Labourers carry sacks of ore at the SMB coltan mine near the town of Rubaya in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, in August, 2019.Baz Ratner/Reuters
Robert Rotberg is the founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s program on intrastate conflict, a former senior fellow at CIGI and president emeritus of the World Peace Foundation.
Africa has more than its fair share of horrendous humanitarian emergencies. Today, half of Sudan’s 47 million people are experiencing severe hunger; 755,000 face starvation. Somalis and northern Ethiopians are also food-short, as are many millions of Malawians, Zambians and Zimbabweans. However, after Sudan, the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is the neediest region. According to the World Food Programme (WFP), a staggering 23.4 million Congolese suffer from severe hunger.
The peoples of the three eastern Congolese provinces of South Kivu, North Kivu and Ituri are especially endangered. In North Kivu alone, the WFP says that 720,000 people have lost their homes and livelihoods due to regional violence. It estimates that nearly 3 million children in the region are acutely malnourished. Cholera is rife, too, and epidemics of Ebola recur.
The famine has been worsened by unremitting, warlord-led violence in the region. Last month, a loose affiliation of militia groups calling itself the Co-operative for the Development of the Congo (CODECO) massacred 23 civilians in attacks across Ituri, while the Islamic State-affiliated Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) killed 38 people in North Kivu. The March 23 (M23) Movement militia group has for several years killed wantonly in North and South Kivu and continues to do so.
“Most of the victims [attacked by CODECO] were killed with machetes, but those who tried to flee were shot. In all these villages, people’s belongings were taken, houses were burnt down,” the head of one of the local communities that was attacked in Ituri told Reuters. The ADF had attacked multiple villages in North Kivu with machine guns and machetes just two weeks prior, while the M23 menaced Goma and other towns near Lake Kivu (on the DRC’s border with Rwanda), despite the presence of UN peacekeepers and a Congolese army detachment. The UN has accused Rwanda of supplying weapons and troops to bolster the M23 rebels’ efforts.
M23 has long been suspected of being a Rwandan proxy and a purposeful destabilizer of the region, attacking mostly Hutu civilians in the Kivus. It also has alleged ties to Rwandan President Paul Kagame.
In May and June, the M23 bombed villages and displaced persons camps in North Kivu, killing dozens. Together with the CODECO assaults and the continued ADF attacks, 20 million people in the three most affected eastern Congo provinces are never far from danger – or hunger.
These all could be considered inter-ethnic conflicts, but, in reality, they are expressions of brutal competition for power, riches and authority in a part of the DRC (more than 2,500 kilometres from the capital Kinshasa) that has been plagued by warlord-perpetrated battles for several decades. Lust for spoils drives the killings in the region and leads to hunger crises.
The region’s internal rivalries became even more desperate and deadly when a range of minerals found in the eastern Congo proved valuable for electronic equipment such as cellphones and stealth aircraft in recent decades. One of these minerals is coltan – tantalite and columbite, combined – which is essential for the manufacture of handheld devices. When refined, coltan becomes a heat-resistant powder, called metallic tantalum, which has unique properties for storing electrical charge. It is found in every phone and laptop, and in modern aircraft and cars.
The Kivus and Ituri also hold deposits of cobalt – critical in making lithium batteries – as well as copper, tin, tungsten and gold. Artisanal (hand-dug) mining unearths coltan and these other extremely valuable resources. The rebel movements would hardly survive if profits from selling such minerals were not so immensely rewarding. CODECO, the ADF and M23 effectively exist to grab those products from local miners. The endless killings are collateral damage from these many local battles.
How best to stop the carnage in eastern Congo? The UN peacekeeping mission has tried. So has the official Congolese army, and for months last year, so did an East African military force led by Kenya. South African soldiers are there now. UN representatives wring their hands. Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi has failed to find a path to peace.
What has not been tried in an enforceable manner is curtailing or banning mineral sales and preventing the onward transmission of the ores to Rwanda and the United Arab Emirates. Minerals fund the rebel movements. Tight export controls at Congolese border crossings and the exclusion of black-market sales would be essential. By starving the warlords of their profits, peace might have a better chance. Lives would be saved, and the pangs of hunger would be reduced.