Digging for the Truth About a Dirty Trade

From the Wall Street Journal: Digging for the Truth About a Dirty Trade A book review: Consuming the Congo: War and Conflict Minerals in the World's Deadliest Place

By JASON STEARNS

The roiling conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo that began more than a decade and a half ago has seen some of the worst human suffering of our time, including cannibalism, an epidemic of rape and mass killings. According to an epidemiological study by the International Rescue Committee, more than five million people died as a result of the fighting between 1998 and 2007. Other studies suggest that more than a quarter of women living in the east of the country have been raped.

Given the scale of the calamity, it is not surprising that we should try to find culprits. There is no lack of candidates: military commanders, politicians in the Congo and abroad, callous businessmen. But much recent writing about the conflict attempts to impose a simple causal arrow on a mess of narrative strands, casting the quest for mineral wealth as the main driver of the violence. The story goes something like this: Brutal armed groups kill and rape in order to get their hands on precious minerals in the Congolese soil, mainly gold, tin and tantalum, a metal used in electronic components. They sell the minerals to foreign companies, who are at best accomplices and at worst puppeteers, and use the proceeds to fund further violence. The minerals then end up in our cellphones, Xboxes and laptops.

Peter Eichstaedt's "Consuming the Congo: War and Conflict Minerals in the World's Deadliest Place" seems at first glance to be in this vein. His publisher's blurb begins: "Every time you use a cell phone or log on to a computer, you could be contributing to the death toll in the bloodiest, most violent region in the world: the eastern Congo." This kind of argument has been around for some time. As far back as 2001, the United Nations began releasing a series of investigative reports accusing belligerents—including Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Uganda and the Congolese state—of profiting from the conflict. Similar investigations continue today—I led such a U.N. team in 2008—and they continue to find evidence implicating governments and business.

But recently the advocacy community has pushed the conflict-minerals narrative with much greater urgency. Until 2003, most outside aid focused on obtaining a peace deal among the African countries involved in the Congo, along with their local allies. That year a comprehensive peace deal was signed, ushering in a transitional government. Thereafter the emphasis was on maintaining this fragile process and getting to elections, which were held in 2006. It was during the post-2006 rut, when violence escalated in the mineral-rich eastern Congo despite the elections, that conflict minerals began to become an idée fixe.

New organizations were launched, with the aim of mobilizing grass-roots support in the United States: Both The Enough Project and V-Day, for example, highlighted the nexus between minerals and sexual violence. Such groups adopted slogans like "Don't want your cell phone to fuel war in the Congo? Tell Obama!" and "Get Blood Out of Your Mobile." Finally, in July of last year, the U.S. Congress chimed in, requiring companies to make sure that they were not using "conflict minerals" from the eastern Congo. An appealingly clear-cut narrative, one in which corporate greed provoked abject misery, drove these responses.

Mr. Eichstaedt's book reflects this analysis but ultimately offers a more nuanced take. At times he does try to fit the complexities of the eastern Congo into the snug straitjacket of conflict minerals, warning that "each time we use a mobile phone, use a video game console, or open a tin can, we hold the lives and deaths of the eastern Congolese in our hands." But the extensive interviews with local actors that are the book's great strength burst the seams of his own narrative.

Through his conversations with businessmen and pick-and-shovel miners, Mr. Eichstaedt shows that many of these people, rather than working to fund violence, are just trying to make a living while struggling with corrupt officials and roving militias. One of the mineral traders tells him: "It's not our fault. We follow the laws and we pay the tax. Out of that we are blamed [for] financing the war? I don't think it is true. People come to us with minerals and we buy." Mr. Eichstaedt suggests that Congolese minerals only amount to a few percent of the world's supply—not enough to justify a broad conspiracy to exploit them.

In the end, Mr. Eichstaedt falls short of giving a clear answer to the central question: To what extent are Western consumers, governments and businesses to blame for the Congo's problems? He gives us isolated facts and statistics but does not build a coherent case. Also disappointing is a seemingly unconnected excursion to Sudan in the middle of the book. (What is the relevance? The oil wealth there? Merely another African conflict?) There are factual inaccuracies, too, such as stating that Ignace Murwanashyaka, a rebel leader, was involved in the Rwandan genocide (he was not) and suggesting that another rebel, Jean-Pierre Bemba, was involved in the 1998 rebellion led by the Congolese Rally for Democracy. (He was actually the leader of a rival group, the Movement for the Liberation of Congo.)

Minerals, in any case, were not the initial cause of the Congolese wars, which have passed through various stages since 1996. The origins can instead be found in a conjuncture of national, regional and local dynamics. For 32 years, with the backing of Western allies, the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko plundered his own state and pitted ethnic communities against one another through cynical divide-and-rule policies. Nowhere were these power games more prominent than in the densely populated east, where a small population of immigrants from neighboring Rwanda was alternately favored and persecuted. In 1994 a spark ignited this powder keg: The Rwandan genocide prompted a million refugees, including most perpetrators of the massacres, to flee into the Congo. The first Congo war began when the new Rwandan government invaded to break up the refugee camps. Since then, nine countries and more than 40 armed groups have struggled over land, citizenship and access to power.

Those seeking to distill this morass into a less murky essence risk oversimplification. It is true that minerals have played a crucial enabling role in the conflict, making it easier to finance the fighting and at times forming a strong motive for individual actors. But politics, even in the Congo, cannot be reduced to profit maximization. Nor would removing minerals from the equation quell all of the fighting—some groups are fighting for more than money and some have diversified into timber, cannabis and palm oil.

We ignore these political contours at our peril. For example, the legislation passed by Congress last year requiring companies to scrutinize their Congolese supply chains made a lot of sense in itself, but it was ill adapted to the Congolese context. A dysfunctional and corrupt state makes tracing minerals difficult; without the local infrastructure necessary to enforce them, the law's stiff requirements have led most U.S.-based companies to boycott Congolese minerals since April of this year, depriving thousands of Congolese of their livelihoods.

At the same time, the focus on minerals has distracted attention from more fundamental tasks. Foremost, the Congolese state must transform from a predator into a service provider. Over the past two years, Congolese security forces have driven many rebel groups out of mining areas only to occupy these areas themselves. Many of the human-rights abuses in the eastern Congo are carried out by these security forces, in particular the army.

Mr. Eichstaedt concludes that "real solutions for the eastern Congo cannot be imposed from the outside." He is right. Still, the United States government alone provides more than $1 billion in aid to the country per annum, and the United Nations has one of its largest peacekeeping contingents deployed there. Outsiders wield a lot of clout in the country and can help midwife the process of reform—provided we diagnose the problem accurately.
—Mr. Stearns is the author of "Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa."