A war has been raging for almost thirty years in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) - a war virtually ignored by the world's media. Between 6.5 million and 10 million people have been killed and over 7 million displaced. This was why the DRC's national football team took the opportunity of the 2024 African Nations Cup to break this media silence, by lining up before their match with one hand placed at their temples like a revolver and the other in front of their mouths.

   Today, the eastern DRC, some 1,900 miles from the capital, Kinshasa, is ravaged by over 200 armed militias. Some are led by indigenous Congolese warlords, but many are sponsored by the neighbouring states of Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. These militias make their living by racketeering small farmers who cut rare timber from the forests or produce cocoa, and by extorting hundreds of thousands of “mineral diggers”. Two of the main provinces of the region, North and South Kivu, contain the world's largest reserves of coltan ore from which tantalum, the rare earth element, is extracted, as well as deposits of tin and tungsten. These are essential for capacitors, resistors and conductors used in cell phones, computers and sophisticated medical devices - and of course, in the weapons, car and aeronautic industries. In Kivu and Ituri, further north, there are also large gold deposits.

   These ongoing wars, with their trail of atrocities, rape and sexual mutilation, used as weapons of war, have causes, a history and a chain of responsible agents. The real perpetrators are indeed, “our" leaders; the leaders of the great imperialist powers. They speak of a “Congolese evil"or an “African curse”, and dare to declare, as Macron did in March 2023 in Kinshasa: “You have not been able to restore sovereignty, either military or security. We mustn't look outside the country for culprits”. These cynical and misleading statements are designed to conceal the responsibility of the great powers - and France's is overwhelming - in wars that are the product of decades of pillage and imperialist rivalries.

The time bombs of colonial policy

These rivalries date back to the colonial division imposed on Africa at the 1885 conference in Berlin, which saw the rich European powers divide Africa up between themselves. Congo Leopoldville, the future DRC, a region as vast as Western Europe, and situated in the Congo River basin, became the personal property of the Belgian king Leopold II, established without any respect for its peoples, languages or customs. Britain took over Uganda, while Germany colonised Rwanda and Burundi, which were reclaimed by Belgium in 1918 after Germany's defeat in WW1.

   Dividing and conquering, the colonial powers regrouped the human beings who lived in these regions according to what they called “ethnicities”. In Rwanda, the colonisers favoured Tutsi elites. But in neighbouring Congo, they dismissed traditional Tutsi chiefs in the East. They displaced populations according to their labour needs. In 1937, the Belgian colonial administration created the Banyarwanda Immigration Mission, which deported Tutsis from Rwanda to Congolese regions. Rwandan Hutus were also displaced and sent to work in the gold mines of Kivu and the copper mines of Katanga. By using ethnic divisions, the Belgian colonisers, like the British and French in their respective empires, set in motion the ticking time bombs that are still detonating today.

   In 1960, when Belgium conceded independence to Congo, the country's unity was extremely fragile. Nothing in the colonial past had forged solid links between the different regions of this immense country, quite the contrary. The economy had been entirely built for the benefit of the metropolis. There was no solid national bourgeoisie, nor even a unified ruling class. Barely independent, the Congolese state was subjected to strong separatist pressures. Each political clan, attached to a province, defended its access to the country's wealth. And behind each of them a major power lined up. So for instance, from 1960 to 1963, the Belgians and French supported the secession of Katanga, a region rich in copper and cobalt.

   The United States, however, strongly opposed the country's break-up. This might have benefited the US's less powerful competitors, but it could also have destabilised the entire region and allowed the then Soviet Union to increase its influence. In 1963, through the UN, the United States intervened militarily to bring Colonel Mobutu Sese Seko to power, against the Katangese secession, but also against the revolt and guerrilla movements that were shaking Congo. Leaders who, in the eyes of the population, embodied an anti-imperialist policy were systematically attacked and even assassinated, like the first elected independence prime minister of the DRC, the pan-Africanist, Patrice Lumumba. Killed on 17 January 1961 by Katangan, French and Belgian mercenaries, with the blessing of the CIA, he became a symbol of the struggle against imperialism, in the Congo and far beyond, and remains so, right up to the present day.

   In the independent Congo, guerrilla groups referring more or less to Marxism emerged, such as that of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who would make his name thirty years later. Kabila even welcomed the Cuban revolutionary, Che Guevara into his guerilla army along with 150 instructors in 1965. This period also saw the political awakening of workers, like the miners as described in Jean Ziegler's novel “The gold of Maniema”. This novel tells how workers were politicised by militant refugees from Portugal. But the workers’ combativeness was contained and led into a political blind alley by the guerrillas, who claimed to be Marxist only in order to gain the support of the USSR, while defending their own rival apparatus and leaders, in opposition to the central power which was sponsored by imperialism - and who merely aspired to capitalist ownership themselves.

   For 32 years, Mobutu’s dictatorial regime carried out widespread plunder of the country's wealth, leading to the degradation of all infrastructure, from the few public services to industrial and mining enterprises. This plunder could only continue with the constant military, financial and political Democratic Republic of Congo players protest against the “forgotten” war in East Congo before their Africa Cup of Nations semi-final match support of the big powers, for whom Mobutu was the most loyal leader in the region. From the 1980s onwards, as the price of raw materials plummeted, the economic situation became catastrophic. Structural adjustment programmes imposed by the IMF and World Bank wiped out what few schools, hospitals and clinics remained.

Chaos in the DRC, the product of imperialist rivalries

By the 1990s, Mobutu’s regime was on its last legs. The economic crisis had sharpened divisions and exacerbated centrifugal forces. The national army could no longer afford to equip itself nor pay its soldiers. In the East, politicians used ethnic rivalries to strengthen their local power and enrich themselves by organising their own troops. As early as 1993 in North Kivu, the demagoguery of politicians led to anti-Tutsi pogroms, which left 7,000 people dead and 250,000 displaced. But it was the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, organised by the French-backed Hutu regime, that tipped the region into war. The genocidal armies, defeated by Paul Kagame’s US-backed army and disarmed, fled under the protection of the French army, which then returned their weapons to them.

   France can be said to be directly responsible for the chaos in the Great Lakes region of East DRC. Last April, on the anniversary of the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, Macron may have admitted that France “could have stopped the genocide with its Western and African allies, but lacked the will to do so”, but this is pure hypocrisy. It was nothing to do with “lack of will”. The French government at the time purposefully armed and protected the genocidal militias. These militias then took refuge in eastern Congo, using the 1.5 million Hutu refugees who had fled reprisals from Kagame’s forces as their recruitment base. There, they formed the Front démocratique de libération du Rwanda (FDLR), which, with its 100,000-strong army, attacked the Congolese Tutsi population. In response to FDLR abuses, Tutsi-dominated militias were formed. The current M23, which with Rwanda’s support has subsequently transformed into a fully-fledged army, has its origins in these militias.

   The bloody chaos in Rwanda thus spread to the Congo. This conflagration coincided with the death agony of the Mobutu regime. Even mining was in free-fall, while advances in electronic technologies sharpened rivalries for control of the minerals necessary for their production. So, in 1997, the United States dropped its support for Mobutu, and placed its bets on his old rival Laurent- Désiré Kabila. From his stronghold in the East, and with the support of the Rwandan and Ugandan armies and the US, Kabila overthrew Mobutu, whose army was already collapsing. During this first Congolese war, capitalists linked to multi-national mining conglomerate, Anglo-American, signed contracts from which Kabila and the businessmen around him drew large payments. In this struggle, French capitalist interests were left out of the picture, as France had supported Mobutu to the very end.

   But the appetites which had been stimulated by the Congolese mining jackpot were soon deprived of the desired feast. Kabila turned against his former Rwandan and Ugandan allies. From 1998 to 2003, a new war started to ravage most of the country, over control of diamonds, copper and cobalt. The east of the country was occupied by Rwandan and Ugandan troops. By now, up to twelve African countries were involved in this “African World War".

   Not all the players in this generalised war had the same level of responsibility: small-scale warlords, and above them Congolese or foreign troops, were indeed responsible for violent exactions and massacres. But, much higher up, it was the big powers who were presiding over this disaster. To protect the interests of their industrialists in gaining access to resources, to defend their influence against rivals, the imperialists have supported this or that dictator or armed group, depending on how the wind has been blowing, by supplying the military equipment needed - literally fuelling war.

   So no, barbarism is not a congenital defect of the DRC and Africa: it is an export product of imperialism, just like assault rifles and rocket launchers.

Endless confrontations, the product of a predatory economy

In 2003, so-called peace agreements were signed, but the war in the eastern DRC has never stopped. Today, the population is still caught between a multitude of armed gangs. Some are small gangs, controlling an artisanal mine, or a village and its farmland. They may originate from self-defehce groups such as the Wazalendo (“patriots" in Kiswahili), recently integrated into the DRC armed forces (FARDC) by the current Congolese president, Félix Tshisekedi. Others are larger in scale, such as the Rwandan-backed M23, which includes Rwandan soldiers, or the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a guerrilla group opposed to the Ugandan regime and now affiliated to the Islamic State. Kivu and Ituri in the northeast of the DRC serve as safe havens for armed groups opposed to the regimes of countries in the region. All claim to defend freedom, democracy and the people, but in fact they are only military apparatuses aspiring to seize power and establish their own dictatorships.

