How the region became overrun by warlords and lacking any kind of functional government. [...] The east has gold, tungsten, uranium, oil, natural gas and coltan — just feet beneath the surface of the earth are enough minerals to keep the global technology and defense industries humming. Dearth and plenty can be embodied in single individuals: outside the IDP camp, I met a miner returning home, a solid young man with dust-stained hands, a pair of cheap rubber boots, and a small pickaxe looped through his belt. He had finished a day of sweltering labor in one of Rubaya’s coltan mines, whose runoff gives the town’s waterways the uncanny appearance of rushing, liquid clay. He worked six days a week, and made decent money — $20-30 over a good three days. “It is not an easy job, but it’s not too hard for us,” he said. “It’s the only job we have here.” I asked several people about the process for obtaining a mining concession, but their answers were vague: you’d have to purchase them through a government office, which is time consuming since all the minable land belongs to politicians in Kinshasa or to FARDC generals. So a prospective developer can give into the predations of the state, or they can just start mining illegally, hence eroding the authority of the state. There’s no legal or governmental framework for a mining sector that can provide more than day wages, or that isn’t dominated by thieves and warlords — the result of ongoing conflict fed by a total absence of government authority, which is itself a result of conflict. The causality is dizzying; the government’s lack of capacity is an outgrowth of war, and visa versa. But its consequences are clear: in Rubaya, the Congolese government is worse than useless. It acts without considering the implications of its decisions, often in a way that seems designed to sabotage its own authority. It’s given up on law on order by handing the city over to the Nyatura, although it didn’t seem to have the capacity to govern it in the first place. In a town with an official population of 32,000 (not counting the refugees) there is no centralized electricity or water, no internet, no paved roads, and only intermittent cell phone service. NGOs provide healthcare and even some basic infrastructure, like water pumps. There are only five secondary schools in town, and they are all run by religious organizations. Their place in Rubaya’s social fabric is precarious. “If you work in a mine, you might make $50 in a day — more than if you’re a teacher,” the head of a local Catholic high school told me. “So sometimes the teachers leave. And when the children are unable to pay their school fees, they go work in the mines as well.” His school had 1100 students, eager children in spotless white uniforms. Just fifteen had graduated the year before. No one is really in charge of Rubaya, but the theater of state authority endures. One of the city’s largest buildings is a freshly whitewashed structure behind high, barbed-wire capped walls. At least theoretically, the region’s mines are regulated from the building, whose lobby was featureless, aside from a small bulletin board with architectural charts of the building itself. It had lighting fixtures and light switches, but no electricity. Rooms were empty; I saw no filing cabinets or papers, and only a single desk. “This is a fake office,” said James. We met an earnest man named Francoise, the secretary for the department responsible for overseeing the area’s “small mines.” The process works like this: some time recently, NGOs, and, he claimed, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), had conducted a survey of mines in the Rubaya area, to determine which were exploiting their employees and kicking their profits to militant groups. “After an investigation, they determined Rubaya minerals are clean,” he said. Well, not really: several mines were labeled “blood sites,” including one connected to Bosco Ntaganda, a career militant and the former leader of M23. Prior to March 23, 2009, he had been a leader of a Tutsi insurgency called the CNDP. Thanks to the treaty signed on that date — the day that M23 is named after — he became a high-ranking general in the Congolese army, despite being under an International Criminal Court indictment for his use of child soldiers during an earlier chapter of the DRC conflict. He had recently appeared at the U.S. embassy in Kigali after the group began to violently fracture, and the Americans promptly transferred him to The Hague. [...] Two armies occupy M23 territory, and they are content with leaving the other alone, for now. It turns out M23 and their Rwandan supporters actually had violated a red line in seizing Goma — in early 2013, the UN Security Council authorized the deployment of the 3,000-troop “intervention brigade,” consisting of special forces from South Africa, Tanzania, and Malawi. In a break with standard peacekeeping practice, the brigade’s force composition and rules of engagement will allow them to go on the offensive in order to protect civilians. The UN is dabbling in modern counterinsurgency methods for the first time in its history.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Jun 2013 04:21:06 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015