been a motley collection of ill-disciplined, cowardly thugs who turn tail and run at the first sound of gunfire and whose main skill is to rape and loot helpless civilians.
Actually it looks like Kabila knows the only people he can rely on to fight for him in the crunch are the FDLR, so instead of disarming them he does the exact opposite-he makes sure they are armed to the teeth.
Everyone knows these things, but they carry on with their pretense of "holding talks". As usual. They hold talks because in reality that is all they can do.
Congolese themselves have to find a solution to their horrors (and here we are talking about other Congolese, not Kabila and his government who very much are part of the problem).
Problem neighbors
The Congo is a terrible mess. At this newspaper we like to call a spade a spade and there is no other way to candidly describe our giant neighbor to the West.
The country is an irreversible mess and no amount of talking in Nairobi or anywhere else will ever change the fact. The country has always been a mess, with a capital M and-unless Congolese do something wholly new; something breathtakingly revolutionary, creative and daring-it always will be a mess.
One feels for that country's long-suffering citizens; one feels deeply for them. No people should suffer the way Congolese do.
Impoverished Congolese die by the tens of thousands each year from the atrocities of low-intensity rebel conflicts and attendant problems like starvation, lack of medicine, exposure to the elements and so on. The suffering of this Sub-Saharan African country is an ever in-your-face reminder of the region's status as the world's basket case.
Of course there are African countries striving to transcend basket-case status. However one of the big problems with our part of the world is that even those societies trying to steer from insane situations to become well-functioning states tend to have problem neighbors always ready to export their chaos and bring everyone down with them.
A good example is South Africa. This is a country populated mostly by poor people; a country trying to recover from the ravages of Apartheid.
But they have a neighbor, Zimbabwe, whose senile ruler clings to power at all costs with a strangely docile population resorting to flee en masse over the country's borders every day-most notably to South Africa where they bring all their economic problems with them, exacerbating social tensions that can (and do) erupt into full scale riots and general mayhem.
An even better example of a country recovering from horror, from a shambolic mess to a functional society is our own.
But the Congo is just across the border and is willing to host Interahamwe militias, ex FAR and every Hutu extremist whose aim-everyone knows-is to continue with their genocide agenda.
In the Congo these mass murderers have found the ideal base from which to carry on with their agenda.
The "leadership" in Kinshasa (again we are calling a spade a spade, we are not diplomats) is spectacularly incompetent, weak, venal and every other adjective you can think of to describe a government that presides over one of the most failed states in the world.
In the Congo the social contract between a government and its citizens has never existed-beginning with the late 19th century when a rapacious Belgian monarch called King Leopold who, intent on loot and plunder, sent an American adventurer, Henry Morton Stanley to carve up this huge swath of territory on the pretext Leopold wanted to carry out "humanitarian work on behalf of the Africans".
There was little chance that the Congo, an amalgamation of hundreds of African ethnic groups arbitrarily bundled together into a so-called nation by a thieving European monarch was ever going to be a functional country once the colonial masters left-which they did in 1960.
Generally this is not a problem unique to the Congo-most of our states are that only in name, having come into existence at the whims and as a result of the greed of European nations that "scrambled" for Africa in the late 19th century, carving out spheres of colonial influence for plunder and slave labor.
One or two African countries would do a credible job of governing themselves once colonial rule ended.
Botswana for example actually looks like it is about to break ranks with other Sub-Saharan African countries and become a state in the real sense of the term: that is an entity that not only guarantees the rule of law but one that provides its citizens decent (decent being the operative word here) health care, decent schooling, decent roads and other transportation infrastructure like functional railways, and it's a country that puts in place conditions conducive to enterprise et cetera et cetera. They even have a social welfare system over there-the only African country with one.
A few other African societies have had modest levels of success governing themselves.
But the defining events of Africa in the five-decade period since the end of colonial rule have been very much what the Congo has experienced and what makes it the failed, problem state it is for us and everyone else in the region: thieving, incompetent corrupt rule that results into perennial military coups, civil wars, genocide, endless rebel wars, hunger and starvation and TV images of fly infested children and ragged, fleeing people with their miserable belongings on their heads.
Misleading international media reports
Now the TV screens are again filled with those images of death, despair and hopelessness.
As usual Western media organizations such as CNN and BBC dominate in beaming those images to the world. Inevitably you will have the same incidences of careless reporting by journalists of these organizations who tend to come in with pre-conceived notions of who "the good guys and bad guys" are, what the "sexy" angle to the story is and how to best package it in three minute segments for the easy digestion of busy Americans and Europeans-their main target audience.
