border or the buying houses of Goma.
Most of the incipient certification schemes for Congolese minerals work by tagging sacks of ore as they emerge from the mine to certify their provenance, imitating the Kimberley Process, which was designed to stem the flow of ‘blood diamonds’. The idea is to prevent belligerents getting around embargoes by passing off their minerals as originating from another mine or smuggling them across borders to allow Congolese coltan to be branded as Rwandan or Angolan diamonds as Zambian. But on this hillside there was not a tag in sight. One local, a peace campaigner who had come along for the climb and who kept his distance from the mining bosses leading the ascent, told me that some of the coltan extracted here was crossing the nearby border into Uganda clandestinely. That took it right through the territory of M23 rebels.
The slope grew steeper. The earth underfoot gave way like a sand dune. Finally a peak of jagged rock emerged, a giant fossilized sponge of warrens that the miners had dug by hand. About two thousand miners, all in Wellington boots, many bearing spades and picks, swarmed among the pits and trenches, some delving as deep as 15 metres into the ground with only rudimentary props to keep the sides from burying them alive. Some looked decidedly younger than eighteen. One was clearly baffled by the white-skinned visitor whose hair was longer than the standard Congolese buzz cut. ‘He has the voice of a man,’ the young miner intoned with consternation to one of my companions, ‘but the hair of a woman.’
On the next hill over we could make out Mwangachuchu’s mine. All this territory lay under his concession, but the informal miners had enough political clout to carry on regardless of his protests, in part thanks to ethnic manoeuvring by the cooperative’s Hutu leadership against the Tutsi Mwangachuchu. The cooperative had resisted Mwangachuchu’s repeated attempts to turf them off his land, challenging the validity of his claim. Mwangachuchu has countered by trying to oblige the informal miners to sell all their production through his company, without which it would be impossible for him to prove that minerals from the concession were not funding militias.
The chief miner, Bazinga Kabano, a well-dressed man with a long walking cane and a penchant for bellowing at his subordinates, told me that when the CNDP controlled the area the miners’ association used to pay the rebels a $50 fee to be allowed to dig. But he was keen to paint his industry not as an engine of war but as a path to betterment. He explained that some of the miners graduated to be négociants, the intermediaries who buy coltan at the mine and sell it on to the comptoirs that export it. Surveying the teeming hilltop, he declared, ‘We are helping them to live their dreams.’
I wandered off to talk to some miners out of earshot of the boss. Kafanya Salongo bore a passing resemblance to a meerkat as his blinking head popped out of a hole in the ground. He was short, slim and strong, ideal for a human burrower. He churned out one hundred sacks worth of rock a day, and that brought in $9. From that he had to find the $25 each miner must pay the bosses every month for the privilege of digging. ‘It’s not enough for the family,’ he told me. ‘I can afford some food and some medicine, but that’s it.’ At thirty-two, he had a wife and two sons. He laughed in the face of danger. ‘Yeah, it looks dangerous, but we know how to construct the shafts, so it’s fine.’
It is easy to scoff at the boss’s notion that these miners are digging toward their dreams. The work is gruelling and perilous. The official statistics recorded twenty deaths in mining accidents in North Kivu in 2012, six of them at an adjacent mine worked by the cooperative. The authorities noted that it is ‘very possible’ that not all deaths were reported. But by local standards the miners’ wages amount to big bucks. Some splash their pay on booze and hookers; some build better houses.
Kabila’s mining ban and the boycott prompted by the Dodd–Frank Act pitched thousands of eastern Congolese miners out of work. The World Bank has estimated that 16 per cent of Congo’s population is directly or indirectly engaged in informal mining, which accounts for all but a fraction of the industry as measured by employment;84 in North Kivu in 2006 mining revenue provided an estimated two-thirds of state income.85 But revenues to the provincial government’s coffers fell by three-quarters in the four years before 2012, in part because of what officials called the ‘global criminalization of the mining sector’ of eastern Congo. The state’s loss is the smugglers’ gain: when the official routes are closed, the clandestine trade picks up the slack.
By the middle of 2013 Kabila’s ban had been partially relaxed, and previously blacklisted comptoirs in Goma had reopened. A dozen mines in North Kivu that the government deemed to be unconnected to armed groups had been ‘green-lighted’ to export. But Emmanuel Ndimubanzi, the head of North Kivu’s mining division, told me that not a single mine was tagging its output so that buyers could identify the mine at which it had originated. ‘Tagging is very expensive,’ he said. ‘We don’t have the partners to pay for it.’ In what might have been a line from Catch-22, he added, ‘Certification can only happen with better security.’
Regional initiatives are increasingly tracking shipments of coltan and other ores, even if North Kivu is lagging behind. Some campaigners have welcomed what appears to be a significant reduction in the documented connections between militias and mining sites as a result of certification efforts and a UN-backed offensive against the armed groups.86 Gradually Western-based electronics groups are drawing up lists of approved smelters that can demonstrate that their metals come from mines that do not benefit Congolese militias, although the campaign group Global Witness warned in 2014 that the first supply-chain reports, which US companies buying Congolese minerals are now required to submit to regulators, ‘lack substance’.87 The German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources has developed ‘fingerprinting’ technology that can trace a shipment of ore back to the mine from which it was extracted. This technology could, if comprehensively applied, prevent the entry into the international market of minerals from militia-controlled mines, provided that it were matched with an intelligence-gathering programme to keep tabs on all the militias’ mining operations.
It appears unlikely that the certification schemes will ever reliably cover the whole of eastern Congo’s mining trade. Clean miners have been squeezed, as the retreat of Western buyers has let Chinese comptoirs gain a near-monopoly on Congolese coltan, allowing them to dictate prices. The efforts to impose some control on the mineral trade might trim the income of the armed groups, but it does so at the cost of weakening the already precarious livelihoods of eastern Congo’s diggers and porters and their dependents. In a land ruled by the law of the roadblock, such initiatives can look quixotic. As Aloys Tegera of Goma’s Pole Institute, one of eastern Congo’s most astute commentators, writes, ‘Without a Congolese state capable of playing its role in controlling and running affairs, how can the minerals of Kivu be de-criminalised?’88
In the run-up to the 2011 elections and during the months that followed, the SMKK transactions and other similar ones effectively transferred hundreds of millions of dollars from the state to a close personal friend of a president. Dan Gertler has doubled as an emissary for the president, conducting diplomatic missions to Washington and Rwanda. ‘The truth is, during our very difficult times, there were investors who came and left and others who braved the hurricane,’ Kabila has said of Gertler.89 ‘He’s one of those.’ Kabila might have added that some of those who left did so when their assets were confiscated – and, in some cases, handed to Gertler.90
Gertler maintains that, far from being a predator, he is among Congo’s greatest benefactors. He and his representatives point out, with some justification, that unlike the most egregious asset-flippers, who do nothing beyond using bribes and connections to win mining rights before selling them on, Gertler’s operations in Congo actually produce minerals, and lots of them. His company, the Fleurette Group, says it has invested $1.5 billion ‘in the acquisition and development of mining and other assets in the DRC’, that it supports twenty thousand Congolese jobs, and that it ranks among the country’s biggest taxpayers and philanthropists.91 Gertler himself has said his work in Congo is worthy of
