The conflict-ridden, politically dysfunctional DRC is home to approximately two-thirds of the world’s supplies of cobalt, a metal vital for manufacturing the lithium-ion batteries used in smartphones and electric vehicles (EVs). Despite such vast natural wealth, however, the Congolese people remain among the poorest on the planet (ranked 176^th out of 187 countries by the UN’s Human Development Index). This is due in large part to Joseph Kabila, the country’s ruler since 2001, and his cronies occupying the highest levels of government.

With the mining industry in particular dogged by rumors of unethical practices, including hazardous working conditions and the widespread use of child labor, Samsung’s move to go to straight to the supplier is being seen as an attempt to guarantee ethical sourcing for their cobalt needs. The question is: With a dictator Kabila still calling the shots, will this road really lead anywhere?

Tightening his grip

Though Kabila’s presidential mandate came to an end in November 2016, he has exploited a legal loophole in the constitution which allows him to stay in power until his successor has been nominated. Since then, citing financial constraints and an inadequate electoral infrastructure, he has repeatedly postponed elections. Not surprisingly, his latest promises to hold elections by December have been met with growing skepticism by the international community and the Congolese people.

These promises look even less reliable when Kabila’s latest maneuvers are taken into account. Earlier this month – likely in recognition of the huge financial role that the country’s natural resource rents have played in keeping him in power – Kabila enacted a new mining code, which declares cobalt a “strategic mineral.” This designation allows the government to levy higher royalties on miners, as well as remove a stability clause that protected investment against changes to the fiscal and customs regime for 10 years.

Mining companies had lobbied against such a code for years, claiming its implementation would signal the demise of the cobalt industry in the DRC, but were forced into submission after a six-hour meeting with the president – though executives confirmed that international arbitration is still on the table. The new code represents a fivefold hike for miners, with royalties jumping from 2% to 10%.

Rotten to the core

In a country whose annual budget is a mere $5 billion, there is perhaps a case to be made that increasing governmental profits on national assets is a good thing – that is, if the increased royalties were intended to benefit the Congolese people. But even a cursory look at Kabila’s track record puts to rest even the pretense that the administration has the good of the people at heart.

According to a landmark report issued by international watchdog Global Witness, more than $750 million in mining revenues never reached national coffers between 2013 and 2015. Representing more than a fifth of all income from the mining industry, that figure swells even further (to $1.3 billion) when state bodies other than the national treasury are taken into account. Most of that money went missing after being paid to secretive state-owned mining giant Gécamines, which receives more than $100 million per year from private companies in the country’s mining sector, but passes on mere pennies to the state. Though Gécamines contributes little to the public coffers, it has somehow found the wherewithal to pay off loans for Dan Gertler, a friend of the president’s.

Mounting opposition

It is these kinds of practices that contribute to the country’s vast inequality, which – if corruption continues unabated – will only be exacerbated by the new mining code. Although Kabila has promised to step down after elections, his hardline stance regarding the mining industry suggests he has other ideas in mind.

Another factor which has facilitated Kabila’s grip on power thus far has been the regime’s constant harassment of the opposition and persecution of political leaders – but there are signs that the opposition’s disarray is changing fast. The emergence of a new coalition named “Together for Change” has united a fragmented political spectrum and could well pose the biggest threat to Kabila’s tenure to date. The movement is spearheaded by the businessman and politician Moïse Katumbi, who is currently in self-imposed exile due to charges of real estate fraud laid at his door by Kabila. Katumbi contends that all allegations are entirely fabricated and has vowed to return to his homeland by June to cement his candidacy.

For his part, Katumbi has condemned the introduction of the new mining code, claiming it only adds to the DRC’s climate of instability and further discourages foreign investment. If elected, he has promised to thrash out a fairer agreement with mining companies and stamp out corruption at the highest levels.

Paved with good intentions

Samsung’s decision to source its cobalt directly from the supplier might well represent the first step in respecting best practice guidelines, but it’s just a drop in the ocean when compared with the magnitude of the challenge. Without a more comprehensive reform of the entire mining and tax system, which would place transparency and integrity at every stage of the supply chain, Samsung’s move is little more than a “tick-the-box” exercise.