So there you are in the morning in Kigali (if you have CNN) watching this reporter in the jungles of eastern Congo, somewhere near Goma describe horror scenes as the Camera pans in on a man dead in his miserable hut. The Camera then cuts to fleeing villagers as gunshots make popping sounds in the near distance.
The reporter drones on, using stock phrases such as "Laurent Nkunda's Tutsi forces" (as we are shown images of tough-looking, camouflage-clad, AK 47-armed young men presumably patrolling areas they've captured).
Towards the end of the clip the reporter is interviewing an elderly peasant woman who offers her unambiguous opinion of who is behind all the trouble, "it is the Tutsis killing us!"
And CNN offers that as proof that Nkunda is indeed a trouble causer.
The journalist does question whether this old woman is merely a poor old peasant with her ignorant tribal biases. He does not enlighten the audience that in the Congo you have people that other ethnic groups consider to be foreigners-namely the Tutsis (it is too much to expect, I presume, that that would ring a bell in the mind of the international community as one of the reasons of the Rwandan Genocide).
CNN and BBC audiences thus end up watching a de-contextualized, even biased report that utterly lacks in nuance (how, after all, can you have nuance in a three-minute segment and on a Western channel more concerned with ratings and sound-bites and whose approach is to offer up the conflict as another African shoot-em-up, tear-em-up somewhere in the jungle?).
Break it up, that is the solution
Few in the Western media and the international community emphasize the fact Nkunda and his people are fighting for their very survival because a weak, corrupt and incompetent leadership and a weak, ineffective UN "peace-keeping" force (MONUC) long ago ceded regions of the Congo to the FDLR whose vocation (we may repeat) is to kill anyone who is a Tutsi regardless of where they were born or what their nationality is.
The FDLR long ago began to set up their own government in an area twice as big as France-namely the Kivus-and even set up administrative units to collect taxes, and set up roadblocks to do what they do best-to rape Tutsis and massacre Tutsis.
But what is the first response from Kabila and his henchmen (and some members of the international community) when Nkunda and his CNDP take up arms to defend themselves; to save themselves against annihilation? "Oh Nkunda is a Tutsi!" As if that denies him his humanity; as if that denies Congolese Tutsis a right to their nationality; as if these Tutsis ever instructed King Leopold to make their lands part of the Congo.
In a recent editorial in this newspaper we argued that Congolese whose existence is threatened should secede and form a separate government and state of their own. Now we strongly urge them even more strongly to give that daring, revolutionary option serious consideration.
Breaking up the Congo is the only solution to the insanity there.
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Why breakup the D:R:C? we guess it,s the advice of his (Kagame) masters so that they can have all the freedom in the world to loot that part of Africa clean.Kagame, to us right now should be confronted by other African rulers to shed his evil plan for the DRC in particular and Africa in general.There is a sinister plan by Kagame and his supporters to dismember and proceed to looting the mineral resources of the D.R.C.Africa must stop this man before it,s too late,he definitely does not have the interest of Africa at heart. Common, kagame,is this the latest plan from the Americans and the E:U? well, tell them that Africa is listening and watching with keen interest all the happenings in the Congo,because we know that a stable and prosperous D.R.C is a stable and prosperous Africa.Shed your evil plans before you get yourself burnt by the collective militancy of the entire African people,another sellout right on our doorsteps.Keep off the D.R.C kagame, if you,re wise listen to the African people not the thieves and plunderers from the west and elsewhere.
Why breaking the DRC? This suggestion must be made for Rwanda, because so small minority are governed the country! It does will be a solution for Tutsis and Hutus instead to transfer their hegemony conflicts to the DRC. Before 1960 they wasn't no Tutsis phenomenal in DRC and why now? No Congolese from south, north, east and west will accept DRC to be break. The genocide in Rwanda is the main route of the today problem in DRC, because the FLDR come from Rwanda to Congo with the blessing of the UN. Ok if we accept that Nkunda is a Congolese, why he served in FPR? DRC’s conflict is not only Congolese but international because the route of the problem is outside the DRC, it is Rwanda.
