скачать книгу бесплатно
Investors from Congo’s old colonial master, Belgium, had mined the area around Mwangachuchu’s lands, but their joint venture with the government had collapsed in the mid-1990s. Invading Rwandan forces and their allies looted thousands of tons of coltan and cassiterite, the tin-bearing ore, from the company’s stockpiles, UN investigators found.
When Mwangachuchu arrived home, artisanal miners around his mountain hometown were hacking away at the rock with picks and shovels. The cassiterite would fetch a few dollars per kilo. But far-off developments in global markets were about to spur the coltan trade – and pour cash into eastern Congo’s war.
The boom in mobile phones as well as in the rest of consumer electronics and games consoles caused voracious demand for tantalum. The two biggest companies that processed tantalum, Cabot of the United States and H. C. Starck of Germany, foresaw prolonged high demand. They signed long-term contracts, locking in their supply of tantalum ores.
That created a shortage on the open market and sparked a scramble to find new supply sources. In the course of 2000, prices for tantalum ores rose tenfold. Congo was ripe for the picking.
Thousands of eastern Congolese rushed into coltan mining. Many exchanged a farmer’s machete for a miner’s pick. Militias press-ganged others into mining. Livestock had long been the East’s most prized commodity, but now, suddenly, it was coltan. In 1999 North Kivu officially exported five tonnes of coltan; in 2001 it exported ninety tonnes. Even after the flood of Congolese supply brought the world price back down, coltan remained more lucrative than other ores.
Coltan was not the sole catalyst of the conflict – far from it. Congo was seething before the boom and would have seethed even if coltan had never been found. But the surging coltan trade magnified eastern Congo’s minerals’ potential to sustain the myriad factions that were using the hostilities to make money. ‘Thanks to economic networks that had been established in 1998 and 1999 during the first years of the Congo war, minerals traders and military officials were perfectly placed to funnel [coltan] out of the country,’ writes Nest.
Mwangachuchu started mining his land in 2001, employing about a thousand men. An amiable man with an oval face and soft features, he breaks bread with his workers and sometimes even works the mines himself, people who know him told me. Mwangachuchu Hizi International (MHI), the business he founded with his partner, a doctor from Baltimore named Robert Sussman, swiftly came to account for a large chunk of North Kivu’s coltan output. ‘We are proud of what we are doing in Congo,’ Sussman said at the time. ‘We want the world to understand that if it’s done right, coltan can be good for this country.’
But UN investigators and western campaigners were starting to draw attention to the role Congo’s mineral trade played in funding the war. The airline that had been transporting MHI’s ore to Europe severed ties with the company. ‘We don’t understand why they are doing this,’ Mwangachuchu told a reporter. ‘The Congolese have a right to make business in their own country.’
Other foreign businesspeople were less concerned about doing business in a war zone, which is what eastern Congo remained even after the formal end of hostilities in 2003. Estimates I have heard of the proportion of Congolese mineral production that is smuggled out of the country range from 30 to 80 per cent. Perhaps half of the coltan that for years Rwanda exported as its own was actually Congolese.
Militias and the Congolese army directly control some mining operations and extract taxes and protection money from others. Corrupt officials facilitate the trade. The comptoirs, or trading houses, of Goma on the border with Rwanda orchestrate the flow of both officially declared mineral exports and smuggled cargoes. Other illicit routes run directly from mines across the Rwandan and Ugandan borders. UN investigators have documented European and Asian companies purchasing pillaged Congolese minerals. Once the ores are out of the country, it is a simple step to refine them and then sell the gold, tin, or tantalum to manufacturers. The road may be circuitous, but it leads from the heart of Congo’s war to anywhere mobile phones and laptops can be found.
In the absence of anything resembling a functioning state, an ever-shifting array of armed groups continues to profit from lawlessness, burrowing for minerals and preying on a population that, like Tantalus, is condemned to suffer in the midst of plenty. In 2007 Mwangachuchu fell out with Robert Sussman, the co-founder of his mining business, a dispute that would lead a Maryland court to order the Congolese to pay the American $2 million. Mwangachuchu pressed on alone. His lands went on yielding up their precious ore. And he began to cultivate a new partner: the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (National Congress for the Defence of the People), a militia that largely does the opposite of what its name suggests.
