The "Mineral Curse": The Congo Has Its Own "Vibranium." Why Did It Get Endless War Instead of "Wakanda"?

Colonialism, foreign intervention, illegal trade and kleptocratic rule have given the Congo more than 130 years of a "resource curse"

Black Panther is a hit around the world. In the film, the African nation of Wakanda slips out of the colonizers' line of sight and uses a rare mineral, vibranium, to build a modern and prosperous country. It sets you wondering about another possible Africa: could an African country really use its own natural resources to reach that kind of progress?

Vibranium and Wakanda also turn up in another Marvel film, Avengers: Age of Ultron, but they leave a very different impression there. The villain, Ultron, steals billions of dollars' worth of Wakandan vibranium from a black-market arms dealer with an Afrikaans accent, forges his own indestructible body out of it, then uses vibranium's magnetic field to lift the city of Sokovia into the air and destroy it. The Wakanda sketched here, its face never quite in focus, sounds more like an African "failed state" that cannot protect its own resources or its own borders.

American science fiction often buries history in its plots. In Avatar, the room-temperature superconductor that humans come to plunder is called "unobtainium" — literally, the ore you cannot obtain. The name comes from Cold War America.

In the 1950s the U.S. military wanted a material light, heat-resistant and strong enough to build the military drone that already existed on paper. The ideal material was so hard to find that an Army general at the Air Materiel Command named it "unobtainium." A few years later the United States found it — in the Soviet Union — and, using layers of middlemen and re-routed trade as cover, bought large quantities of the raw material needed to make it from the Soviets. The material is now called titanium.

In Age of Ultron, the mineral's terrible power, the murk around how it is obtained and the blurred identity of the country it comes from all recall something that happened in the Second World War.

In August 1939, Einstein wrote to Roosevelt to warn that Germany was developing nuclear weapons, and noted that "the most important source of uranium is the Belgian Congo." The United States promptly sent agents to the Belgian Congo — today the Democratic Republic of the Congo (also called Congo-Kinshasa, to distinguish it from its similarly named neighbor, Congo-Brazzaville) — to keep the uranium there out of Nazi hands. Soon after, the United States began building nuclear weapons of its own. The uranium used in the Manhattan Project came from the Belgian Congo, and was finally dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. None of this is a secret any more. But what the Congo went through to supply America's uranium has stayed unknown.

The Missing Link

Susan Williams, a researcher who has studied America's uranium program in the Congo, recorded one historic scene in an article.

On August 6, 2016, the anniversary of Hiroshima, a group of Congolese expatriates gathered in a museum in Cape Town, South Africa, for a commemoration called "The Missing Link" — an attempt to connect, at last, the disaster at Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the disaster the Congo suffered supplying uranium for America's atomic bombs. People at the event described how those who lived around the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in Katanga province, in southern Congo, and those who worked in it, were never told why the mine was being dug or what it would do to their health. The area is now full of people badly hurt by radiation, their bodies deformed, in constant pain. The deformities have been passed on to their children. None of it was ever officially recorded, and no one has assessed 70 years of radiation. The disaster at Shinkolobwe has never been commemorated.

"This town is dead, haunted by the ghosts of Hiroshima," a Congolese journalist who grew up in Likasi, a town near Shinkolobwe, wrote in his book. One mine, two tragedies.

Someone at the event said bitterly that knowing so little about the past makes it hard for Congolese people to respond to their country's present and future.

In 1977 and 1978, again in Katanga — then called Shaba — Soviet-backed Angolan rebels invaded twice, and twice, with intervention from the United States, France, Belgium and Morocco, Mobutu's Zaire (as the Congo was then named) won. Part of what drove the invasions was the Soviet Union's wish to control the local minerals: copper, uranium and cobalt. A few months before the second invasion of Shaba in 1978, the Soviet Union quietly bought up all the cobalt on the market, because the mineral was vital to the arms industry. Permanent magnets made from it went into military microwave communications gear and electric motors; heat-resistant alloys made from it were essential to jet engines.

Once again, rare minerals did nothing for the Congo's prosperity. They became a reason for foreigners to invade and intervene, and they were used for war.

Today cobalt is indispensable to lithium batteries, and so to phones, computers and electric cars — a "salt of high technology," much like vibranium. The Congo holds more than half the world's proven cobalt reserves. Since early 2017 cobalt prices have been high worldwide.