Rwanda-not D.R Congo- is the country that needs to be broken in two states: one hutuland and another tutsiland precisely because of the inability of two tribes to live together there. What is happening in Congo is only a spill over of the hatred between tutsis and hutus of Rwanda. With well over 400 tribes, Congo has no minority and all its people live peacefully.Radical tutsis in Rwanda hope to keep banking on the mass killings there in 1994 that themselves masterminded to maintain large hutu populations outside so they can blame other countries like DRC. There's is an awekening of moderate tutsis now in Eastern Congo who oppose this tendency of radical tutsis in the region to leave peacefully with other communities. Change is coming in the region.
Moderate tutsis in Eastern Congo oppose this tendency of radical tutsis to expansion wars and only wish to leave peacefully with other communities.
I would like to see those who are saying Congo should breack up , to go and try to do it. Congo is going through a tough time doesn't mean they have to breack up to find the solution. Every congolese province is full of ressources . what makes you (geniuses in solving problems ) think breaking congo into peices will solve the problem?
This is my SOLUTION . Put a fence on the Congo-Rwanda , Congo- Uganda and Congo-Burundi borders. Make sure the HUTUs are disarmed and are put in the hands of the UN. It's the responsability of the UN to desarm FDLR since they are the ones that begged ZAIRE to open the border for the HUTU refigees.
But the notion that some how DRC has to be broken up, is a sick and brainless solution.
Rwandans , Ugandan , Burundin are so tiny but are they immune from problems or have they solved their proplems?
Some people need to go back to school. and that's those who are saying congo need to breakup. all that is jealusy not sympathy.
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Mikhael Missakabo reveals the extent to which Canadian mining companies are benefiting from instability and weak institutions in the Democratic Republic of Congo to reap huge profits while paying little attention to the ecological and human cost of their actions. These companies have become adept at hedging their bets in the ongoing conflict and negotiating contracts that literally impoverish the host country. All that remains in their wake is environmental and economic and social ruin.
Without doubt, public or private discussion about Africa's socio-economic context rarely revolves around foreign investment. However, at the 2006 Indaba, a senior official from a Canadian mining concern urged his colleagues to take advantage of the 'unusual conditions' and venture to invest in the DRC. This in spite of the dire press reportage coming out of that tortured country. Cape Town formed an idyllic backdrop far removed from the mining areas of Africa, for the Indaba, an annual meeting bringing together the different players in the mining industry interested in African adventure. Strange, and yet true, this illustration of the paradoxes that characterise relations between Africa and the West.
Without delving too deeply into this paradox, we will attempt to cast light on the consequences of Canadian mining operations in the DRC. Their numerical superiority makes them stand out. It is clear that every Canadian mining company leaves a footprint. This footprint is not merely ecological, but also socio-economic. Unfortunately, this is not all; alas, these effects are felt even at the level of human rights.
By 'unusual conditions', this official was referring to the favourable juridico-legal and fiscal environment offered by the DRC government to those investing in the mining sector. The DRC is considered a fiscal and juridical paradise for mining companies. The reasons for this are both multiple and intricate.
The DRC has been steeped in crisis for the last two decades. The country is abundantly blessed by nature. The climate is ideal, water is plentiful, fauna and flora abound. The ground is replete with vast mineral reserves. However, the commercial exploitation of these resources has not translated into development. In other words, the living standards of the Congolese people have not improved. On the contrary, one may venture that mining has in fact led to the deterioration of the people's living standards.
Mining has always dominated the DRC's economic landscape, and served as its main driving force. Mining contributes approximately 70% of the country's annual budget. Gécamines is the largest mining concessionaire in Katanga. Today, however, Gécamines is defunct as a result of the mismanagement and looting of the Mobutu regime. Given that Gécamines was previously the largest employer in Katanga, one can imagine the effects of its collapse. Following the collapse, the government took the decision to allow artisan and small-scale mining of copper/cobalt. The justification for this was the creation of a Congolese middle-class to serve as a conveyor-belt for harmonious development. When Gécamines closed down, it was necessary to 'create jobs' for former employees who had been laid off. Ten years earlier, a decision had been taken to liberalise artisan and small-scale diamond mining in Kasai. Sadly, the artisan and small-scale mining of Copper/cobalt, diamonds and coltan benefits small capitalist expatriates who use Congolese as middlemen and labourers.
