Rwandan economic involvement in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo

According to the International Rescue Committee, as many as 3.3 million people have lost their lives, either in direct fighting or from the outbreak of diseases as a result of the war. Despite the formation of a two-year national transition government, composed of representatives of the former Kinshasa regime, the pro-government Mayi Mayi-militias, rebel movements, the unarmed political opposition and civil society, the prospects for durable peace remain bleak. While intensified ethnic strife between Hema and Lendu militias in the resource-rich Ituri province has triggered a massive flow of refugees and the creation of a multilateral intervention force in June 2003, the Kivu provinces have witnessed renewed fighting between rebel forces of the Rwandan-backed RCD-Goma rebel movement and Mayi-Mayi militiamen. Even the south-eastern Katanga province has shown signs of evolving instability: on 8 August 2003, the international relief non-governmental organisation GOAL reported that six different armed groups were occupying the town of Manono, following the ejection of the local RCD-Goma administrator by the 8th Brigade, a mysterious group of 150 men claiming to be members of the former Kinshasa government’s army. Unfortunately, the spiral of violence in Congo’s border regions is not the only source of concern to diplomats involved in overseeing the peace process. The dubious track record of some of the key members of the national transition government does not inspire much confidence in the preparatory work for the country’s first democratic elections since independence. Whereas a Belgian court has sentenced vicepresident Jean-Pierre Bemba to one year’s imprisonment for human trafficking, his colleague Abdoulaye Yerodia Ndombasi has also faced a Belgian judicial inquiry for his inflammatory statements concerning the DRC’s Tutsi population in August 1998. Finally, one of the biggest impediments to the Congolese peace process may be the issue of resource trafficking. According to the UN expert panel investigating the illegal exploitation of natural resources and other forms of wealth of the DRC, members of the Rwandan and Ugandan regime have developed mechanisms to continue the looting of diamonds, gold, coltan and timber after the official withdrawal of their troops from Congolese territory, as agreed in the Pretoria and Luanda peace accords. Previous reports by the Panel contained a detailed account of the multiple ways in which a selected group of Rwandan and Ugandan military officers, politicians and businessmen have taken advantage of the military presence of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and the Ugandan People’s Defence Forces to secure their stake in the Congolese mining business.

Mining in comparative perspective : trends, transformations and theories

This article offers a brief introduction to a special issue based on a selection of papers originally presented at an international mining conference in Ghent (Belgium) in December 2017. The aim of the conference was to promote a comparative and multidisciplinary approach to a selective number of political, economic and sociocultural aspects of mining in the Global South. The five papers included in the special issue have been grouped around three main themes: (1) mining elites, (2) the antagonism between artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) and large-scale mining (LSM), and (3) mining in a globalizing world

Men, mines and masculinities: the lives and practices of artisanal miners in Lwambo (Katanga province, DR Congo)

This dissertation deals with the phenomenon of artisanal mining in Katanga, the southeast province of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the course of the past decade, thousands of people have moved to the Katangese mining areas with the aim of finding new sources of income and developing new strategies to be able to cope with the continuing economic depression in their country. Making use of simple tools such as shovels and pickaxes, artisanal miners or creuseurs have started digging for copper and cobalt ores, which are in great demand among mineral traders and metal producers. While copper prices have been on the rise as a result of expanding infrastructure in rapidly developing countries such as China and India, cobalt prices have also boomed, largely as a result of the growing demand for cobalt-based rechargeable batteries, which are used in various electronic devices such as cell phones, laptops and camcorders. Due to the fact that, in Katanga, the artisanal mining sector constitutes a genuine male stronghold, artisanal mining is an excellent field to examine the relationship between work and masculinity. The main argument of this dissertation is that large groups of Katangese men have engaged in artisanal mining because they are eager to redefine the relationship between work and masculinity. Although, primarily, they go to the mines to earn themselves a living, they also use their stay in the mining areas to experiment with new ways of being a man. Unlike their fathers and grandfathers, who were able to prove their manhood through the performance of wage labour for one of the many companies in the region, contemporary Katangese youngsters are forced to try their luck in the informal economy. Many of them feel attracted by artisanal mining, because they believe that, in the mines, they will be able to make a lot of money within a short period of time. Moreover, they are convinced that, thanks to their work in the mines, they will be able to develop typically masculine qualities such as physical strength, bravery and technical knowledge. Thus, it can be argued that Katangese men use their stay in the mining areas to construct new masculine identities