External Economic Exploitation in the DRC: 1990–2005

In his conclusion to his seminal book, Politics in the Congo (1965), Crawford Young wrote the following:

Belgium . . . constructed in Africa a colonial state which stood out by the thoroughness of its organization, the formidable accretion of power through an interlocking alliance of state, church, and capital, and the ambition of its economic and social objectives. The very strength of the system as a colonial structure, and its steadfast refusal to face effectively the problem of political adaptation until it began to disintegrate, made an ordered transfer of power peculiarly difficult. A colonizer who suddenly lost the profound conviction of the righteousness of his policy was confronted with a revolution by the colonized which lacked both structure and ideology. Total colonialism was replaced by total independence virtually overnight, yet the very completeness of the victory of the colonized had as its concomitant an impotence which emptied success of its substance.

(1965:572)

Since this abrupt and failed decolonization, as outlined by Young, the Congo has never recovered. More recently John Le Carré said that “if one were patrolling the globe in search of great problems to address, the DRC would be the logical first stop” (Le Carré 2001:5). According to Le Carré, the Congo has been bleeding to death for five centuries, a victim of Arab slavers, King Leopold’s destructive extraction, Belgian restructuring, Mobutu’s rule, and now the predation of Rwanda occupation and associated mineral companies. Indeed, thanks to Congolese wealth, Rwanda has become a gold and diamond exporter without possessing gold or diamond mines of its own.

In December 2008, Herman Cohen wrote a commentary in the New York Times encouraging the DRC to let Rwandans exploit the minerals in eastern Congo. According to Cohen, because Rwanda is already smuggling minerals from eastern DRC, if the DRC were simply to allow Rwandans to exploit the minerals and collect taxes on them, the country would receive at least some return.

This argument is economically sound. But simply because it is economically beneficial does not mean that it is socially and politically acceptable. Eastern Congo is not only an economic space; it is also a political space where people have claims to their patrimony—on their land and everything it contains. Cohen’s argument—a call for the Congolese to acquiesce in foreign intrusion—sounds much like one put forward about nuclear waste by Lawrence Summers (when he was chief economist for the World Bank), who suggested that nuclear waste should be sent to Africa because the benefits provided by the financial compensation would far outweigh any possible health risks incurred. In economic terms, by this logic, Africa is “under-polluted.” But even if Summers’s logic seems economically sound to some, it is of course ethically and morally unacceptable, and certainly the same could be said of Herman Cohen’s proposal to validate Rwandan extraction of Congolese mineral wealth. After all, would either proposal have been seriously entertained if applied to the U.S.?

A second objection to Cohen’s proposition relates to the assertion that Rwanda has acted only as a middleman to outside power brokers in the West. In the 1990s no Western state was ready to point the finger at Rwanda, and Rwanda was therefore implicitly encouraged to occupy eastern Congo (sometimes through surrogate channels) and pillage Congolese resources. By empowering Rwanda at the expense of the DRC, the West (mostly the U.S. and Britain) has furthered instability in eastern Congo where the Congolese Tusti in North Kivu and the Banyamulenge, a tiny minority in south Kivu supported by the Rwandan government, have claimed land and provoked confrontations with other ethnic groups. Of course, plundering the Congo is not a new phenomenon, and it did not start with the current war: from long before the publication of Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost (1998), it was well known that King Leopold’s “Congo Free State” was little more than a barbaric looting enterprise. It was similarly common knowledge that the uranium used by Americans to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from Shinkolobwe mining in Katanga, but the benefits...