Joseph Busisi’s fiancée may never learn that the man she is secretly betrothed to is lying paralyzed in Sendwe Hospital. He is one of hundreds of thousands of victims of what the United Nations calls Congo’s “war economy.” Angela will never know the price Busisi paid for the dream he nurtured in endless conversations with her. When he proposed, she pointed out that he had no income with which to support a family.
“There were no schools within 10 km of walking (bicycles were too expensive), and no land to farm,” he says, “but I hear many things about young boys making money from digging in mines.”
He scraped together every Congolese franc he could and paid a truck driver to give him a ride into the forest where he could get a job extracting tin at a dollar a day. The governor of Katanga, Moise Kutumbi, has passed a law forbidding companies to pay diggers less than $100 a month, but policing these illegal operations is increasingly difficult in a country that has been embroiled in war for twelve years.
A few days into the job, part of the mine collapsed, severing Busisi’s spine. Without a medical officer on site, or the training to understand he needed to be stabilized and moved only on a stretcher, fellow miners did their best to help him. They dragged him a few kilometers up the dark, narrow tunnel and put him on a truck to the nearest city. Doctors say Busisi was paralyzed from the waist down by the time he reached the hospital. “He does not remember the name of the mine, or the jungle (that surrounded the operation) or maybe he is afraid to tell us, but he cannot read any signs, and he was not there long enough to ask,” said the nurse in charge of the ward where Busisi lay helpless.
“We have noticed a massive rise in spinal fractures because of mining,” she said, explaining that there is no concept that an injured person must not be moved. “Sometimes a friend or relative will carry the person for miles, slumped over their back, and the fracture may be a crack but by the time they get here constantly moving, the damage is done. Anyway we can help with the pain but we have no (imaging) equipment.”
Examining a chunk of tin ore as it is brought up from the bowels of the earth, it is hard to imagine the role minerals play in perpetuating the conflict in Congo. Rebel militias fight over control of vast tracts of eastern Congo, claiming everything they can extract from illegal mining operations as the spoils of war. Congolese General Samy Matumo controls all of Bisie, where he is said to make $80 million a year from one mining enterprise alone. Renegade Rwandan general Laurent Nkunda positions himself as the protector of ethnic Rwandans living in Eastern Congo (40 percent of the population) but takes home a hefty slice of the country’s illegally extracted minerals in the areas his rebel fighters have taken over. But mining does more than fuel the Congo conflict; the repercussions resonate across continents. The uranium for the bombs that the Americans dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from Congo, and international weapons experts are concerned about Americans and Iranians mining large swaths of land for radioactive ore.
“The Americans just came here, scooped up the uranium and flew off, without asking for permission or paying for the precious material,” said Governor Moise Kutumbi. “We don’t allow that now. It is illegal to mine uranium. And anything that is mined in Congo must be processed in Congo.”
And yet, in 2007, 17 tons of radioactive ore, part of a larger load that made it through checkpoints, was hurriedly hidden in the Mura River when police began questioning lorry drivers a little too aggressively. Every environmental expert from World Vision to Unicef hastened to try to contain the damage done by the contaminated water source, and the issue made international headlines. But the mystery of where the uranium was headed remains unsolved, although a Chinese company named Magma Lubumbashi mined it. Local and International experts say the practice is widespread, and were perplexed as to why this particular incident was plastered across papers around the globe.
“It clearly suits some members of the international community who need access to uranium to keep Congo distracted by a war and unable to keep a strict eye on operations, or even other minerals they know they can mine here illegally when the situation is not stable,” said governor Kutumbi. Nkunda had initially declared his dedication to rooting out the Hutu death squads that massacred 800,000 Tutsis and then fled across to Goma. He recruits soldiers to his cause with the promise of plunder. To Congolese soldiers who haven’t seen a cent of their government salaries in years, Nkunda’s rhetoric sounds heaven sent. The soldiers’ starving families can suddenly eat. It is incentive enough to blind them to the chaos that Nkunda imposes on their country and people.
“The international community talks about a blanket ban on Congolese tin, but the fact is, it is Rwanda that is getting rich from exporting our tin. Nkunda takes large amounts over the border everyday, so how does it help to ban Congolese tin? Give us the means to kick the Rwandans out, stop stealing our resources, and then our country can go back to normal,” says a mining official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
But the plunder of Congo goes back to a tragic legacy left behind by the ruthless Belgian King Leopold and perpetuated by every international entity that set foot on its mineral rich soil. Joseph Conrad calls it the “vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.” And the scramble continues today with truckloads of illegally mined ore transported over the border to one of the nine countries that border Congo under the cover of the “chaos” that Congolese people are now convinced the Western world has some part in continuing, if not creating.
A recent report by eight independent experts appointed by the UN condemned Rwanda’s role in the conflict, accusing President Paul Kagame’s closest advisor of bankrolling Nkunda’s army, and of allowing his fighters use of farms from which to launch attacks.
