Blood and Treasure
"
Why one of the world's richest countries is also one of its poorest.
" By Adam Hochschild
IN 1890, A BEARDED YOUNG POLISH SEAMAN made a trip up the Congo River as a steamboat officer and was appalled by the lust for riches he saw among his fellow Europeans. A decade later he finally got the experience onto paper. "A stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads and brass-wire" flowed into the interior, wrote Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, "and in return came a precious trickle of ivory...The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it."
The trickle of ivory that Conrad described was highly visible: elephant tusks carried on the shoulders of exhausted porters from the African interior to the coast, where it could be shipped off to Europe to be carved into jewelry, piano keys, and false teeth. More than 100 years later, far more wealth flows out of this same territory, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, but today much of it can't be seen. If, for example, you stand beside the washboard dirt road that winds out of the Ituri district of the country's northeast, you will see a few vehicles, not more than five or 10 an hour: a dusty SUV, an army jeep, two men on a motorbike, an ancient truck with a precariously high load of fruits and vegetables and a layer of people hitching a ride on top. But you won't see the treasure they are carrying, for it is too small. It will be in little plastic bags in someone's pocket, or perhaps, better to be concealed from thieves and greedy policemen, sewn into a shirt seam or slipped under a shoe's insole. In this part of the country the main source of wealth is gold. More than $1 billion worth is mined in Congo each year, and a good portion of it comes down this road.
Gold is only one of a half-dozen or more lucrative minerals to be found in Congo, and together they constitute what may be the worst case on Earth of what has come to be known as the "resource curse." As inevitably as oil drew the United States into Iraq, it is the temptations of this wealth"more than ethnic rivalries, the legacy of colonialism, or anything else"that has turned Congo into the horrific battleground it has been in recent years. A country with a lavish array of natural riches and a dysfunctional government is like a child heiress without a guardian: Everyone schemes for a piece of what she's got.
As far back as Congo's history is recorded, the wealth from this vast natural treasure house has flowed almost entirely overseas, leaving some of the planet's best-endowed land with some of its poorest people. I have often heard Congolese friends say, "We wouldn't have so much trouble if we weren't so rich."...
...Some Kilo miners were forced to work for a decade or more, and released only when they supplied sons to take their places. Repeated uprisings against the forced-labor regime were brutally suppressed and thousands of deserters were recaptured and put to work again. The mines paid bonuses to overseers based on the amount of gold mined by the Africans under their control, whose workday rose to 12 hours during World War I. Discipline was enforced by armed mine police and by the chicotte, a whip of sun-dried hippopotamus hide with razor-sharp edges, whose blows were meticulously tabulated: Records from one group of northeastern Congo gold camps register 26,579 lashes applied to miners during the first half of 1920 alone. Around that year, the Belgians realized that the harshness of their regime was shrinking the population so rapidly that they would eventually have no labor supply left"you can actually find colonial officials saying this on paper. The system then became less severe as control of the northeastern gold mines passed from the colonial government to a private corporation. Gradually, requiring Africans to pay taxes (for which they had to earn money) replaced outright coercion as a means of turning subsistence farmers into miners or industrial workers. Forced labor, however, remained an element of the economy here, as elsewhere in colonial Africa, until the 1940s, and the whip lasted even longer.
Despite having no political rights, the Congolese, ironically, enjoyed their highest standard of living in the decade or so before the colony won its independence in 1960. Belgians invested heavily in the gold mines, and although the profits continued to flow back to Europe, the colonizers came to understand that this industry and others would produce more if workers were well fed, healthy, and literate. Not too literate, mind you: The colony had one of the best elementary education systems on the continent, but virtually no Africans were trained for management positions. Schools for whites and blacks were segregated, of course, and no black schools in the gold mining towns went beyond 8th grade. As we drive further along the road, past trees with high green bunches of papayas, we can see aging brick health clinics and primary schools built during the late colonial era....
...With strong American encouragement, an army officer named Joseph Mobutu seized power in a military coup in 1965. For 32 years he maintained a repressive, disastrous dictatorship, changing his name to Mobutu Sese Seko and his country's to Zaire. Delighted to have an anti-communist ally who was friendly to American investors and helpful in covert military operations, the United States enthusiastically supported him, providing more than $1 billion in aid over the decades. President George H.W. Bush welcomed Mobutu to the White House as "one of our most valued friends." Sucking his country's economy dry, the dictator amassed a personal fortune estimated at $4 billion, spending it on assorted palaces, a huge yacht, two private ambulances, an airport near his Congo birthplace, Concorde rentals to pick him up there for trips to Europe, and elegant villas on the French Riviera and in other pleasure spots...
...Since Mobutu's overthrow and death in 1997, Congo has been in the grips of a fiendishly complex and brutal war whose exact toll no one knows. It may well be in the millions if you count those who died because fleeing their homes or living in packed, disease-ridden refugee camps cut them off from adequate food and medical care. Women and girls by at least the tens of thousands have been gang-raped by government soldiers and rebel militias, who have found this a chillingly effective method of terrorizing the civilian population of areas they occupy.
Refugees flee a warlord's attack on Ituri in 2003. Fighting in this West Virginia-size district, most of it driven by competition to control the goldfields, displaced more than half a million people and killed more than 60,000.
This has not been a civil war driven by ideology, but rather a multisided free-for-all driven by plunder. No fewer than two dozen armed groups signed the most recent of several shaky peace deals, for example. Among the warring parties have been the ineffectual national government, an array of feuding local ethnic warlords, and nearby African countries hungering for a share of Congo's great natural wealth. Here in Ituri, most of the combat has been between two shifting coalitions of militias, each of them intermittently supported by neighboring Rwanda or Uganda. Both countries have eagerly eyed Congo's gold"and its wealth of other metals necessary to make everything from computers to cell phones, including tin ore, coltan, and tungsten...
...The real problem is not conflict minerals, but the fact that Congo's long-suffering people reap only a tiny share of their country's vast wealth....
...The drilling has confirmed a treasure trove. Beneath less than one square kilometer of ground, next to the hill we're on, Woolford says, are more than 2.5 million ounces of gold, worth about $3 billion at current prices. And it is found at the rate of about three grams per ton of rock"an extraordinarily high batting average for a deposit this big"all of it within an easy 800 feet of the surface.
The company has about 250 employees on this site. Mostly they work inside the compound, tightly protected by guards who include Nepalese Gurkha veterans of the British army. (These are provided by a subsidiary of ArmorGroup, the security firm whose guards at the US Embassy in Afghanistan were at the center of a hazing scandal disclosed last September.) The compound's gates, floodlights, and high razor-wire fence prompt Joel Bisubu, a Congolese human rights activist traveling with us, to call it "Guantánamo."
AngloGold Ashanti recently finalized a series of agreements with the government under which it will begin mining here and at another major site in the northeast. At Mongbwalu, it will have an 86 percent share of the operation; the near-bankrupt former state mining company, now being privatized, will have the remainder. Four other multinationals"based in London, Canada, and South Africa"have likewise concluded closed-door agreements over mining rights. No one will ever know what Congolese government officials may have reaped from these deals in the way of quietly promised jobs, favors, or money under the table, in a country where such rewards are routine. Representatives of local communities, meanwhile, found it hard to get a seat at the negotiating table.
Seldom, in fact, do local communities gain much from such agreements; that is part of the resource curse. This pattern is all the stronger in a place where the national government has as fragmentary a hold as it does here. A failed state fails its people in many ways, and one of them is that, in a world of powerful corporate players, a weak and corrupt government has no bargaining power. For industrial mining that could create new skilled jobs, Congo desperately needs the expertise and investment capital that, for better or worse, only a multinational can offer. But a company like AngloGold Ashanti, with more than 60,000 employees at work on four continents, can easily invest elsewhere if the terms in Congo are not to its liking....
...The drilling has confirmed a treasure trove. Beneath less than one square kilometer of ground, next to the hill we're on, Woolford says, are more than 2.5 million ounces of gold, worth about $3 billion at current prices. And it is found at the rate of about three grams per ton of rock"an extraordinarily high batting average for a deposit this big"all of it within an easy 800 feet of the surface.
The company has about 250 employees on this site. Mostly they work inside the compound, tightly protected by guards who include Nepalese Gurkha veterans of the British army. (These are provided by a subsidiary of ArmorGroup, the security firm whose guards at the US Embassy in Afghanistan were at the center of a hazing scandal disclosed last September.) The compound's gates, floodlights, and high razor-wire fence prompt Joel Bisubu, a Congolese human rights activist traveling with us, to call it "Guantánamo."
AngloGold Ashanti recently finalized a series of agreements with the government under which it will begin mining here and at another major site in the northeast. At Mongbwalu, it will have an 86 percent share of the operation; the near-bankrupt former state mining company, now being privatized, will have the remainder. Four other multinationals"based in London, Canada, and South Africa"have likewise concluded closed-door agreements over mining rights. No one will ever know what Congolese government officials may have reaped from these deals in the way of quietly promised jobs, favors, or money under the table, in a country where such rewards are routine. Representatives of local communities, meanwhile, found it hard to get a seat at the negotiating table.
Seldom, in fact, do local communities gain much from such agreements; that is part of the resource curse. This pattern is all the stronger in a place where the national government has as fragmentary a hold as it does here. A failed state fails its people in many ways, and one of them is that, in a world of powerful corporate players, a weak and corrupt government has no bargaining power. For industrial mining that could create new skilled jobs, Congo desperately needs the expertise and investment capital that, for better or worse, only a multinational can offer. But a company like AngloGold Ashanti, with more than 60,000 employees at work on four continents, can easily invest elsewhere if the terms in Congo are not to its liking.