   Alliances and counter-alliances between these militias and regional armies are constantly changing, as they plunder the minerals that fuel the world capitalist economy. There is no unity in the east of the country, where the central state is powerless, and there is no lasting common interest among these warlords, whether they be Congolese or foreign. Each is intent on taking its share of the plunder, shifting alliances and fomenting endless confrontations. But in the end, they all submit to imperialism because their power is fragile, the product of a predatory world economy.

   President Tshisekedi himself, re-elected last December, presides over a house of cards, held together only by the grace of the great powers. He was received in Paris in April 2024 by Macron. Joe Biden sent a special representative to his inauguration in Kinshasa. In the chaos of unstable alliances, Tshisekedi is no exception. Until November 2021, he was an ally of Kagamé, the Rwandan president, and the two states had signed an agreement for the processing of ores from the Société Aurifére du Kivu et du Maniéma (Kivu and Maniema Gold Mining Company) by a Rwandan refinery. The two presidents claimed to be “brothers”. Rwandair used to fly to Kinshasa and other major cities in the DRC. But this honeymoon was destroyed by rivalries between Rwanda and Uganda.

   In November 2021, the DRC signed a military agreement with Uganda, as well as contracts for infrastructure, including a road between Goma, the capital of North Kivu, and Beni, a town of one million inhabitants in the north of the province. The agreement stipulated that the work was to be protected by the Ugandan army: a challenge to Rwanda’s role in this region, where control of the roads is crucial. It is through this network that businessmen import consumer goods and weapons, and export cocoa and minerals. Shortly after the agreement between the DRC and Uganda was signed, the conflict in North Kivu escalated sharply with an offensive by the Rwandan-backed M23. Tensions with the DRC then became explosive, and exacerbated as each side played on nationalism to get the population to rally behind it. In December 2023, during the DRC presidential election, Félix Tshisekedi compared Kagamé to Hitler, accusing him of wanting to get his hands on the eastern DRC. Kagamé responded by denying any involvement, even though Rwandan soldiers are fighting in the M23 with his backing.

   But this is far from being the only militia. There are also numerous “private military companies”, a euphemism for mercenaw bands. The Russian “Wagner group" is not (for now) present in the DRC, but mercenaries linked to France are. In Goma, the capital of North Kivu, former members of the French Foreign Legion operate alongside shady businessmen such as a certain Olivier Bazin, alias “Colonel Mario”, a military equipment broker. His private military company, Agemira, has signed a contract with the Congolese army for the maintenance of its planes and helicopters, carried out by some forty former Belarusian and Georgian soldiers. Like many post-independence states, the Congolese state is collapsing, leaving power in the hands of mercenary groups who sell themselves to the highest bidder to protect the plundering of the DRC’s natural resources.

Mineral plundering

In the midst of this chaos, the extraction of minerals has never stopped - it directly nourishes the fighting and deadly displacement of populations. The DRC has 60% to 80% of the world's coltan reserves. It supplied 44% of global production of this tantalum-containing ore in 2019, over 2,000 tons. Most of this comes from so-called “artisanal” mines, such as Rubaya in North Kivu, which produces 15% of the world's coltan.

   The Congolese Ministry of Mines sells concessions to companies. Unlike copper and cobalt mining in Katanga, which is dominated by the Swiss Glencore, the Belgian-Congolese Georges Forrest group, and large Chinese state-owned companies, the companies involved in coltan mining are more modest in size. The capital required is limited, as extraction is carried out by primitive means, using only the muscle power of the miners, who dig with shovels and crowbars. The companies managing the concessions change frequently and are opaque, as are the companies which then export the ore via Rwanda, Burundi or Uganda.

   Two companies currently dominate the export of coltan from the DRC, including CDMC, which is chaired by a British businessman, John Crowley, along with Swiss broker, Chris Huber. Minerals are sent to Rwanda or Uganda by land, by canoes across the region's lakes, or by air. There are few roads in good enough condition for transport, but there are many small private airfields. The ore is then shipped to the major ports on Africa's east coast, such as Dar-es-Salam in Tanzania, and on to smelters in Thailand, Malaysia and China. Finally, the metals reach the giants of the electronics, aeronautics and arms industries, in North America, Europe or Japan, landing on the production lines of Apple, Intel, Samsung, Motorola, Thales, Dassault, etc. These companies suck up the wealth extracted by the miners of the DRC with their hands and their pickaxes, in order to feed high-tech production.

Whose “barbarism"?

