Across the jagged scar of the hillside, white against the lush green, tiny figures scurry like worker ants, hauling, washing and bagging precious minerals pulled from the earth. Men and boys, their faces caked in white manganese, navigate paths slippery with laterite, their shoulders bowed with sacks.
At a rinsing pit, the mine manager, Patrice Musafiri, swirls his hands through a bucket of black stones. “Coltan,” he declares. “Without it a mobile phone cannot function. Modern life cannot function. Everyone in the world needs what is here.”
This is the Rubaya mine in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, an area ravaged by conflict stemming back to the 1994 Rwandan genocide and fuelled by three decades of the world’s growing thirst for technology-critical minerals.
The men overseeing the mining are from M23, the Rwandan-backed rebel force that has swept through a swathe of Congo, establishing a parallel state now challenging the central government more than a thousand miles away in Kinshasa.
The rebels’ advance unleashed a dramatic surge in violence in what was already a conflict-scarred corner of the continent where local warlords, chaotic militias, foreign mercenaries and corrupt government forces clash in a contest for resources that has pulled in more than a half dozen countries.
They include Rwanda, the long-time donor darling of the West, which stands accused of fuelling the conflict next door over the three decades, after its forces pursued Hutu génocidaires into Congo, never to leave, using the protection of ethnic Tutsis on both sides of the border as a pretext for domination.
Now the scramble for Congo’s natural riches looks set to enter a new, yet more internationalised phase. As M23 gathered strength, Kinshasa’s embattled government took a cue from Ukraine, offering up its mineral wealth to President Trump with a plea for help quelling the rebellion.
Rwanda, meanwhile, is bargaining with Washington over accepting deported illegal migrants. And developments in Congo have now piqued the interest of Erik Prince, the founder of the notorious Blackwater mercenary group, who has visited to discuss how his guns for hire could be deployed.
Watching over all of this is Beijing, Washington’s chief rival for natural resources, whose state-linked companies already own the licences for most of Congo’s functioning mines and which signed a multi-billion minerals for infrastructure deal with the previous government in Kinshasa nearly 20 years ago.
And trapped between all these competing interests are the Congolese, citizens of one of the five poorest countries in the world for whom the mineral scramble has brought little more than further violence, misery and displacement.
‘It’s always the people who are the victims’
“I’ve never seen even one of these minerals that are causing our deaths,” says Tumusifu Chance, 25, sitting outside her family home in the town of Sake, the last bastion on the road to Goma taken by the rebels. “I’ve never even seen real gold. All we have here are lava rocks,” she says, lifting up a stone cracked off from flows on Mount Nyiragongo, the active volcano that destroyed Goma in 2002.
Sake lies at a crossroads in a valley where the rebel coalition fought the government, its allies and its hired guns on their way to Goma. The consequences for its civilian population were horrific. Chance’s mother, Adeline, points out the bullet holes in the roof made by soldiers. Adeline lost three grandchildren in the crossfire: Confiance, eight; Florence, six, and Alice, three. She does not know where their graves are. “The Red Cross took their bodies away,” she says.
Like most in Sake, the family fled to Bulengo, one of several camps for the displaced in Goma. Bulengo alone held 800,000 civilians when M23 took the city. The rebels promptly emptied the camps and ordered people home, fearing they could become centres for organised resistance, just as Rwanda once accused the aid world of sheltering génocidaires as refugees in Congo.
When they returned to Sake, the town was still littered with the debris of war. As Adeline went to harvest vegetables from their patch, leftover ordnance exploded, shattering her leg. “They are fighting over the mines but it’s the always the people who are the victims,” Adeline says. “Money and minerals and we can’t even get to our fields to harvest our crops.”
Their expulsion from the camps has also put many out of the reach of humanitarian organisations, badly hit by the rebel takeover. Tarpaulins bearing the imprint of USAid, the American aid department shuttered by the Trump administration, cover holes in houses left by the fighting. It is a graphic reminder of the hole that can’t be filled, the almost $1 billion worth of assistance from Washington to Congo that has vanished overnight.
The price of coltan
M23 are moving to demonstrate their transition from conquering rebels to governing force. Last week, Sake became the backdrop for a groundbreaking ceremony for a new road, the first the M23 administration has begun.
The newly-installed governor addressed crowds as trucks of earth line up behind a bulldozer. Women danced and ululated under the gaze of soldiers wearing the insignia of the Congo River Alliance, the rebel political movement for whom they serve as an armed wing. This time, Sake’s crossroads location was a blessing. This road leads onto Rubaya and the largest coltan mine in the entire region, producing more than half of the country’s total.
Coltan is a mineral that contains the rare earth element tantalum, used in technology from smartphone to knee replacements. The worldwide appetite for it is almost boundless.
Before M23 conquered Goma, Rubaya’s coltan was smuggled over the border into Rwanda further north at a rate of 120 tonnes a month, earning the rebels at least $800,000 a month in taxes, according to the United Nations.
UN experts have documented Rwanda’s direct role in the violence, calling M23 a “proxy army” for President Kagame’s regime. Its units are directed by Rwandan officers and equipped with weapons from the Rwandan military arsenal. Some 4,000 Rwandan soldiers have been deployed across the border.
Kagame denies giving any backing to the group, which in turn denies receiving it or anything like the kind of revenue the UN estimates. Coltan from Rubaya is officially sanctioned in the West as a “conflict mineral”, the modern day incarnation of the blood diamond, but coltan originating from Rwanda is not and last year the European Union signed a strategic minerals partnership with Kigali, its capital, to smooth access to its raw materials.
But exports of coltan from Rwanda have more than doubled since Rubaya’s seizure and now far exceed what tiny Rwanda’s own mines can feasibly produce.
Global Witness, an environmental watchdog that investigated corruption and human rights abuses, shed light on the discrepancy when it revealed that hundreds of tonnes of conflict coltan from Rubaya was making its way into European supply chains after being been mixed with Rwanda’s own domestic output.
How likely was it, I ask the mine’s M23 manager, Patrice Musafiri, that there was coltan from Rubaya in the well-known branded phone I am recording our interview on? He thinks for a second. “About 80 per cent.”
‘We are revolutionaries, not rebels’
“Why is everyone always talking about these minerals?” asks Corneille Nangaa, the political leader of the Congo River Alliance, across his office desk back in Goma. “Even me as a leader, I’ve never seen coltan. I don’t know what it looks like. I don’t know anything about these stones.”
But mention the minerals deal that President Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of Congo proposed in his letter to President Trump on February 8, days after Goma fell, and the urbane Nangaa becomes exercised. “We understand that Trump has this business approach,” Nangaa says delicately. “But Tshisekedi is a corrupt man. Tshisekedi is a thief. Tshisekedi is illegitimate and he doesn’t have the right to sell the future of Congo like this.”
Nangaa was once an ally of Tshisekedi. As the director of Congo’s election commission, he was the man who certified Tshisekedi as the winner of the contested 2018 election. But five years later Nangaa turned on him, confessing to have orchestrated Tshisekedi’s victory as part of a secret deal with the outgoing president, Joseph Kabila. He fled east to join the insurgents as their political leader.
Despite being sentenced to death by a court in Kinshasa, sanctioned by the West and leading an insurgency that has cost thousands of lives, Nangaa insists that his masters are the Congolese people. “We are revolutionaries, not rebels,” he proclaims. While the US conducts peace negotiations between Congo and Rwanda, ostensibly embracing a ceasefire, fighting on the ground has continued.
Nangaa has no intention of stopping now. “We will go on to Kinshasa,” he says. “This is what the Congolese people want. They don’t want to hear we are withdrawing, they don’t what to hear about negotiations or ceasefire. They want change.” He turns to the photographer. “Did you get the flag in?” he asks, gesturing to the national standard behind him.
M23 redraws Congo’s map
In early February, M23 conquered Goma before moving onto the east’s second city, Bukavu. Nangaa’s chances of marching on Kinshasa, though, seem slim. The capital is more than a thousand miles away and, in between, there is not even a road.