The relentless conflict in eastern Congo has prevented the development of large-scale industrial mining there. Almost all mining is done by hand. The East’s minerals have fuelled the war, but the value of its output is tiny compared with the immense mines to the south.
Congo’s Katanga province, sandwiched between Angola and Zambia, holds about half of the world’s stocks of cobalt.
The metal is mostly used to make the ultra-strong superalloys that are integral to turbines and jet engines. It is mined as a by-product of copper, a crucial ingredient of human civilization, from its first uses in ancient coins to the wiring in electricity networks. The African copperbelt stretches from northern Zambia into Katanga and holds some of the planet’s richest copper stocks. In Katanga vast whorls of red earth and rock have been cut into the forest, open pit mines that descend in steps like amphitheatres.
Katanga has endured secessionist conflict and suffered heavy fighting during the war. But, lying much further from the border with Rwanda, the principal foreign protagonist in the rolling conflicts, Katanga has known more stability than the East. Mining multinationals from Canada, the United States, Europe, Australia, South Africa and China have operations in Katanga; the region’s mining output dwarfs the rest of Congo’s economy. Congo’s rulers have built a shadow state on the foundations of Katanga’s minerals, resembling the one that Angola’s Futungo has fashioned from crude oil.
Augustin Katumba Mwanke grew up in Katanga idolizing the executives who ran Gécamines, the national copper-mining company. As Congo crumbled in the dying years of Mobutu’s rule, a combination of fierce intelligence, luck and determination carried him to South Africa, then brimming with possibility after the end of apartheid. He worked for mining companies before landing a job at a subsidiary of HSBC. In April 1997, when Laurent Kabila’s forces captured Katanga on their advance across Congo, the bank grew nervous that the rebels might not honour a loan it had made to Gécamines. A delegation was dispatched to Congo for talks with the rebels. Katumba was added to the party in the hope that a Congolese face might help the bank’s cause.
‘When they came I saw a young man who looked very bright,’ Mawapanga Mwana Nanga, then the rebels’ finance chief, told me years later.
An agronomist who had trained in Kentucky, Mawapanga was on the lookout for talented recruits as he prepared to inherit a ransacked treasury. He took a shine to Katumba. ‘I told him, “You should come back. The country needs people like you.” We were just joking. I said, “I can give you a job, but I can’t pay you yet.”’ The lighthearted exchange contained a serious offer. Mawapanga exhorted Katumba to have the bank second him to what was about to become Congo’s new government. Katumba craved influence but had foreseen a career in international business, not the chaos of Congolese government. Nonetheless, aged thirty-three, he headed home to take up Mawapanga’s invitation. His transformation into one of Africa’s most powerful men had begun.
As the rebels struggled to start governing after deposing Mobutu, Katumba impressed as an adviser in the finance ministry. He had been back in Congo less than a year when his phone rang. ‘Hello, may I speak with Katumba?’ said the voice on the line.
‘Yes, this is he.’
‘This is Kabila.’
Katumba had a friend with the same name and asked him what he wanted.
‘No,’ said the voice. ‘This is Laurent-Désiré Kabila.’
The president, a fellow Katangan, told Katumba he wanted to meet him. A few weeks later Katumba stood before the corpulent guerrilla at the presidential palace. Following some brisk questioning about the young man’s background, the president said, ‘I want to name you governor of Katanga.’ According to his memoir, a stunned Katumba protested that he was utterly unqualified for what was one of the most influential positions in Congolese politics. But he could hardly refuse. The appointment was made public that evening. ‘Katanga is as big as France,’ Mawapanga, the finance minister, told his protégé. ‘If you can manage that, the sky’s the limit.’ He might have added that Katumba was being handed the keys to one of the world’s greatest vaults of minerals.
Kabila’s rebels-turned-rulers needed to generate money from Congo’s dilapidated mining industry for the twin purposes of resisting an invasion by their erstwhile Rwandan backers and making sure that they used what might prove a brief stint in power to bolster their personal finances. Oscar Mudiay, a senior civil servant in Kabila’s government, told me that the president received a minimum of $4 million each week delivered in suitcases by state-owned and private mining companies.