Under pressure for the World Bank, the government developed the Mining Code to guide the liberalisation of the mining sector. By and large, the Code concretises the liberalisation of the sector. The playing field may be level, but the players are not of the same calibre, or in the same class for that matter. Consequently, mining companies are making a beeline for the DRC. One would no doubt expect abuses, blunders and pitfalls. However, the Congo has ended up falling victim to its own initiative. Forced to negotiate from a position of weakness, the government has been issuing lop-sided contracts. In some cases, the contracts actually gave the concessionaires the very means to subvert the aims of liberalisation. This sabotage is in turn stifling the growth of the indigenous middle-class. Following pressure from international NGOs and Congolese civil society, the contracts were reviewed in an effort to correct the imbalances. Apparently, the mining companies use loopholes in the mining code, and other means to safeguard their interests.
According to Alain Denault, author of 'Noir Canada: Pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique', Canadian mining firms operating in Africa are involved in levels of abuse worse than those perpetrated by the former colonial empires. In the early 1990s, just after the World Bank-inspired privatisation wave, Canadian firms were profiting from the Mobutu regime. Shortly after, Laurent Kabila's rebellion erupted. Within a few weeks, the conflict was full-blown. The mining firms - including the Canadians - went over to the winning side. Mining contracts signed by Kabila were soon distributed. By the same stroke, Kabila received the financial means to support his war effort, and de facto international economic legitimacy, even before the fall of the Mobutu regime. For Canadian companies like Banro Corporation or Barrick Gold, so long as business remained lucrative after as before, the regime did not matter.
Banro, Kinross-Forrest, Barrick Gold, Emaxon, Lundin (Tenke Fungurume Mining), Mindev, and Anvil Mining are among the more prominent Canadian companies involved. Some of these provide us with exemplars of the Canadian firms' footprints in the DRC. An exhaustive list of these companies involved would be long and assorted. Such would include both private and publicly funded Canadian companies, operating bank accounts and holding addresses in tax havens. While some are privately owned, others are listed on several Canadian stock exchanges. Toronto's TSX is the more attractive of the stock exchanges because it tends to be less demanding with regard to mining companies and their declared values. Some analysts have even asserted that, unlike the American exchanges, the TSX turns a blind eye to baseline evaluations of exploratory mining. These allow mining companies to speculate on the real value of resources and increase their profits exponentially. This little digression helps to explain the situation with Gécamines.
In Katanga and Kasaï Oriental, the local economies are dependent on mining. Gécamines is a parastatal operating in Katanga and as mentioned, it is in decline, and one of the first consequences of this is that employees are going without salaries. In addition, there are a lot of small to medium companies sub-contracted to Gécamines that are now suffering. To avoid open rebellion Mobutu liberalised the mining sector. Artisan and small-scale mining boomed and with this came ecological disaster and rock falls that claimed lives.
FOOTPRINTS
Mutoshi is a small neighbourhood of Kolwezi in Katanga. Since 2007 Mutoshi has seen a gold-rush, with thousands of artisan and small-scale miners, many of them former Gécamines employees, arriving to pan a rich abandoned mine. This mine is adjacent to the little town. Following a joint-venture with the Canadian firm Anvil Mining, operations resumed here and the artisan and small-scale miners were chased off. Desperately seeking a means of survival, these miners carried on mining, following rich seams located under houses and streets in Mutoshi. One can imagine the net result: homes and roads in the town under assault by artisan and small-scale miners.
Today, Canadian firms own in excess of $300 billion worth of assets in the DRC, most of it acquired through dodgy contracts signed with mining parastatals. Following pressure from civil society, opposition parties and international NGOs, the government has revisited some of these contracts. One particular contract between Gécamines and Tenke Fungurume Mining (TFM) is worth a mention. This Canadian company (a branch of Lundin Mining) controls an area containing 13 identified fields that together hold the planet's largest reserves of coltan. In 2007 TFM's capital investments were estimated at $900 million. In 2008, Gécamines suddenly realised that TFM had increased its capital investment to $1.75 billion, and an extra $850 million was ploughed in without informing or consulting its principle partner. TFM underhandedly decreased Gécamines' share of the joint-venture from 45% to 17.5%, using improvements to infrastructure and rising costs as an excuse. TFM is thus over-invested in the operation, considering that the Mining Code allows investors to recoup their initial outlay on a sliding scale. This means that TFM will be able to recoup its over-investment within the first few years of production, and during this time, Gécamines and the government will get nothing.
Other Canadian companies have also benefited from this scenario. A contract signed in 2005 between Gécamines and Kinross-Forrest granted 75% of the shared value to the latter. According to the contract the capital outlay, including any interest accrued, can be recouped in less than five years after the start of effective production. Kinriss-Forrest is thus helping itself to the lion's share of production at the expense of the Congolese state and its citizens. Another Canadian company Emmaxon has also delivered a masterstroke by obtaining exclusive rights to diamond mining.
Anvil Mining operates three sites in Katanga, but it is the Dikulushi one that caught the attention of the Commission. A clause in the 1998 contract granted Anvil and its sub-contractors an exemption from taxes and royalties for a period of 20 years. As for the Mutoshi site, the consequences are clear, with residents sacrificing their town and their homes to mine copper/cobalt. Ecological impact is certainly not a key concern for artisan and small-scale miners. For some mining companies, human rights are not a major concern. In 2005, Anvil Mining is said to have provided logistical support for the transportation of army troops during an operation in which civilian lives were lost. Among the dead were scores of women and children.
This year the town of Likasi witnessed violent confrontations between authorities and artisan and small-scale miners, resulting in one death and 32 injured. The cause of the clash was the expulsion of the miners from an old abandoned Gécamines mine in Kamatanda (about seven kilometres from Likasi) that had subsequently been transferred to a Canadian company.
The ecological impact of mining is becoming increasingly evident. A large quantity of chemical effluent from the mines is contaminating the water table. Streams and rivers are littered with chemical waste. A few days ago, the nationwide station Radio Okapi broadcast a worrying report by the Centre for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law condemning the pollution of drinking water in Lubumbashi, a city of four million and the capital of Katanga. The NGO points the finger at mining companies and highlights 'the occurrence of congenital birth defects at various hospitals in the town. This could be a consequence of drinking polluted water.'
THE PARADOX
Approximately 60% of mining companies operating in Africa are Canadian-owned or funded with Canadian capital. Everywhere that mining takes place in Africa there are serious problems. These challenges are not only socio-economic. They are also ecological, and the impact on human rights. Obviously, Africa does not deserve that which is good for Canada, an attitude which seems to pervade the decisions and actions of companies operating in the continent.
The Peter Munk Cardiac Center and the Peter Munk International Center at the University of Toronto benefit from the generosity of the president of Barrick Gold. Teachers' pensions, OMERS, Canada Pension Plan, and others all invest in Canadian companies mining in the DRC. Everybody is benefiting! Meanwhile the royalties that these companies pay to the DRC government amount to a mere 5%.
75% of the country's 60 million inhabitants (around 45 million people) survive on less than a dollar a day. Production costs are very low, there is rampant unemployment, and efforts at organised labour are frequently scuppered. The Banro Corporation controls 13 mining permits in south Kivu, covering concessions that hold approximately 2178 million ounces of gold. Two years ago, Banro claimed to have contributed the welfare of the local population by donating a small kitchen to the local hospital.
CIDA and SNC-Lavalin spent about $2 million on a feasibility study for the construction of the Inga 3 hydroelectric dam. The dam would produce electricity for export, meaning the local residents would have to continue cutting down trees and burning charcoal for cooking, thus further destroying the environment. At the last project meeting held in London, civil society and DRC government representatives were not given a voice. According to Alain Denault, 'it is worrying to see government agencies like CIDA giving development aid to certain African countries whose resources Canadian companies continue to pillage. CIDA markets Canada while masking the atrocities committed by Canadian companies.'
One wonders why the legal and moral obligations that apply to mining companies in Canada are not applicable in the tropics. It is obvious that the mining companies' primary objective is profit. But this should not preclude the respect for the engagement conditions of host countries. These companies largely resort to means that would be scarcely acceptable in Canada: rapacious financial practices, human rights violations, violations of ecological standards, stockpiling of undervalued resources. All of these place the future of Africa at risk.
We can echo Alain Denault's question: 'What good is served through the shameless extraction of diamonds and gold in Africa, as in Canada, particularly since the profits only accrue to shady companies who continue to threaten the common good?'
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Being surrounded by small size countries is not synonym to reducing yourself. President Kagame should remember how President Mobutu was in control of the entire region for decades. The mess they have been talking about is just in the eastern part of the country not everywhere. If this is happening it's because of the bigger plot to dismantle the nation that is the African hope for change. Anything good happening in DRCongo will easily benefit the whole Africa. Its prosperity is just like electing Obama to the White House. A country like Rwanda should seek its own development in good organisation and hard working, as they now pretend to be, but not in looting from neighboring resources. A wish to balkanize DRCongo is a selfish desire of business people not for welfare community.