Unless such a scenario comes to pass, the proceeds from cobalt, copper, and the DRC’s myriad other exports will surely continue to find their way into the wrong pockets and stay there. If that happens, all the momentum Katumbi and the opposition can muster might not be enough to oust Kabila and save the Congolese people from decades of oppression and poverty.

The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the authors are theirs alone and don’t reflect any official position of Geopoliticalmonitor.com.

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Ethnic clashes have broken out in DR Congo’s northern province of Ituri, leaving at least 79 people dead and tens of thousands displaced. The bulk of the fighting is between the Hema and Lendu tribes. According to reports from Al Jazeera, Lendu fighters have razed at least six villages in the past week, and some 60,000 displaced people are seeking shelter in the provincial capital of Bunia.

Lendu-Hema violence has a long history that spans over 40 years and several wars. Ituri was branded “the bloodiest corner of Congo” by Human Rights Watch in 2003, when it estimated that some 55,000 civilians had been killed from 1999-2003. Since then the death toll has slowly ticked upward as low-level conflict raged between the pastoralist Hemas and farming Lendus.

The recent spike in violence does not bode well for the overall stability of DR Congo, especially given the uncertainty surrounding the future of President Joseph Kabila, who has remained in office beyond his constitutionally mandated two-term limit.

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Electric vehicles (EVs) are starting to revolutionize the car market in 2018, with BMW recently announcing new designs for electric versions of a dozen of its leading models. The BMW effort is being replicated across the car market by its competitors, as technological advances transform vehicle designs in the biggest shift to hit ground transport since the invention of the internal combustion engine. Even roads are changing with the gradual arrival of the energy generating and storing “solar panel roads.” These new EVs come with one drawback from carmakers’ perspectives however; they require a great deal of the rare mineral cobalt. A typical EV battery needs 21kg of cobalt to function properly, and as the mining sector has woken up to the prospect of fleets of EVs on our roads by the 2020s, the price of cobalt has spiked.

Early in January, business outlet Bloomberg reported the price had climbed from $600 to $1700 in 16 months. There is another problem for carmakers however: 60 percent of all known cobalt supplies come from the unstable and corrupt Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). War is also brewing there after the DRC’s autocratic leader President Joseph Kabila refused to step down at the end of his term in 2016. With fossil fuels falling out of favor due to their environmental impact, carmakers do not have the luxury of refusing to engage with the DRC, but how they avoid tying themselves too tightly to the decaying Kabila regime will be a crucial consideration. In the interim period between the end of fossil fuels’ monopoly of the motor industry and the rise of credible alternatives to cobalt (recycling dead batteries is often mentioned), the DRC will have a disproportionate amount of international leverage relative to its tiny and highly dysfunctional economy.

Background

A legacy of dictatorship. Security in the DRC has taken a sharp downwards turn in 2017 as the peace agreement which ended the devastating Second Congo War in 2003 fell apart. President Joseph Kabila, who took over as the DRC’s leader upon the assassination of his father Laurent-Désiré Kabila, went on to serve two full terms as the “elected” leader of the DRC. This was all that was allowed him under the post-war DRC constitution, whose creators wanted to avoid another ‘president-for-life’ in the mold of the DRC’s notorious former military dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Mobutu was leader when rebel forces under Laurent-Désiré Kabila took power 1997. He had helped to murder the DRC’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, by turning him over to secessionist forces in the rebelling state of Katanga, who promptly had Lumumba shot. He also overthrew the DRC’s first president, Joseph Kasavubu, in 1965.

Corruption in the DRC. This tradition of coups, assassinations, and violent rebellion has plagued the DRC ever since. Joseph Kabila’s refusal to step down at the end of his final term in 2016 has sparked violent conflict in both the Congo’s southwestern Kasai region and in the DRC’s unstable east. While fear of his own personal safety is undoubtedly one reason that Kabila has repeatedly pushed back elections (he now says they will take place in December 2018, two years after his term officially ends), corruption is another. Kabila and his circle are estimated to have amassed a considerable fortune during his brutal 17-year reign, such that there is no sector in the DRC’s economy which is free from their influence — including the lucrative mining sector.