The Congo has another salt of high technology: columbite-tantalite ore, better known as coltan. Tantalum, refined from this associated ore, makes the tiny capacitors in personal computers, phones, digital cameras and car electronics; niobium, also refined from it, goes into high-strength structural steel and into the superconducting magnets that medical MRI machines and the aerospace industry need. Eighty percent of the world's proven coltan reserves lie in the Congo.

Has anything changed, so that these precious deposits might now serve the prosperity of an African country? It is not impossible, but history gives little ground for optimism. Minerals producing upheaval and war is the normal state of Congolese history, and remains so today — so much so that the thing has its own term, "conflict minerals," close in meaning to the better-known "blood diamonds."

To see what conflicts the Congo has had, and how minerals fed them, you have to start with the country's history.

What Happened in the Congo?

On August 1, 1885, King Leopold II of Belgium declared himself King of the Congo — in Belgium. He never set foot in the Congo in his life, but on this territory 80 times the size of his own country he used massacre and torture to force the native population to gather ivory, rubber and abundant minerals for him. The number of people worked to death under him is put as high as 10 million, about half the Congo's population at the time. In 1908 the Belgian government took over the Congo, but kept up Leopold's brutal economic exploitation, and piled up great wealth for Belgium.

The book The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila puts it this way:

The Congo first financed the public buildings, roads and other public works projects that King Leopold cherished, and later helped rescue Belgium from the financial difficulties of the two world wars and their aftermath.

In 1960, as independence movements swept the African continent, Belgium had no stomach for a fight and the Congo became independent peacefully. In May, parliament elected the radical nationalist Patrice Lumumba prime minister. Within a month the army mutinied and Katanga province declared independence. The Congo writes that both were the work of Belgian instigation and of the Western mining conglomerates behind Katanga. In January 1961, Lumumba, whom Western governments suspected of being a communist, was arrested by the military and killed; Belgian officers took part in his execution directly. This is known as the First Congo Crisis.

In 1965, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, regarded as a Cold War ally, took power in a military coup against the transitional government, backed by the United States, France and Belgium. In 1977 he changed the country's name from Congo to Zaire, reportedly to erase the traces of colonialism; clothing and personal names were changed along with it. He wore a national costume resembling a Mao suit and renamed himself "Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga" — "the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and unbending will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake."

Through all his years in power Mobutu never slackened in enriching himself. By 1984 his personal fortune had reached $5 billion, roughly the country's foreign debt at the time. Corruption among him and the ruling elite ran so wild that it acquired a name of its own: "Zairean sickness."

In 1990 the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War ended, and the international picture changed completely. At home, calls for democracy grew loud. Mobutu made a show of going along, promising democratic reform while crushing the opposition, and turned back the democratic gains that had been so hard to win.

Meanwhile the Congo's ethnic problems kept fermenting, and finally, pushed by forces at home and abroad, grew into a full war.

In eastern Congo, in the two provinces of South Kivu and North Kivu, which border Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda, live two groups defined by identity labels: the so-called indigenous people and the so-called Banyarwanda. The "indigenous people" hold that they have lived there since ancient times; "Banyarwanda" means, literally, "people from Rwanda."

But the Banyarwanda are not one people. Some were living there before colonization; some came as laborers during the colonial period; some are more recent refugees who poured in during wars in neighboring countries such as Burundi. Some are Hutu, some Tutsi. Perhaps the only thing they all share is a language — Kinyarwanda.

To the "indigenous people," all of them are latecomers. That outsider status long kept the Banyarwanda from full citizenship and from full social and political rights. So in the 1960s and 1970s the Tutsi Banyarwanda dropped the "-rwanda" from their group's name and called themselves Banyamulenge, "people from Mulenge" — a district of South Kivu. The "indigenous people" saw this as identity fraud, a way of climbing.

A genocide in Burundi in 1972 pushed thousands of Hutu "Banyarwanda" into Zaire. This frightened the "indigenous people," who, egged on by some tribal leaders, began attacking the Banyarwanda. Mobutu at the time wanted to hold down traditional authorities by cultivating elites of various kinds, so he signed a citizenship decree granting citizenship to most Banyarwanda. It deepened the "indigenous people's" resentment of the Banyarwanda — and it also set Hutu Banyarwanda against Tutsi, since the Hutu in turn considered the Tutsi latecomers who did not deserve citizenship.