Kabila’s government soon signed a flurry of mining and oil deals, with scant regard for due process. The regional coalition that had swept him to power had split into pro-Kabila and pro-Rwanda alliances, and Kabila needed to keep his foreign allies, principally Zimbabwe and Angola, sweet. One beneficiary of the deal-making was Sonangol, the Angolan state oil company controlled by the Futungo, with which the Congolese state formed a partnership.
As governor of Katanga province, Katumba was perfectly placed to build his influence over the mining industry. ‘He was more intelligent than the others and got close to Gécamines,’ Oscar Mudiay recalled.
As he built a base for himself in Congo’s mining heartland, Katumba became a member of Kabila’s inner circle. He befriended the president’s son while they travelled together on sensitive diplomatic missions. Monosyllabic and withdrawn, Joseph Kabila had been thrown into the military when his father became the figurehead of the rebellion against Mobutu. He was prematurely promoted to general and, in name at least, appointed head of the army. In December 2000 Rwandan troops and anti-Kabila forces routed the Congolese army and its foreign allies at Pweto, Katumba’s hometown in Katanga. The Rwandans seized a valuable cache of arms, but there was another prize within their reach: Joseph Kabila was on the battlefield. As the Congolese army melted into frantic retreat and the high command took to its heels, Katumba received a call from the president: ‘Kiddo, find Joseph, my son.’
Katumba raced to reach Joseph by phone and discovered he was alive and still free. Such were the straits of the government campaign that Katumba, according to his memoir, personally had to find fuel and take it to the airport for a plane to evacuate the president’s son.
This was the moment that formed an unbreakable bond between Katumba and the younger Kabila.
Four weeks later one of Laurent Kabila’s bodyguards, an easterner who had been among the cohort of child soldiers in Kabila’s rebel army, approached the president and shot him three times at close range, for reasons that have been the subject of competing conspiracy theories ever since. In disarray, his senior officials decided to create a dynasty on the spot and summoned Joseph to Kinshasa to inherit the presidency. Mawapanga Mwana Nanga, the former finance minister who had brought Katumba back to Congo, was involved in the tense efforts to hold the government together after the assassination. ‘Joseph was a general – he did not know politics,’ Mawapanga told me. ‘So he called Katumba to come back and be his right-hand man and show him how to navigate the political waters.’
In four years Katumba had gone from a junior post in a Johannesburg bank to the side of Congo’s new president. He was appointed minister of the presidency and state portfolio, in charge of state-owned companies. In 2002 UN investigators appointed to study the illegal exploitation of Congo’s resources named him as one of the key figures in an ‘elite network’ of Congolese and Zimbabwean officials, foreign businessmen and organized criminals who were orchestrating the plunder of Congolese minerals under cover of war.
‘This network has transferred ownership of at least $5 billion of assets from the state mining sector to private companies under its control in the past three years with no compensation or benefit for the state treasury of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,’ the UN team wrote.
When the UN investigators recommended Katumba be placed under UN sanctions, he was shuffled out of his official post in Kabila’s government – and moved into the shadow state. He became the leading exponent of a system that Africa Confidential, the most comprehensive publication in English on the continent’s affairs, encapsulated: ‘Exercising power, from the late President Mobutu Sese Seko to the Kabila dynasty, has relied on access to secret untraceable funds to reward supporters, buy elections and run vast patronage networks. This parallel state coexists with formal structures and their nominal commitment to transparency and the rule of law.’
I have heard people compare Katumba to Rasputin, Karl Rove and the grand viziers of the Ottoman Empire. Diplomats rarely met him. In photographs his eyes look penetrating, his face set in a permanent semifrown of calculation. One foreigner who found himself in the same room as Katumba described an impressive man, shrewd and gentlemanly, with a fondness for his own jokes. ‘He never spoke much,’ said Oscar Mudiay, the official who served under Laurent Kabila. ‘Just a glance.’
Katumba was like an elder brother to the young president. ‘Joseph Kabila put his total faith in Katumba,’ Olivier Kamitatu, an opposition politician who served for five years as planning minister in Kabila’s government, told me.
‘He was hugely intelligent. He knew how to run the political networks and the business networks. The state today is the property of certain individuals. Katumba’s work was to create a parallel state.’
On 15 October 2004, the residents of the Katangan mining town of Kilwa discovered what it meant to fall foul of Katumba’s looting machine. The previous day Alain Kazadi Makalayi, a twenty-year-old fisherman with delusions of grandeur, had arrived in Kilwa at the head of half a dozen ramshackle separatists and proclaimed the independence of Katanga.
His call to arms attracted fewer than a hundred young followers. Realizing that a rebellion that could not even organize a radio broadcast was unlikely to last long and that the national army could not be far off, most of Kilwa’s inhabitants ran away.
The separatists posed a negligible threat, but they had dared to challenge the interests of the shadow state. Dikulushi, the copper mine that lay 50 kilometres outside the town, was linked to Katumba.
Anvil Mining, a small Australian outfit, had won the rights to mine the area in 1998 and began producing copper in 2002. According to a subsequent inquiry by the Congolese Parliament, the company was granted a twenty-year exemption from paying any taxes whatsoever.
Katumba was a founding board member of Anvil’s local subsidiary, and his name appeared on the minutes of three board meetings between 2001 and 2004.
Bill Turner, Anvil’s chief executive, denied that Katumba held any shares in the company; he said Katumba sat on the board as the government’s representative. But Turner admitted to a reporter from Australia’s ABC television that, as well as a few thousand dollars in director’s fees, the company paid some $50,000 a year to rent a compound Katumba owned in Lubumbashi, Katanga’s capital, for its headquarters.
After the young separatist convened a public meeting in Kilwa’s marketplace to proclaim his rebellion and declare that the days of Joseph Kabila and Katumba ‘pocketing money from the mines’ were over, the president ordered the regional military commander to retake the town within forty-eight hours.
Troops had orders to ‘shoot anything that moved’, according to a UN inquiry into what followed.
The soldiers arrived on Anvil Mining’s aircraft and made use of the company’s vehicles. They encountered scant resistance and suffered no casualties putting down the inept rebellion. Once the fighting was over they taught Kilwa a lesson.
Soldiers went from house to house, dispensing vengeance. At least one hundred people were killed. Some were forced to kneel beside a mass grave before being executed one by one. Among the dead were both insurgents and civilians, including a teenager whose killers made off with his bicycle. Kazadi, the hapless separatist leader, was said to have died of his wounds in the hospital. Soldiers who ransacked homes and shops carried their loot away in Anvil vehicles, which were also used to transport corpses, according to the UN investigation, claims the company denied.
A decade later, in 2014, I asked Bill Turner about Anvil’s role in the Kilwa massacre. ‘Anvil were of course aware of the rebellion and the suppression of the rebellion in Kilwa in October 2004, having provided logistics to the DRC Military, under force of law,’ he told me, declining to elaborate on what those logistics were. But Turner told me he had not been aware of ‘allegations of war crimes or atrocities’ until an ABC reporter asked him about them in an interview seven months after the massacre. (He added that the interview was edited with the aim of ‘portraying Anvil and me in the worst possible light’.) ‘There have been multiple government enquiries in a number of countries, including a detailed Australian Federal Police investigation in Australia into those allegations,’ Turner continued in a letter responding to my questions. ‘None of those enquiries has found that there is any substance whatsoever to the allegations. In addition, there has been litigation instigated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Western Australia and Canada, which has at least touched on the matters raised by you. In none of those cases have there been findings against Anvil.’
The survivors’ representatives fought for years to hold those responsible for the Kilwa massacre to account, but they got nowhere. Katumba was untouchable. In 2009 a US diplomatic cable described him as ‘a kind of shady, even nefarious figure within Kabila’s inner circle, [who] is believed to manage much of Kabila’s personal fortune’.
The cable was transmitting news that Katumba had stepped down from his latest formal position, heading Kabila’s majority in the national assembly. But it predicted – accurately – that his influence would remain.
In 2006 and 2007 two rebel groups and the Congolese army fought for control over Edouard Mwangachuchu’s coltan mine at Bibatama.
The group that won out was arguably the most formidable rebel force in eastern Congo – quite an accolade, given the ferocity of the fighting that continued to erupt regularly despite the formal end of the war in 2003.