Impact

Acquiring cobalt from the DRC is therefore a PR nightmare for leading Western carmakers and their developed democratic equivalents in states like Japan and South Korea. For starters they are dealing with a country where the central leadership is facing outbreaks of political dissent in the periphery, and the capital only survives through brute force and playing the opposition off against each other.

The national environment is not a place for safe and stable business arrangements. Conversely it is an excellent one for becoming identified with the regime of an authoritarian despot, risking brand damage over the regime’s human rights record and complications dealing with whatever government succeeds Kabila.

Then there are concerns about just who is operating at the far end of the supply chain where the raw materials are extracted. Carmakers are already exploring the possibilities of sourcing some of their products from the DRC’s inefficient artisanal mines, which still produce around a fifth of cobalt exports. The approach is problematic because the artisanal mines frequently employ child labor, they have been linked to forced labor and militant groups in the recent past, and they are corruptly awarded their mining licenses, if they’re licensed at all. Meanwhile seven of the 10 largest producers in Congo as of 2016 were Chinese-owned according to Bloomberg. These companies operate in a far looser regulatory environment, and as a result have a reputation for condoning terrible work conditions, environmental destruction, and for working hand-in-glove with corrupt rebel warlords, dictators, and organized criminal syndicates.

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Since Democratic Republic of Congo’s President Joseph Kabila subverted constitutional term limits last year, the political situation in the country has been fragile. Violence on the streets between protestors and members of the security services has already killed dozens of people in a series of clashes in 2016, and the situation has been further complicated by the death of long-time opposition leader Étienne Tshisekedi, who had been set to lead a transitional council as part of an agreement put together late last year. This agreement was supposedly aimed at paving the way for Kabila to leave power in 2017, refraining from running for a third term as president. His son Felix Tshisekedi is now expected to become prime minister in the new power-sharing government, assuming the agreement still holds.

Background

Holding steady? The power-sharing arrangement was brokered in December by the influential Catholic Church, and may still hold despite a fragmented opposition; few ordinary Congolese have much respect for their politicians of any stripe, though few yet support the ethnically unrepresentative, corrupt, and brutal Kabila regime. Both the opposition and the weak central government therefore have reasons to hope the truce will hold, since it furthers the interests of both parties. It gives Kabila a chance to hold onto some of his ill-gotten wealth and power, and gives the divided opposition a chance at acquiring influence at a national level that is currently beyond their often-local powerbases.

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Despite a mass trial of its members, the continued presence of rebel groups operating out of eastern Congo, such as Uganda’s Allied Democratic Forces, highlights a lack of security that is crippling efforts to rejuvenate the mineral-rich area’s economy and free it from the armed groups who exploit both the east’s resources and its population.

Background

A courtroom in the northeast town of Beni is hosting the latest attempt to bring perpetrators of mass atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to justice. This time however, the alleged killers belong to a secretive Ugandan Islamist rebel faction opposed to President Yoweri Museveni’s rule, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF).

The ADF is a serious threat to civilians in the DRC’s east – three days of national mourning were recently declared in August after the group killed 36 people in a revenge massacre for military operations in their area. Hundreds of its members are on trial in a military court for abuses, which have left an estimated 1,000 people dead in the last two years alone.

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As electoral norms spread through sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s, a number of strongmen emerged who rigged elections to keep themselves in power indefinitely. Term limits were introduced into the constitutions of countries like Burundi or the Congo precisely to prevent the emergence of such an electoral dictatorship. Alas from Russia to Turkey to eastern Africa, in the twenty-first century elected autocrats have learned to manipulate constitutions and exploit weak judicial systems to their advantage. Now the apparent success of Burundi’s Pierre Nkurunziza in side-stepping constitutional term limits in Burundi shows how the spirit of the law can still be evaded if a legal pretext can be patched together by the party in power.

