The people of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) live in a cursed place. Not just because thousands of men with guns have roamed those beautiful hills for decades, driving them from their homes and into the rivers, into exile, into the ground.
They are cursed by the riches beneath their feet. Gold, copper, cobalt, lithium, tin, coltan and a strange metal called tantalum.
Most people don’t know what it is, even though there’s 40g of the stuff in just about every smartphone. Tantalum is used in semiconductors, the DRC has lots of it, and the Americans, the Chinese and others want it.
In Washington this week, officials from the DRC and Rwanda are expected to sign a peace treaty — brokered by the US and mediated by Qatar — that is supposed to end three decades of war involving such groups as M23 and the Democratic Force for the Liberation of Rwanda.
Hold the joyful tears, though. This is a transaction. Peace in exchange for strategic minerals
Hold the joyful tears, though. This is a transaction. Peace in exchange for strategic minerals, many of which will flow 2,000km down what used to be known as the Benguela railway and is now dubbed the Lobito corridor.
Stripped of its peace-in-our-time puffery, the treaty is simply the US beating China to the metals. The odds are good that when US secretary of state Marco Rubio signs the agreement, no-one will mention that it was, in fact, China that rebuilt the railway, destroyed in the Angolan civil war, or that it is already well-invested in the DRC and Angola.
The US state department’s text speaks loftily of ensuring “peace in the region”. Good luck with that. As South African soldiers learnt the hard way after 10 years in the DRC, it ends with a ramshackle and humiliating convoy to another country while the rebels look on.
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