Known by its French acronym, CNDP, the Congress for the Defence of the People was the creation of Laurent Nkunda, a Tutsi renegade general and Seventh-Day Adventist pastor from North Kivu. Nkunda had fought with Rwanda against Laurent Kabila before joining the Congolese national army when it incorporated various warring factions under the 2003 peace deal. He rose to general before returning to the cause of rebellion – this time, his own.
The hills and forests around Nkunda’s hometown in North Kivu became his fiefdom, as the forces at his command swelled to eight thousand men (and children).
A student of psychology, for a time he outwitted everyone, navigating with cunning the treacherous terrain in which Rwanda and Kinshasa jostled for influence with UN peacekeepers, arms dealers, local politicians and eastern Congo’s constellation of paramilitary groups.
For all Nkunda’s rhetoric – he spoke to a Financial Times reporter in 2008 of ‘a cry for peace and freedom’ – his operation was, in large measure and like many of its rivals, a money-making venture.
Eastern Congo’s militias – not to mention the army itself – have many ways to bring in revenue, from taxing commercial traffic to ranching and trading in charcoal. But the mining trade is particularly lucrative and has the advantage of bringing in foreign currency that can buy arms.
The business arrangements of eastern Congo’s clandestine mineral trade reveal something else, something that undercuts the crass notion that the primitive hatreds of African tribes are the sole driver of the conflict. The two most important militias, the CNDP and the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), are sworn enemies. The former’s stated reason to exist is to defend the Tutsis of eastern Congo from the latter, a cohort formed by the Hutu extremists who perpetrated the Rwandan genocide. Both also serve as proxies: Joseph Kabila has supported the FDLR to counter the influence that Paul Kagame’s Tutsi-led government in Rwanda exercises through the CNDP.
But as one easterner who has worked in both mining and intelligence told me, ‘Formally the groups are all enemies. But when it comes to making money and mining, they cooperate pretty well. War changes, but business goes on. The actors change, but the system stays – the links between the armed groups and the mines. The conflict goes on because it has its own financing: the mines and the weapons. It has its own economy.’
On a Sunday afternoon in Goma I drank a beer beside a pool at a hotel with Colonel Olivier Hamuli. He is the spokesman of the Congolese armed forces and journalists regard him as one of the more accurate sources of information on the fighting, even if he avoids discussing the military’s own role in plunder and atrocities. An easterner, his convivial demeanour cannot mask the eyes of a man who has seen too much. When we met he was fielding call after call about clashes between Tutsi rebels and the army. The rebels had advanced to take strategic positions on the edge of Goma; the army and UN peacekeepers were preparing helicopter gunships for a counterattack.
‘The CNDP, the FDLR, they say they are fighting against bad governance. They are just mining. Even the FDLR, they are not trying to challenge the Rwandan government – they are here to mine. This is the problem of the war in the east,’ the colonel said.
‘It’s a war of economic opportunity. It’s not just Rwanda that benefits; it’s businessmen in the United States, Australia too.’ He brandished one of his incessantly buzzing mobile phones. ‘Smuggling goes on. Mobile phones are still being made. They need the raw materials one way or another.’
According to the UN panel of experts that tries to keep track of the links between eastern Congo’s conflict and the mineral trade, after Nkunda won the battle for the territory that contained Mwangachuchu’s mining operations, the warlord permitted the businessman to retain control of his mines in return for a cut of the coltan.
Mwangachuchu told the UN team he paid 20 cents per kilo of coltan exported from his mines at checkpoints he suspected were run by the CNDP.
That levy alone would have channelled thousands of dollars a year into the militia’s war chest. Altogether eastern Congo’s militias are estimated to have raked in something to the tune of $185 million in revenues from the trade in coltan and other minerals in 2008.
The UN team also reported Mwangachuchu’s excuse for funding the militia: he told the team he had ‘no choice but to accept the presence of CNDP and carry on working at Bibatama, as he needs money to pay $16,000 in taxes to the government.’
To his supporters, Mwangachuchu is a well-meaning employer (of both Tutsis and other ethnicities) assailed by grasping militiamen. His supporters, none of whom wanted to be named when they spoke to me, described a legitimate businessman striving to introduce modern mining techniques in the face of turmoil and wrongheaded foreign interventions. Some well-informed Congolese observers are less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. One night in a Goma bar a senior army officer fumed with anger when I asked him about Mwangachuchu and other mining barons of North Kivu. He damned them all as war profiteers who preferred to pay a few dollars to rebel-run rackets than have a functioning state tax them properly. When I asked the easterner who has worked both on mining policy and in Congolese intelligence about Mwangachuchu’s claim that he had been forcibly taxed by the CNDP, he shot back, ‘It’s not a question of taxes. Mwangachuchu and the armed groups are the same thing.’
It is hard to see how Mwangachuchu could have established himself as a leading Tutsi businessman in the East without becoming intertwined with the armed groups. As well as seeking prosperity, Tutsis in eastern Congo have faced near-constant threats to their survival, most terrifyingly from the Rwandan Hutu génocidaires who roam the hills.
In 2011 Mwangachuchu stood as a candidate for CNDP’s political wing in the national assembly – and its foot soldiers helped guarantee his victory. They had been absorbed into the lawless ranks of Congo’s army under a shaky peace deal but retained their mining rackets and their loyalties.
‘The CNDP guys used every trick in the book to make sure he got through,’ said a foreign election observer who watched former CNDP rebels filling out ballot papers for Mwangachuchu after the polls had closed.
Ex-CNDP fighters in the national army were observed brazenly intimidating voters in North Kivu, some of the most egregious abuses in a deeply flawed national election that secured Kabila a fresh term.
According to a report to the Security Council by a UN group of experts, to ensure the support of the CNDP’s fighters, Mwangachuchu had paid off Bosco Ntaganda. Known as ‘The Terminator’, Ntaganda had replaced the deposed Laurent Nkunda three years earlier as the CNDP boss and brought his boys into the army even though he was wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes including murder, rape, conscripting child soldiers, and ethnic persecution.
Despite overwhelming evidence of foul play and months of legal wrangling, Mwangachuchu’s election stood. Even before his victory was secure, Ntaganda named him president of the CNDP’s political party.
Mwangachuchu’s leadership was short-lived. A few months after the 2011 election Kabila’s government sought to strengthen its writ in the East by relocating the former CNDP militiamen who had been brought into the national army to postings elsewhere in the country, far from the East’s coltan, gold and tin mines. But the militiamen were not about to give that up without a fight. Several hundred mutinied under a new acronym, M23, short for March 23, the date of the 2009 deal that had brought them into the army. Rwanda, deeply involved in both eastern Congo’s military and mining networks, again provided covert support to the mainly Tutsi rebels as they advanced on Goma.
In early May 2012 General James Kabarebe, the redoubtable Rwandan defence minister who had masterminded its military campaigns in Congo and surreptitiously commanded M23, called Mwangachuchu. He ordered him to support the rebels and pull the CNDP political party out of its alliance with Kabila.
Mwangachuchu refused. Perhaps he feared that crossing Kabila would imperil his mining interests; perhaps he sensed that the new rebellion was doomed. A furious Kabarebe told Mwangachuchu that ‘a lightning bolt will strike you’. Within days he had been ousted as president of the CNDP’s political party.
But Mwangachuchu had chosen wisely. Western powers that had long turned a blind eye to Rwanda’s meddling in Congo ran out of patience and suspended aid. Bosco Ntaganda, the Tutsi warlord who had joined the mutiny, found himself under such mortal threat that he chose to take his chances in The Hague and turned himself in at the US embassy in Rwanda, from where he was sent to face justice at the International Criminal Court. At negotiations in Uganda between Kabila’s government and the M23 rebels, Mwangachuchu was part of the government delegation. The talks came to little, and in late 2013 Congolese forces, backed by a new UN force with a mandate to smash the rebel groups, routed the M23 rebels.
I asked Mwangachuchu to give me his own account. He declined. When I e-mailed him a list of questions, it was his lawyer who replied. Mwangachuchu, the lawyer wrote, ‘reminds you that there is a war on in this part of the country and he cannot afford at this stage to answer your questions.’ Mwangachuchu can claim to have played peacemaker – but only when it suits him. ‘He’s not a fighter; he’s a businessman,’ a former minister in Kabila’s government told me. ‘His loyalties are not so strong – except to his business.’