Officially, metals mined in the war-torn regions of the DRC are subject to export regulation. Representatives of major Western companies claim to have guarantees that the tantalum or tin they use does not come from “bIood minera/s". But who can believe them? Of course, there are some very nice product labels, supposedly certifying that the ores do not come from areas controlled by armed gangs. But the certification is carried out by the exporters themselves. As they joke among themselves, “The wolves are guarding the sheepfo/d". These tin and coltan capitalists distribute bribes to officials of the Congolese government's Ministry of Mines to get the right stamp of approval. These civil servants often have no choice: paid less than £1 a day, they have to support their families, and those who refuse bribery suffer the consequences at the hands of the armed gangs in the service of the company that holds the concession.

   The working conditions of the 240,000 miners who extract coltan, tin and tungsten are inhuman. Reports, often poignant, show the lives of these miners, who dig pits and galleries in the walls of the Kivu mountains, and the women and children who enter the holes to extract blocks of coltan under the constant threat of a landslide. Their exploitation is brutal. Concessionary companies seek to lower the price paid to miners for their ore, and sometimes there are angry outbursts. In 2019and 2020, miners in Masisi, North Kivu, clashed with the mining police, employed by the concession companies who never paid on time.

   Since 2012, gold production in eastern DRC has also been on the rise. Most of these mines are also small and artisanal, controlled by armed gangs. But there are also industrial mines, like the Kibali mine in the northern Ituri province. This is one of the world's largest gold mines, controlled by South Africa's AngloGold and Canada's BarrickGold, with operations subcontracted to a subsidiary of the French Bouygues group. These workers are a little better off, but they belong to the same working class as the miners in the so-called artisanal mines. They are often the same workers, moving from one region to another, from one mine to another, sometimes controlled by a warlord, sometimes by western capitalists, depending on the current level of inter-militia fighting and available work. But the outbursts of anger at mining sites demonstrate that workers in the Congo are not just victims of exploitation. Through their work and their indispensable role, they also have the strength to defend themselves.

The future is in the hands of the working class

Faced with the horror of the situation, commentators and non-profit organisations argue for better certification of exported minerals. This is impossible, and they know it, as long as the authorities and private companies are the ones to carry out this so-called control, and not the workers themselves. Others explain that products containing coltan or other rare metals should be boycotted. But today, tantalum is indispensable for medical equipment and vital electronic installations. And then there are the leaders of the major powers who suggest that UN intervention will stabilise the situation. Today, the United Nations Mission in Congo (MONUSCO) is in the process of withdrawing, with some of its officers implicated in arms trafficking...

It is obvious that the imperialist-dominated UN has nothing to offer the population of the DRC.  But neither do DRC politicians, who are above all, preoccupied with gaining a position that gives them access to the crumbs of the plunder left to them by western capitalists.

   Throughout Africa, many of the states born of independence are collapsing, demonstrating that there is no hope for development under this system, even in a country as vast and rich in natural resources as the DRC. Capitalism has turned the eastern DRC into a bloody quagmire to feed the fortunes of American and European billionaires. This chaos is not a problem intrinsic to the DRC but merely a demonstration that in this degenerate imperialist phase of capitalism only underdevelopment and widespread violence is on offer to what used to be called the Third World.

    But in the DRC, as everywhere else on the planet, there is a working class without which society would not exist, without which the economy would not function. Hope can come only from the working population. These are the workers in the mines and the many small-scale transport workers who use trucks or even bicycles to distribute essential goods to the population. They are the small farmers who produce cocoa; the woodcutters exploited by warlords; the small street vendors, the “diggers”. On the other side of the border, in Uganda or Burundi, life is no easier for workers, who have to contend with the high cost of living, violence from the authorities and their police. The exactions of militias like the M23, and the nationalist rhetoric of politicians, fuel ethnic tensions. This, too, is a way of pitting poor against poor, a demagogy that paves the way for further massacres. But there is nothing inevitable about this.

    If and when a revolt against exploitation breaks out, it can spread fast, because there are links between all these workers. In East Africa, in Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and as far as Mayotte, there are many refugees from eastern DRC. In the rich countries of Europe and the United States, there are also Congolese refugees who have become part of their working classes. Through the supply chains of capitalist industry, we are all bound together by exploitation.

    Only workers can put society back on its feet, because they are the ones who ensure production everywhere on the planet, from the coltan mines to the high-tech electronics factories of the rich countries, via the foundries of Southeast Asia. The chaos spreading across the African continent and elsewhere on the planet is rooted in the domination of the great powers. The next workers’ revolution could start in a mine in the DRC, but it will win only if it spreads everywhere, and overturns the entire imperialist order. The working class can wage this struggle to the end, in the poor countries dominated by imperialism as well as in the rich citadels of capitalism - and it is the only force which can.

 

June 2024