“Inside every phone is the blood of a Congolese person.” These words from Pascal Mirindi, a student and activist in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), encapsulate the deadly links between war, the plunder of resources, and climate breakdown.
Nowhere is this more devastatingly clear than in the DRC, where militias financed by the Rwandan government, in turn funded by the UK, United States, and many other countries, are committing mass murder and ecological destruction as they surge into the east of the country.
On the rare occasion that the mainstream media covers the DRC, it is portrayed as a poor nation with a “complicated” conflict-riven backstory. But this framing omits the catalyst for the region’s violence since its colonization: resource robbery. “The conflict, which has persisted in the east of the DRC for almost 30 years, and is the deadliest since the Second World War, is mainly economic,” explains Nobel Laureate Denis Mukwege. Since 1996, more than 10 million people have been killed, with countless more displaced, raped, or forcibly recruited (even as children) into armed groups. “The link between exploitation and the illegal trade in minerals is recognized as a root cause.”
Rich Nation, Poor Nation
Though the Congolese people have long been vampirized by extractivism, with over 70 percent living on less than $1.90 a day, the DRC is not a poor nation. Rather, it is a robbed nation. In fact, the DRC is considered the world’s richest country in terms of wealth in natural resources.
DRC’s fossil fuels have been profitably exploited by foreign corporations and co-opted local elites for decades, leaving communities like Muanda, which is both the original site of fossil fuel extraction and the poorest city in the country, scarred by dispossession, disease, and environmental degradation.
After the deadly Kalehe flood in South Kivu province last May, which killed hundreds and affected another 50,000 people in the flood zone, student activists from Extinction Rebellion Goma University launched the Pétrole Non Merci campaign to highlight that the DRC is already suffering the effects of climate catastrophes and that this suffering will only increase if the fossil fuel industry’s expansion is not stopped.
The students traveled thousands of miles across the width of the country, mobilizing communities to oppose the sale of 30 new oil and gas blocks, most of which overlap protected areas and would be transported by the ecocidal EACOP pipeline. A major focus of their efforts has been to facilitate ongoing educational exchanges on how to claim their rights through nonviolence and to hold officials and corporations accountable to local communities.
The continued work of building grassroots power to counter resource and human exploitation is now facing crucible conditions. Goma activists are spending long hours caring for the massive influx of internally displaced people amid food shortages and cholera outbreaks. Others in their networks have been displaced and suffered violence and even death. “This crisis only reinforces that the struggle for environmental justice is inextricably linked to the struggle against the cycles of violence that we continue to experience,” explains an activist with LUCHA, a non-violent and non-partisan youth civil society movement in Goma.
Green Growth, Red Trail
As global finance gears up for “green growth,” the DRC’s resource wealth has again brought violence, robbery, and ecological destruction. The world’s largest coltan reserves, vast caches of copper, diamonds, tin, gold, and more than 63 percent of global cobalt are prized by armed gangs who sell them to corporations and wealthy states wanting to manufacture phones, computers, batteries, and, increasingly, renewable energy technologies.
In the chaos orchestrated by the militias, minerals are more easily siphoned to Rwanda, where they are exported and bought by multinational firms like Glencore. Nicolas Kazadi, DRC’s finance minister, claims that Rwandan mineral smuggling costs the DRC $1 billion per year. The U.S. Treasury Department estimated that last year more than 90 percent of DRC’s gold was smuggled to countries including Rwanda and Uganda, where it is refined and exported, mainly to the United Arab Emirates. Rwanda is also somehow the world’s primary exporter of coltan, despite being one of the lowest mineral producers in Africa. Without conflict minerals, the numbers just don’t add up.
Efforts to regulate conflict minerals and ensure responsible supply chains have been laughable in their inadequacy, and typical in their market-oriented approach that prioritizes profits while ignoring Congolese perspectives and outcomes. “The case of conflict minerals poses questions about how global supply chain capitalism, conflict resolution, and consumer ethics intersect with postcolonial friction and violence,” writes Josaphat Musamba and Christoph Vogel in Dissent. “Both international and Congolese interveners and elites have contributed to simplistic and misleading imageries of the problem and its solution, in a quest for a quick and seemingly hands-on, human rights–inspired PR operation.”
Until a decolonized approach that centers communities and ecology is adopted, extraction will inevitably lead to conflict. It is not possible to clean up a supply chain that begins with dirty motives, just as it is not possible to build regional stability and heal generations of trauma in the context of manipulation and structural inequity, better known as “development and aid.”