The politics of Burundi, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo have all been tragically tied together by conflict and instability spreading from one to the other, so Burundi’s example does not auger well for its fragile neighbours’ future stability and good governance. President Nkurunziza’s claim that his first term in office should not be counted because he had not been elected has a certain plausibility but was grossly irresponsible in a fragile and ethnically divided polity. At the first sign of a serious backlash a statesman would have dropped his bid and allowed a caretaker government to oversee a proper election. Instead, after stacking the constitutional court with his supporters, Nkurunziza is accused of pressuring it to rule in his favor so he could stand for a third term behind a façade of judicial approval.

He had to ride out violent opposition protests and a coup attempt that together cost dozens of lives, but he has managed to secure himself an extra few years in power.

Few people believe the Burundian president’s claims to respect legal and constitutional restraints on his power and prerogatives. In an unprecedented rebuff, Nkurunziza’s re-election was not even observed by the African Union. Alas, in the bear-pits of his neighbors’ politics many leaders will be keen to follow his recent example. For example, there are no doubts that the fourteen year-old regime of Joseph Kabila next door is any less devious in protecting its monopoly on executive power. With the right court rulings and parliamentary maneuvering, the DRC’s own term limit issue could be circumvented. Mr Kabila could swap chair whilst remaining in power simply by stripping the presidency of its powers whilst increasing those of another power center such as the prime minister’s office. As the reaction on the streets of Kinshasa in January showed however, there are few signs it could be done without bloodshed.

Sadly the present Kinshasa regime has precious little democratic traditions to restrain its maneuverings. The current president inherited his position from his father when the latter was assassinated. The presidential incumbent before that was another Joseph, the infamous Mobutu, who looted the DRC for thirty years and murdered or exiled any political opposition. Four years prior to the present drama in Burundi, the DRC’s 2011 election results had already brought opposition accusations that the Congo’s Supreme Court had not examined electoral results thoroughly enough when it awarded the victory to the incumbent Kabila administration. How much truth there is in this matters less than the fact that many in the Congolese opposition are likely to believe the judiciary is biased against them. If the DRC’s Court became an actor in any kind of constitutional crisis in the run up to next year’s elections it would not be seen as a neutral institution but as a tool of the ruling Kinshasa clique.

In the African Great Lakes region contests for power within states are always nerve-wracking moments for their neighbors because of the ease with which instability in one can spread to the others. The Second Congo War is a prime example of this transmission of instability from one part of the Great Lakes region through porous borders to another. The conflict was triggered in aftermath of the Rwandan genocide when ‘Hutu power’ extremists fled from their country into eastern Congo following their defeat at the hands of Tutsi forces. Since the eastern DRC was home to previous waves of Hutu and Tutsi refugees from both Burundi and Rwanda and their descendants, the Rwandan Hutu militias swiftly added to eastern Congo’s own swirling bush wars, and brought their genocidal ideology with them. A much wider war was sparked when Kinshasa prevaricated and seemed unable or unwilling to control the situation in the east. Rwanda and Uganda promptly invaded and placed Joseph Kabila’s father Laurent in power, trigging a region-wide struggle involving nine African states. Millions died across the DRC and peace has only sporadically returned since then.

The weakness of the DRC to armed incursions from its neighbors is reason to be concerned when those states start to look fragile themselves. The peace between the DRC, Rwanda, and Burundi remains extremely brittle. In the east of the Congo the remnants of the Rwandan Hutu militias, local Mai-Mai militants, and assorted other armed groups still pose a threat to civilians, if not to Kinshasa. Meanwhile in May, as tensions in Burundi escalated, the Rwandan government seemed to be preparing the diplomatic ground for an armed intervention if ethnic killings broke out there. Fortunately the Burundi situation has been resolved for now without escalating into inter-ethnic fighting, both because President Nkurunziza’s re-election bid was opposed by many members of his own Hutu ethnic group, and because he successfully seems to have bought off some of the opposition, splitting it politically.

Much money, time, and energy has been spent by the international community in Burundi, Rwanda, and the DRC trying to prevent a return to the tidal wave of blood that soaked all three countries between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s. That may all be at risk if the Kabila regime takes a leaf from President Nkurunziza’s book. Repeated rebellions against Kinshasa, some of them backed from neighboring Rwanda and Uganda, have rocked the DRC since the end of the Second Congo War, which ran from 1997 to about 2003. It is a testament both to the weakness of the Congo’s central government and the susceptibility of the DRC’s east to its neighbors that the embers of Rwandan-linked revolts were not fully stamped out until 2013, and that the Kabila regime needed repeated international intercessions to do so.

It is therefore difficult to see how Kinshasa can extended Joseph Kabila’s term of office as neatly as Pierre Nkurunziza has in Burundi. The DRC is a much larger country than its neighbors and there are simply too many armed groups beyond the control of the security forces. Meanwhile the army itself is divided and weak, full of former rebel fighters and widely distrusted for its corruption and brutality. Any bid by Kinshasa to stay in power using a legalistic fig-leaf would almost certainly trigger a new revolt in the east and possibility other parts of the DRC and if Kabila’s actions were to spark another uprising against his regime it is debatable if the West would intervene to save him.

However it would also be difficult for neighboring governments in Burundi, Uganda and Rwanda to overlook the security and financial incentives of meddling in the DRC’s factional politics. If one country starts to back an armed movement, the others will follow suit, threatening a return to regional instability. Despite the dangers, the temptation for Kabila to stay on somehow will be strong, as will the pressure on him from members of his inner circle. The DRC’s best hope is that President Kabila has learned from his father and his namesake’s mistakes and does not try to outstay his welcome as President Nkurunziza has done in Burundi. Peace in the Great Lakes region could soon depend on the Congo not following in its neighbor’s footsteps.

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The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) political system is structured by the amended constitution of 2006. The president is elected by popular vote for a 5 year-term (for a maximum of two terms). As a republic, the government has a bicameral legislature, the National Assembly and the Senate. The National Assembly has 500 seats, of which the large majority are elected by proportional vote for a 5-year term. The prime minister is elected by the controlling party or coalition of the assembly. The Senate has 108 seats, all of which are elected indirectly as well for 5-year terms. The country is divided into ten provinces, which all elect their own provincial assemblies.

The DRC experienced an extensive period of civil conflict since its independence in 1960, and held its first free elections in four decades only in 2006. The absence of a strong and effective central government over such a long period has led to the creation of a high number of political groups and parties which exist solely for the purpose to control and represent territories, and to enforce allegiance to individual leaders rather than any overarching sense of nationhood or ideology. More than 270 parties are registered with the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

While all state institutions are now operational, the election of Joseph Kabila as new president in 2011 raised concerns about transparency within the electoral process both internationally and nationally.

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Summary
This report examines the current war and genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which started in the mid-1990s, placing emphasis on the roles of Western covert operations, corporations and the plundering of resources that has resulted.
Analysis
War in the Congo

King Leopold’s War for Rubber

Nearly 125 years ago, during the beginning of the European ‘Scramble for Africa’, European empires competed with each other to take over Africa and plunder it for its resources. The King of Belgium at the time, King Leopold II, sought to take control over the Congo, as during the time, “the demand for rubber increased dramatically,” and the “Congo contained wild rubber trees which could be harvested immediately to meet the spiraling demand.”[1] This was achieved by forcing African males to work by taking “their families hostage until a certain amount of rubber was harvested,” and they would, “chop off the hands of Africans who failed to meet their quotas or who resisted European demands for more rubber.” All of this resulted in “up to 10 million people [who] died through a combination of murder, starvation, exhaustion, disease and a plummeting birth rate.”[2]

The Congo Civil War: 1996-1998

In 1996, two years after the massive killings in Rwanda, a new conflict arose, which today is still ongoing, and has in the last 12 years resulted in millions of deaths. The Congo, which before went by the name Zaire, was invaded in 1996 by Rwandan troops under the orders of Tutsi President Paul Kagame. He argued “that the Hutus across the border posed a threat to Rwandan security.”[3] Kagame’s army, “massacred thousands of Hutu noncombatants who had taken refuge in The Congo when Kagame came to power” in Rwanda. Burundi, which also had a Tutsi government, and Uganda sent troops in 1997 to aid a Congolese rebel group under Laurent Kabila, who was attempting to overthrow Zaire’s dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko.”[4]

2007: page 257-258

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