The Land Law of 1973 abolished the power of "indigenous" tribal leaders to hand out land under customary law. At the same time Banyarwanda elites used the newly created land market to buy up large holdings, and kept moving into parliament, the government and even the security services, their political weight growing year by year. That deepened the "indigenous people's" resentment further.

In 1977 world copper prices collapsed, and Zaire, too dependent on copper mining, fell into economic and social crisis. Mobutu, looking to secure his rule through it, turned around and reimposed direct control over the traditional tribal leaders, and finally, in 1981, revoked the citizenship he had granted the Banyarwanda in 1972. Overnight they became people without a country.

Thousands of young Tutsi Banyarwanda — the Banyamulenge — then crossed into Uganda and joined the Tutsi rebel force, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The RPF fought the Hutu government in Rwanda's civil war in 1990, and after the Hutu genocide against the Tutsi in 1994 it overthrew Rwanda's Hutu government. It has ruled Rwanda as the governing party ever since.

In 1993 in North Kivu, friction between the "indigenous people" and the Banyarwanda turned into ethnic conflict: 10,000 dead and 250,000 displaced in six months. At almost the same moment civil war broke out in Burundi, and 50,000 Hutu Burundian refugees crossed into South Kivu. Then came 1994 and the Rwandan genocide, which the whole world would come to know. In 100 days, 500,000 to a million Tutsi were killed by the Hutu government army and its militias. The Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front then overthrew the Hutu government, and a million Hutu refugees crossed immediately into the Congo — but they were not all unarmed civilians.

France at the time was still backing the defeated former Hutu government, hoping to use it to hold the Rwandan Patriotic Front in check. It escorted the Hutu forces into a humanitarian zone in eastern Congo, and there a government-in-exile took shape, with full equipment, staff and money, an army of 50,000 soldiers and 800,000 to 1.7 million Hutu civilians — in effect a micro-state. The exiled government used the zone as a base for counterattacks into Rwanda, raiding across the border often, and attacked Tutsi inside Zaire as well. Neither France, which had set it in motion, nor the United States had the political will to disarm the exiles; Mobutu went further and supported the micro-state.

In October 1996, with Mobutu's backing, the deputy governor of South Kivu ordered all Banyamulenge — Tutsi Banyarwanda — to leave Zaire or face "elimination and expulsion." That gave Paul Kagame, then Rwanda's vice president and the man who actually held power there, his reason to intervene. He sent in a force of Banyamulenge volunteers trained by the Rwandan army together with battle-tested Ugandan and Eritrean soldiers, but with the Rwandan army at its core, under the name Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (ADFL).

The First Congo War had begun.

This is where Laurent-Désiré Kabila walks onto the stage, an opportunist of a chaotic age. In 1965 the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, then training Congolese rebels loyal to Lumumba, met Kabila briefly. Guevara wrote in his diary: "He spends his days in political squabbles; everything about him shows he is far too fond of drink and women." Yet it was this man who led the ADFL, swept the armed Hutu refugee camps aside with overwhelming force, crossed the Congo in six months, took Kinshasa, overthrew Mobutu, and was sworn in as the Congo's third president in May 1997.

Research has since shown that during the First Congo War the ADFL killed 230,000 Hutu refugees — another genocide, by any fair name. This is the grim sequel that Hotel Rwanda, with all its humanitarian glow, does not tell.

Besides Rwanda's proxy war through the ADFL, Uganda, Angola, Burundi and others threw themselves into the war against Mobutu, some to wipe out their own rebels, some to defend their borders. The Cold War was long over by then, and Mobutu had lost America's protection.

Not long after Kabila took power, the loud presence of Rwandan troops in the Congo — above all their meddling in Congolese affairs — made Congolese see them more and more as an occupying army. Kabila also judged that if his people believed his victory rested on a foreign army, it would damage the legitimacy of his rule. So he began to distance himself from the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and even stirred up anti-Tutsi feeling, hoping to win over the majority at home that way.

At the same time, after Mobutu's fall, Tutsi economic and political power in the Congo grew markedly, which inflamed ethnic tension again and drove it toward violence.

On July 27, 1998, Kabila ordered Rwandan troops out of the Congo. Rwanda joined with Uganda and with the Congolese rebels each of them backed and marched on Kinshasa again, to overthrow him. Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Sudan, Chad and Libya sent troops to support Kabila, each for its own strategic interests or for the Congo's minerals. Several rebel groups that hated the Rwandan occupiers joined the fighting too. As the war went on, these groups kept splitting, until the whole thing became a melee no outsider could follow.