UN experts have labelled the M23 intentions as the “territorial expansion and the long-term occupation and exploitation of conquered territories”. The group calls the area it now controls “the liberated zones”. To visit, you cross the border from Rwanda with a visa issued by M23 and have your passport stamped by their officials.
Earlier this month, across this border, Rwanda facilitated the exit of the failed South African stabilisation mission, having earlier given safe passage to up to 800 Romanian mercenaries fighting for the Congolese government. Some 2,000 government soldiers and their families took refuge inside a compound belonging to Monusco, the UN peacekeeping forces whose mission to protect civilians and prevent escalation has been so widely seen as a failure they were due to leave at the end of last year.
Their partial withdrawal opened a vacuum M23 was able to fill. In panic, Tshisekedi reversed his decision and 3,000 blue helmets stayed on, far too few to prevent Goma from falling. Monusco’s main base sits across from a cemetery where many of the dead from the fall of Goma are buried in graves marked with only a number, under the looming presence of Mount Nyiragongo.
Last week, a convoy of lorries from the International Committee of the Red Cross entered the UN compound to evacuate the Congolese soldiers and their families and take them to Kinshasa.
Hospital under fire as sexual violence surges
Jean Mutombo Mukendi, 28, a government soldier, was still stranded at Kyeshero hospital being treated for war wounds when M23 rebels raided the ward on April 14. “They came in without warning,” Fabrice Bishenge, Kyeshero’s director, says. “When the soldiers refused to come out they started shooting.”
Patients in surgical wards scrambled under their beds as the bullets flew. One was Buuma Mushahara, 73, the sole survivor of a massacre at his village outside Goma in which five of his family were killed. Mukendi was caught by the rebels and was beaten before he escaped. “But now he can’t leave or he will be killed,” Bishenge says.
Kyeshero was one of the hospitals that received mass casualties during the fighting for Goma over the week straddling the end of January and the beginning of February. The total casualties are disputed, with the UN putting the death toll at close to 3,000 while others, including M23, insisting the number of Red Cross burials, less than 1,000, represented the total dead. Whatever the number, they were not, as Nangaa insisted, all combatants.
Of the 530 wounded that passed through Kyeshero that week, 100 were woman and 43 were children, mostly with bullet wounds. At least 150 women were raped and burned alive inside a prison in Goma that was torched by escaping male inmates during the fighting.
Separately, Kyeshero admitted 229 rape cases severe enough to require medical treatment. Unicef have reported a dramatic surge in child rape over the last three months while the UN high commissioner for human rights has accused all sides in the conflict of using sexual violence as a weapon of war.
“Security is not restored here now, whatever anyone tells you,” Bishenge says. “We hear gunshots every night. We won’t let the ambulances go out after 8pm.”
M23 rallies and recruitment drive
At a rally in central Goma, M23 fighters and officials gee up the crowds with fiery speeches, followed by the Congolese and M23 anthems. “The people must stop hoping for the return of Felix Tshisekedi’s government,” Rémy Segihobe, an M23 recruiting officer says. “It’s time to take our destiny into our own hands and place our trust in the M23.”
While he calls on people to “stop dividing ourselves by tribe and recognise that we are all, first and foremost, Congolese,” he still invokes the tribal reverberations present since the Rwandan genocide as the animating spirit behind the Tutsi-dominated M23.
“We took up arms because of bad governance and the mistreatment of Congolese Tutsis, who have for years been discriminated against, killed, and even had their flesh eaten by fellow citizens,” he says. “If you truly want peace, join the army or the police. Our security forces still lack sufficient personnel.”
No-one comes forward. Eventually the crowd pushes a tall, bewildered young man towards the front. Three more follow amid shouting, then a tiny young woman. The crowd cheer, jostle and turn rowdy. “The M23 does not recruit by force, nor does it recruit children,” Segihobe insists as the crowd roars. “Maybe one day, even Félix Tshisekedi will join us. The M23 is not going anywhere. The M23 is here to stay.”