Donor Darling, Donor Orphan
Though this long regional conflict is often portrayed as Rwandans versus Congolese, Hutu versus Tutsi, or even Muslim versus Christian, the primary generator of endless suffering is a more universal clash: power and profit vs people and planet. Colonialism, which never really ended, now works remotely via economic imperialism. A look at the history of foreign intervention in the region clearly shows that the sources of underlying tensions are not due to some inherent failing of the Congolese or Rwandan people. Instead, it’s structural.
“Several studies point to the erroneous perceptions of outsiders to explain why their interventions have been unable to address the root causes of conflict in the African Great Lakes region. However, few authors focus on the impact of UN and donor activities on regional fragility,” says policy analyst Léopold Ghins at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa. “It is chiefly through these activities that outsiders have become part of the problem they [supposedly] seek to resolve.”
One way in which the imperial core exacerbates regional fragility is through unbalanced aid allocations. From 2003-16, Rwanda received about 130 percent and 50 percent more aid in per capita terms than the DRC and Burundi respectively. Rwanda was dubbed a “donor darling,” while the DRC and Burundi were considered “donor orphans.” Donors now see Rwanda as a useful regional hegemon through which to carry on with the plunder of African resources. After all its economy is growing, and its infrastructure is developing at speed .
But if Rwandans are so happy with their “development success,” why is there a black-clad, machine-gun toting policeman on every second street corner in Kigali? Over the last 24 years under President Kagame, the government has become unashamedly authoritarian with mounting human rights abuses and the celebrated growth only benefitting a tiny elite.
Unhoused Rwandans and those caught begging have been forcibly exiled to a “rehabilitation island” in the middle of Lake Kivu, also known as Rwanda’s Alcatraz. Dozens of journalists have been banned from the country, arrested, and killed. Opposition politicians are routinely locked up, while civil society groups are not allowed to operate independently. Rwanda’s involvement in the destabilization of the DRC, the plundering of its resources, and the commission of the most serious crimes, including the use of sexual violence as a method of war and as a strategy of terror, is widely documented, notably by the United Nations.
Yet the EU and other international institutions tout this outcome as a development success, even striking a high-profile advertising deal with FC Arsenal where players wear a “Visit Rwanda” slogan on their jerseys. Activists are not fooled by spectacle. In a recent solidarity action both outside and inside the UK’s Parliament, activists from Extinction Rebellion UK denounced their government for giving Rwanda vast sums to service its extreme asylum policies and therefore indirectly enabling mass violence and the theft of $24 trillion in natural resources from the DRC.
A second by-product of donor policies is the core-periphery structure that has emerged in the Great Lakes. At the core is the Kigali-Kampala axis, with eastern DRC, Burundi, and northwestern Uganda together forming the periphery. Mirroring global relations, people living in the regional core face lower security risks and have higher incomes in comparison to those in the periphery. “This situation has entrenched the notion that areas in the periphery are ‘lagging behind,’ and reinforces perceptions of the DRC as ‘an inscrutable and unimprovable mess,’” explains Ghins.
First Justice, Justice First
The security and humanitarian situation in the DRC is becoming more and more dire each day. Clashes have intensified in recent days between the M23 militia backed by Rwanda and Congolese government forces in the territories surrounding Goma, the regional capital home to over a million people. The Goma airport was bombed twice. Internally displaced people continue to arrive in droves.
On his way back to one of the crowded refugee camps on the outskirts of the city, Mirindi describes an outbreak of a skin infection that is spreading like wildfire among the displaced children. He is seeking a way to organize medical aid, though he is not a doctor. Out of a resilience born both of necessity and vision, he and fellow activists, artists, students, and friends are experienced in organizing as a practice of strategy as well as care, yet stress is taking its toll. The price of food in Goma has almost tripled; young children are dying of dehydration and cholera. Yet ordinary people are aiding one another in extraordinary ways—the makings of a paradise built in hell.
From this brutal context, activists in the DRC are calling for the international community to immediately stop funding Rwanda’s aggression and to hold all who are complicit accountable. They are urgently calling for a green transition that puts justice first, not new revenue streams, and that dismantles colonial exploitation once and for all. “Otherwise,” warns Mukwege, “the so-called green energy transition will remain red with the blood of Congolese men, women, and children.”
In a silent protest in February, DRC soccer players stood before their Africa Cup of Nations semi-final match against Ivory Coast. They chose not to sing their national anthem, opting instead to cover their mouths with their hands and place two fingers from their left hands to their temples, a display of unity and solidarity with all Congolese people—silenced, with a gun to their heads.
This hand gesture is not a resignation, it is condemnation and a challenge. The DRC will no longer be silenced. When asked for the first step toward solidarity, Mirindi says that, “It is really essential that we talk about this situation again and again, to attract the attention of the international community, organizations, public figures and to have more mobilization.”