It came to be called the Second Congo War, or the Great War of Africa, or the African World War. It never got the attention from the outside world that it deserved, perhaps partly because it was too complicated to define or describe. Nine countries spanning the African continent, along with 30 militias, were drawn in. It was the deadliest war since the Second World War. The fighting officially ended in 2003, but the International Rescue Committee estimates that by 2008 a total of 5.4 million people in the Congo had died directly or indirectly because of it, the great majority of malnutrition.

The conflicts the war left behind continue today, 20 years after it started, in Ituri province and in North and South Kivu in eastern Congo. In 2016, 920,000 Congolese fled their homes, more than in Syria or Iraq. Between mid-December 2017 and mid-April 2018, ethnic conflict in Ituri alone drove more than 340,000 people out.

The Salt of High Tech, the Salt of Conflict

The war could last so long, and stay so tangled and so cruel, because the Congo's rich minerals and the global trade in them gave every side a steady flow of money. The clearest case is coltan.

1996, when the First Congo War began, was a time of surging global demand for electronics. Between 1990 and 1999, world demand for tantalum capacitors tripled. Sony's PlayStation 2, released in 2000, set off another coltan boom. And 80 percent of the world's coltan happens to sit in war-torn eastern Congo.

In 1996, when Laurent-Désiré Kabila had just set out against Mobutu and was pushing toward the capital, Kinshasa, multinational mining companies including De Beers and the Anglo American Corporation competed to get close to him and secure minerals, already treating him as the Congo's real ruler. The American company Bechtel not only handed Kabila detailed satellite and infrared survey data on mineral deposits across the country, it used satellite data to help his military operations.

In 1998, when the Second Congo War broke out and everything shifted, these same companies switched to dealing with the rebel factions carving up the country, treating them as sovereign states. Each time rebels took a new place, they advertised the minerals they had just seized and received companies and investors from every direction. Rwanda and Uganda then simply set up companies of their own and joined in, appointing the local rebel commanders they backed as the channels for their coltan trade. That gave the two countries a monopoly on the Congo's cobalt mines. The money coltan brought in paid for their military operations in eastern Congo — so much so that Paul Kagame, then Rwanda's de facto president, once said Rwanda's operations in the Congo were "self-financing."

As early as 1998 the UN Security Council condemned the occupation of eastern Congo by foreign armies, and later condemned those armies for taking the Congo's resources to pay for the war. Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi went on "repackaging" coltan ore from the Congo as their own national mineral exports.

That year Uganda became a tantalum exporter to the United States for the first time, though the country has no record of producing any coltan between 1998 and 2000. Uganda's economy grew fast in the 1990s; it was one of only two countries in sub-Saharan Africa whose GDP growth reached 6 percent, while the rest of the region stayed under 3 percent. This is thought to be connected to its plundering of Congolese minerals in the second half of the decade. Rwanda suddenly became a major coltan exporter after the Second Congo War began, reaching $500 million in exports within two years, and its coltan exports to the United States doubled between 1997 and 2000.

In 2000 the UN Security Council appointed a Panel of Experts to investigate the illegal seizure of the Congo's natural resources, and it published a series of reports over the following years. A 2001 report found that Uganda and Rwanda had invaded the Congo at first out of concern for their own security, but that taking natural resources later became the chief motive. A 2002 report stated: "There is no coltan coming out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo that does not benefit one of the rebel factions and foreign armies."

The same report listed 85 companies that had breached the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises over Congolese resources, in businesses running from mining to the trade in coltan and diamonds, investment, finance, logistics, coltan processing and capacitor manufacturing. Most, though not all, were based in OECD countries.

In 2009, Global Witness, a non-governmental organization that has followed the question of Congolese resources for years, wrote to the world's major phone makers asking how they would make sure their supply chains were not feeding the conflict still under way in the Congo. From the answers it got, the group concluded that these companies "generally lack adequate measures to ensure that phones and other electronic products do not contain conflict minerals."

"An air of mystery hangs over the rare-metals industry," writes The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age, a book on the geopolitics and the inner workings of the rare-metals trade. Because deposits are concentrated in a few places, the smallest disturbance affects supply, so companies that use rare metals try to secure them through as many channels as they can, even in small, piecemeal lots — illegal sources included. The people they deal with are often traders of wide reach, who use their networks, experience and wits to hunt down raw material on the companies' behalf. For the companies, steady supply comes first, so they would rather keep good long-term relations with suppliers through closed-door deals than build an open, transparent market where they could compare prices.

