* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Violent attacks at tin mine underscore the urgency for Europe to join the United States in passing a tough new law to clean up supply chains of conflict minerals
(Any views expressed in this report are those of the writer and not of the Thomson Reuters Foundation)
For Darlène Ndango, fear builds at night. Just over two weeks ago, she was woken up in her bed by the sound of gunshots ripping through the air. Armed men had ambushed the cassiterite mine where she sold her merchandise in South Kivu, eastern Congo. Immediately, she fled.
“We were in bed at about 5 a.m. when we started to hear shots being fired. We got up and started to run,” she tells me. “During the flight, there were some that ran into the forest and there were others that actually ran into the mine pits. The assailants who came followed people right up to the entrance of the tunnels. They captured some men...they took everything they could find. Minerals, clothing and money.”
Ndango, a 37-year-old mother of six, had never encountered an armed attack at a mine site before. She had only begun making the journey to Lukoma mine in the last month to sell beer to miners and make much-needed money for her children.
But armed groups and members of the Congolese national army have preyed on eastern Congo’s mining sector, for more than 15 years. They have taxed and traded minerals, such as the cassiterite, a form of tin found in Lukoma, and tungsten, tantalum and gold, found in parts of eastern Congo, to help finance their operations. Conveniently, these four minerals are in global demand for consumer products, including mobile phones, laptops, jewellery and cars.
Violence at some mine sites in eastern DRC continues today. Ndango fell and hurt her leg before taking refuge from the armed men in a pit. Once she climbed out, she says she saw four miners that had been killed. One pregnant woman, her neighbour, was also reportedly found dead in bed. One eyewitness says a bullet went straight through her head.
Weeks before the European Union votes on its first conflict minerals regulation, aimed at cleaning up the global mineral trade by encouraging public companies to report on their supply chains, it’s stories like this that need to be heard. The current EU proposal is voluntary for almost all European companies, meaning most will be able to get away without doing checks into where their minerals come from or the harm their trade might have caused. This will leave Europe lagging behind. Major U.S.-listed companies are required to report on their mineral supply chains.
Global Witness is urging members of the European Parliament to amend the voluntary proposal so all European companies would be encouraged to ensure the minerals they buy from conflict-affected and high-risk areas are sourced responsibly and don’t fund violence in countries around the world, including in DRC.
Ndango says she did not know the identity of the attackers. But, according to others, they affiliated themselves with a series of local armed groups, known collectively as the ‘Raia Mutomboki’.
While it is thought they were motivated by local territorial rivalries, they left with minerals. One of 40 miners captured during the attack says he was forced to walk for an entire day transporting their stolen cassiterite. “No-one thought they’d come out alive,” he says of the ambush.
Of course, international legislation won’t fix the problem on its own. Congo’s approach to governing its mineral sector also needs to change. In recent years, DRC’s government has started to address conflict financing in its mineral trade, but our research suggests the efforts to clean up the sector fall far short of meaningful reform.
The government’s mine site validation programme, which labels sites ‘green’ if they are clear of the presence of soldiers, armed groups, children and pregnant women, risks becoming a green-washing exercise that does not address the challenges found at most sites. So too, do mineral tagging schemes. This means supposedly ‘clean’ supply chains are susceptible to contamination by minerals from other sites, which could have benefitted armed groups. Mineral from high-risk areas in mines we visited in South Kivu continues to be smuggled into neighbouring Rwanda.
This is not good enough.
(Sarah Morrison is Senior Communications Adviser at Global Witness who recently visited the DRC, and she is former Human Rights Correspondent at The Independent titles. Names have been changed in this report to protect security)