Our two-jeep convoy slowed as it approached a roadblock deep in the tropical forests of one of eastern Congo’s national parks. Manning the roadblock were soldiers from the Congolese army, theoretically the institution that should safeguard the state’s monopoly on the use of force but, in practice, chiefly just another predator on civilians. As my Congolese companions negotiated nervously with the soldiers, I stepped away to take advantage of a break in a very long drive and relieve myself, only to sense someone rushing toward me. Hurriedly zipping up my fly, I turned to see a fast-approaching soldier brandishing his AK47. With a voice that signified a grave transgression, he declared, ‘It is forbidden to piss in the park.’ Human urine, the soldier asserted, posed a threat to eastern Congo’s gorillas. I thought it best not to retort that the poor creatures had been poached close to extinction by, among others, the army, nor that the park attracted far more militiamen than gorilla-watching tourists.
My crime, it transpired, carried a financial penalty. My companions took the soldier aside, and the matter was settled. Perhaps they talked him down, using the presence of a foreign journalist as leverage. Perhaps they slipped him a few dollars. As we drove away it occurred to me that we had witnessed the Congolese state in microcosm. The soldier was following the example set by Kabila, Katumba, Mwangachuchu and Nkunda: capture a piece of territory, be it a remote intersection of potholed road, a vast copper concession, or the presidency itself; protect your claim with a gun, a threat, a semblance of law, or a shibboleth; and extract rent from it. The political economy of the roadblock has taken hold. The more the state crumbles, the greater the need for each individual to make ends meet however they can; the greater the looting, the more the authority of the state withers.
Leaving the roadblock behind, we bounced along the pitted tracks that lead into the interior of South Kivu province. It was late 2010, and a joint offensive against Hutu rebels by Congolese and Rwandan forces and their allied militias had driven masses of civilians from their farmsteads. Kwashiorkor, or severe acute malnutrition in children, was rife.
The lone hospital in Bunyakiri serves 160,000 people. It has no ambulance and no electricity, making it almost impossible after nightfall to find a vein for an injection. The rusting metal of its roof is scarcely less rickety than the surrounding mud huts. When I visited, medicine was in short supply, the army having recently ransacked the hospital. There was no mobile phone reception, an irony in a part of the world whose tantalum is crucial in making the devices.
The hospital’s pediatric ward had fourteen beds. At least two mothers sat on each, cradling their babies. On one, Bora Sifa regarded her surroundings warily. Two years earlier a raiding party from the FDLR, the militia formed by the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, had descended on her village in search of loot to supplement the income from their mining operations. The raiders ordered Bora’s husband to gather up what they wanted. ‘They forced him to carry all the things away into the forest,’ Bora told me. ‘Then they killed him.’
Bora fled and a stranger in another village took her in, allowing her and her children to live in an outhouse. Now twenty, she made about a dollar a day helping to cultivate cassava, a root crop that fills empty bellies but has little nutritional value. Five days ago she had brought her son, Chance, to the hospital. ‘He wasn’t growing,’ Bora said. ‘I wasn’t making enough milk.’ Like many malnourished children, Chance’s features had aged prematurely. His eyes were sunken, his hair receding.
At any given moment since the start of Congo’s great war in 1998, between 1 million and 3.5 million Congolese have been adrift like Bora. The vast majority are in the East, driven from mining areas or the shifting frontlines of multiple interwoven conflicts. In 2013 2.6 million of Congo’s 66 million people were ‘internally displaced’, as refugees who have remained in their country are known in the jargon of human catastrophe, making up one in ten of the worldwide tally.
Many end up in flimsy bivouacs fashioned from tarpaulins bearing the brands of assorted relief agencies; others appeal to the solidarity of their fellow Congolese, which persists despite the myriad fissures that war, desperation and ethnicity have opened between them. That solidarity can only do so much in a country where two-thirds lack sufficient food. Uprooted, Congo’s wandering millions starve.
With the help of the hospital’s tireless doctor and a French charity, Chance was recovering.
Few others shared his fortune. Further up the road I visited a hilltop clinic beside a school in the town of Hombo Sud. One by one, dozens of emaciated children were being dangled from weighing scales and checked for telltale signs of severe malnutrition: oedema (a buildup of fluids in the legs) and arms with a circumference of less than 10.5 centimetres.
Anna Rebecca Susa, a bundle of spindles in a pink skirt emblazoned with the word ‘Princess’, was dangerously underweight. The special measuring tape showed red when a medic pulled it tight round her arm. Her belly was swollen beneath fleshless ribs, her hair reduced to a faint frizz. At five, she could not understand what was happening to her, but her big eyes were full of anxiety, as though she could sense that her body was failing. She could not keep down a sachet of the peanut paste that can do wonders for malnourished children and was sent home with more in the hope her stomach would settle. Her father, Lavie, invited me back to his home, an outhouse belonging to a distant relative where Lavie, his wife, and their four children had lived since they fled rebel attacks on their home village two years previously.
The signature falsetto guitar of Congolese music drifted over the jagged rooftops of the tiny metal shacks sprayed across the slopes. Lavie’s wife, whose wedding ring he had fashioned from a plastic bottle top, was out foraging for leaves. Anna fell asleep on the shack’s lone bed. Her younger brother, Espoir, tottered around, oblivious to his sister’s plight.
A few weeks later I got in touch with the clinic’s medics to ask after Anna. When she had kept throwing up the peanut paste, the French charity had driven her to the hospital at Bunyakiri. By then there was little anyone could do. Her immune system destroyed by malnutrition, she died of an infection.
The heavens opened the day they buried Augustin Katumba Mwanke. The Congolese establishment sheltered under marquees in Kinshasa before the coffin that sported an enormous floral garland.
In a black suit and black shirt Joseph Kabila arrived amid a phalanx of bodyguards manoeuvring to keep an umbrella over his head. It was a rare public appearance for a reclusive president said to have spent his early years in office in the company of video games. His face was expressionless. Barely two months had passed since he had rigged his way to victory in the presidential election, securing a second five-year term. Now the mastermind behind both his power and his wealth was gone. The previous day, 12 February 2012, the American pilot of the jet carrying a group of Kabila’s senior officials to Bukavu by Lake Kivu had misjudged the landing. Katumba’s last moments came as the aircraft veered off the runway and smashed into a grassy embankment. He was forty-eight.
One other guest at the funeral stood out. He was the lone white face in the front row. Kabila clasped his hand. The burly, bearded man in a yarmulke, the Jewish skullcap, was Dan Gertler. He was the all-important intersection between the shadow state that controlled access to Congo’s minerals and the multinational mining companies that coveted them.
The grandson of one of the founders of Israel’s diamond exchange, in his early twenties Gertler set forth to seek his own fortune. He went to Angola, then still deep in civil war and a rich source of diamonds. But another Israeli, Lev Leviev, had already staked a strong claim there. Gertler arrived in Congo in 1997, days after Laurent Kabila had overthrown Mobutu. An ultra-orthodox Jew, he was introduced by a rabbi to Joseph Kabila, newly installed as the head of the Congolese army.
The younger Kabila and Gertler had much in common. Each stood in the shadow of his elders, carrying a heavy burden on young shoulders into the cauldron of Congolese warfare and politics. They became firm friends.
Gertler soon discovered the value of his friendship with the president’s son. Kabila Sr was in urgent need of funds to arm his forces against Rwandan and Ugandan invaders and to butter up his allies for the fight.
When Joseph took his new friend to meet his father, the president told the young Israeli that if he could raise $20 million without delay, he could have a monopoly to buy every diamond mined in Congo. Gertler cobbled together the cash and was granted the monopoly.
Not for the last time, an arrangement that suited Gertler and the Kabila clan hardly served the interests of the Congolese people. ‘It wasn’t a good deal for us,’ Mawapanga Mwana Nanga, then the finance minister, told me. ‘We should have opened the market to the highest bidder.’
UN investigators declared that Gertler’s diamond monopoly had been a ‘nightmare’ for Congo’s government and a ‘disaster’ for the local diamond trade, encouraging smuggling and costing the treasury tax revenue.