So unlike diamonds, which have a global certification system to screen out blood diamonds, the coltan trade has no way of tracing anything at all.

In 2010 the U.S. Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act, requiring companies to state whether their products used tungsten, tantalum, tin or gold from the Congo — 3TG, by their initials. Companies abandoned Congolese coltan in a rush and ore prices fell sharply, but the warlords' income was not cut off. The ore simply flowed to cheaper, lower-end manufacturers outside these rules, whose customers cared less about human rights. Many of them are in Asia.

Illegal traders also work the loopholes, disguising freshly refined tantalum from Congolese ore as scrap, or blending Congolese tantalum into legally sourced tantalum to slip past oversight. Industry experts estimate that in 2011 a quarter of the world's tantalum still came from the Congo.

In 2016 American commentators began debating whether cobalt should be added as a fifth legally designated conflict mineral. Cobalt mines lie mainly in the south of the country and have not been a major prize for the warring parties in the east, but investigations by NGOs and the press have shown that cobalt mining is riddled with child labor and unsafe working conditions.

The question is what these destitute miners would live on if cobalt exports were restricted. World Bank figures show that in recent years about 10 million people in the Congo have depended on mining — more than a seventh of the country's population at the time — the overwhelming majority of them artisanal miners.

Resource Nationalism?

In January this year the Congolese parliament debated amendments to the Mining Code of 2002: a sharp rise in corporate profit tax and in mining royalties, and a bigger government stake in mining companies. Cobalt and coltan were designated strategic minerals, with royalties on them set at 10 percent, five times the rate on ordinary minerals.

This alarmed mining companies and investors. A large share of mining in the Congo, they said, is simply illegal and outside the reach of the Mining Code altogether, so a heavier tax burden would only punish those who obey the law. It would cut companies' competitiveness and dull their appetite for investment, and in the end it would be Congolese people who suffered.

Others answered that the old rate was far too low. The World Bank drafted it in 2002, when the African World War had not yet ended and the priority was attracting foreign money in the middle of a war. The priority now, they said, is more revenue, so that Congolese people can be given public services.

Still others doubted that resource nationalism has any necessary link to bigger public revenues, since the Congo's history has no shortage of resource nationalism.

In 1973 Mobutu, in the name of decolonization, forcibly "nationalized" 2,000 foreign companies — registering them, in fact, under his own name and his family's, which gave him three-quarters of the country's cattle and a quarter of its banana and cocoa output. He also made himself the largest shareholder of the Bank of Kinshasa and required every state mining company to keep its money there, swelling his private fortune further. In 1990 an important state-owned copper-cobalt mine in Katanga collapsed and closed, and the Zairean government's finances never recovered. In 1995, to raise revenue, Mobutu reversed the nationalizations of 1973 and sold the state enterprises to Western multinationals.

But when Laurent-Désiré Kabila replaced Mobutu as president in 1997, he reversed the 1995 privatization in turn, and replayed Mobutu's scene from 1973, making the national economy his own private property.

The elder Kabila was assassinated in 2001 and his son Joseph Kabila took over. The Paradise Papers, made public last year, revealed that around 2010 the multinational commodities-trading giant Glencore, using the Israeli diamond dealer Dan Gertler — a friend of both Kabilas — as its middleman, bought stakes in three mines from the government at throwaway prices, costing the Congo billions of dollars in state assets. The younger Kabila used the proceeds to pay for his 2011 election campaign. That same diamond dealer had once funded the elder Kabila's war in exchange for a monopoly on the Congo's diamonds, and is said to have inspired the film Blood Diamond.

The younger Kabila's term as president in fact ended in December 2016, but he refused to leave. Mediation by the Catholic Church extended it by a year. By the end of last year he still showed no sign of going, and protests and unrest broke out in Kinshasa and elsewhere, running into the early part of this year; the crackdown killed dozens. In March the opposition parties formed a coalition demanding that Kabila, in power for 17 years, step down. He has still not said he will, and the Congo's stability remains an open question.

The Kabilas, Mobutu, even Leopold II — there is not much difference between them. Each treated the country as a tool for digging up and exporting natural resources to keep himself in power, and took no responsibility for the endless suffering of its people.

Colonialism, foreign intervention, illegal trade and kleptocratic rule: this is how, since Leopold II seized the Congo in 1885, this land has come by 133 years of a "resource curse."

Cover image from the Flickr account of the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo