Congo holds 80 per cent of known stocks, but the figure is without foundation. Based on what sketchy data there are, Michael Nest, the author of a study of coltan, calculates that Congo and surrounding countries have about 10 per cent of known reserves of tantalum-bearing ores.3 The real figures might be much higher, given that reserves elsewhere have been much more comprehensively assessed. Nonetheless, Congo still ranks as the second-most important producer of tantalum ores, after Australia, accounting for what Nest estimates to be 20 per cent of annual supplies. Depending on the vagaries of supply chains, if you have a PlayStation or a pacemaker, an iPod, a laptop or a mobile phone, there is roughly a one-in-five chance that a tiny piece of eastern Congo is pulsing within it.
The insatiable demand for consumer electronics has exacted a terrible price. The coltan trade has helped fund local militias and foreign armies that have terrorized eastern Congo for two decades, turning what should be a paradise into a crucible of war.
Edouard Mwangachuchu Hizi avoided the brutal end that befell many of his fellow Congolese Tutsi as the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 spilled across the border, but he suffered nonetheless. The son of a well-to-do cattle farmer, Mwangachuchu was in his early forties and working as a financial adviser to the local government in Goma, the lakeside capital of eastern Congo’s North Kivu province, when extremist Hutus on the other side of the water in Rwanda embarked on what is reckoned to be the fastest mass extermination in history, butchering eight hundred thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutus in one hundred days. Two million people fled, many of them into eastern Congo, where analogous ethnic tensions were already simmering.
On his way to work one day in 1995 a mob dragged Mwangachuchu from his jeep.4 He was choked with his tie and stripped. The mob dumped him at the border with Rwanda, where Tutsi rebels had seized control from the Hutu-led government following the genocide. His herds slaughtered, Mwangachuchu found himself among the flotsam of war, albeit more fortunate than those consigned to the squalid refugee camps beside Lake Kivu. He was granted asylum in the United States in 1996, along with his wife and six children.
Mwangachuchu watched from afar as the Hutu génocidaires licked their wounds in eastern Congo and began to launch raids against the new Tutsi-led authorities in Rwanda. He looked on from Maryland as Paul Kagame, the steely guerrilla who had become Rwanda’s leader, and his regional allies plucked an obscure Congolese Marxist rebel called Laurent-Désiré Kabila from exile in Tanzania to head a rebel alliance that swept through eastern Congo. The rebels perpetrated revenge massacres against Rwandan Hutu refugees and génocidaires as they went and then pushed on westward across a country the size of western Europe, all the way to Kinshasa, Congo’s capital. They toppled Mobutu Sese Seko, the decrepit kleptocrat, and installed Kabila as president in 1997. But Kabila barely had time to change the country’s name from Zaïre to the Democratic Republic of Congo before his alliance with his most powerful backer, Rwanda, started to fray. A little over a year after he took power, after Kabila had begun to enlist Hutu génocidaires to counter what he perceived as a Tutsi threat to his incipient rule, the alliance snapped. Half a dozen African armies and a score of rebel groups plunged Congo into five more years of war, during which millions died.
When Mwangachuchu went home in 1998, the dynamics of eastern Congo were shifting once again. Anti-Kabila rebels supported by Rwanda’s Tutsi-led government had taken control of the East. No one in this ethnic cauldron is ever safe, but the latest realignment favoured Congolese Tutsis like Mwangachuchu. He set about reclaiming his ancestral lands at Bibatama, 50 kilometres northwest of Goma. Mwangachuchu knew that the territory contained something still more precious than fertile pastures for grazing cattle – the rocks beneath were rich with coltan.5
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.6 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.7 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.8
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.’9 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.’10
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.11
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
