UN says war in Congo is fuelled by foreign firms

[N.O.R.F]

By David Usborne in New York

31 October 2003

 

 

A panel of experts renewed its warning to the United Nations yesterday that the illegal exploitation of precious minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is continuing to fuel conflict in the country.

 

The Security Council was due last night to discuss a fourth and possibly final report from the panel that has been investigating the parts played by scores of foreign and African-based companies in helping, wittingly or otherwise, to perpetuate the war that has already cost the lives of more than 2.5 million people.

 

"Illegal exploitation remains one of the main sources of funding for groups involved in perpetuating the conflict," the panel said. It urged the international community to block the flow of arms to those groups and continue to put pressure on companies which operate in the Congo to abide by international guidelines of good conduct.

 

"The flow of arms," the report says, "exploitation and the continuation of the conflict are inextricably linked. Breaking that cycle will be key to ending both the conflict and the illegal exploitation of natural resources."

 

The minerals involved include diamonds, cobalt and also the lesser-known coltan, which is used in the manufacture of electronics, such as mobile phones.

 

In its work over three years, the panel has named 157 companies and individuals that warranted investigation into their activities in Congo. Of those parties, which were first identified in an earlier report last year, 119 have given responses to questions posed by the panel, the report said.

 

It adds, however, that 18 companies, including some well-known international operators, either rejected any suggestion that their activities in Congo were questionable or refused to accept that they had any responsibility for the continuing violence.

 

Human rights organisations are pressing the Security Council to seek prosecutions by western governments of some of the companies identified. The plea was made again by a group of organisations, including Oxfam and Human Rights Watch, which issued a joint statement in New York.

 

The Council "can no longer ignore clear evidence linking the exploitation of resources to the war in the Congo," the group said. "It must insist that member states hold the companies and individuals involved to account, including companies based in Western countries. Business must demonstrate its commitment to change the way it operates in conflict situations."

 

Diplomats said the Council was unlikely to press for any prosecutions, however. The UN, which has deployed 10,000 peacekeepers in the country, is anxious not to destabilise the peace process now under way and the progress of the transitional government installed earlier this year.

 

In its annexes, the report sorts the companies into different categories depending on how far their respective cases have been resolved, and nine UK companies are listed as requiring no further investigation. However, four UK-based firms are included in a third category of "unresolved" cases which have been "referred for updating or further investigation". Those companies are De Beers, the giant diamond conglomerate, Das Air, Avient Air and Oryx Natural Resources.

 

Files on these companies have been passed to the UK Government.

 

A spokesman for De Beers, in a statement to the BBC, defended the firm's conduct. "De Beers is the only company that was on the list - on the original list in fact - that had called for sanctions to be applied to those diamond areas within the [DRC] that were feeding rebels there and the conflict," he said.

 

Controversy surrounds a decision by senior UN officials to keep one section of the report sealed.

 

The section deals with information gathered by the panel on senior government and military figures in Congo and neighbouring countries drawn into the war

[N.O.R.F]

Britain must confront shameful trade that ruins Congolese lives

By Anneke Van Woudenberg

31 October 2003

 

 

A few weeks ago, in a quiet corner of a hotel in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo's capital, a militia leader told me that 6,000 of his armed men had recently taken control of a gold mine in the north.

 

He reckoned that he could sell 5kg of gold from his new mine for $50,000 (£30,000). He said it would be traded for guns. According to countless reports, those guns, in turn, are used to massacre civilians. Human Rights Watch has documented many of these attacks where men, women and children are brutally killed, raped or mutilated.

 

The drive to control the DRC's vast mineral wealth has been a prime motive for the war. Multinational companies and the DRC's neighbours are accused of profiteering from the war, yet the UN Security Council has taken no action. The war has left more than three million people dead in the past five years.

 

The DRC is blessed ­ or in this case cursed ­ with some of the world's largest diamond reserves, rich gold fields, as well as huge reserves of cobalt and coltan (a mineral used in laptops and mobile phones). All the warring parties have exploited these reserves to finance their military operations and buy weapons, often committing serious human rights abuses in the process. A peace process has begun but the deadly business practices persist.

 

Companies in Britain are among the 85 accused of ignoring fundamental principles and international standards of good practice as laid down in the Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which spell out how companies should behave. And Britain has failed to investigate even one of them.

 

Britain has also failed to confront the DRC's neighbours, Uganda and Rwanda, who have funded and supported Congolese rebel groups. In the decade before Ugandan troops arrived in the DRC, for example, Uganda exported few diamonds but, once Ugandan soldiers were on the spot, it sold diamonds abroad worth millions of dollars. Rwanda multiplied its exports of coltan in the same way.

 

Uganda and Rwanda have now pulled their troops out of the DRC but they have reportedly kept their economic links with the warlords. It is precisely this murky trade that destroys Congolese lives and undermines hope for the peace process.

 

Looking the other way guarantees continued profits for a few and continued horror for the many.

 

Anneke Van Woudenberg is a senior researcher on the Democratic Republic of Congo for Human Rights Watch