the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jun 18, 2024
The following article was translated from an article appearing in Lutte de Classe #241, June 2024, the political journal of Lutte Ouvrière, the French Trotskyist organization.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a war has been raging for almost thirty years, virtually ignored by the media. Between 6.5 and 10 million people have been killed and over seven million displaced. It took the gesture of the DRC national team players at the 2024 African Nations Cup. They placed one hand at their temples like a revolver and the other in front of their mouths, to make a small denunciation of this bloody chaos and the silence of the great powers.
Located 3,000 kilometers from the capital, Kinshasa, the eastern DRC is ravaged by some 200 armed gangs. Some are led by Congolese warlords, others are linked to neighboring Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. These militias make their living by extorting money from small farmers who cut precious wood or produce cocoa, and by exploiting hundreds of thousands of “mineral diggers.” Two of the main provinces, North and South Kivu, contain the world’s largest reserves of coltan, the ore of tantalum, as well as deposits of tin and tungsten. These are essential metals for electronics, armaments, automobiles and aeronautics. Kivu and Ituri, further north, also contain large quantities of gold.
These ongoing wars, with their trail of atrocities, rape and sexual mutilation used as weapons of war, have causes, a history and responsible agents—that is, the great imperialist powers and their leaders. They dare to speak of the “Congolese evil” or “African curse,” and actually declare, as Macron did in March 2023 in Kinshasa: “You have not been able to restore sovereignty, either military or security. We mustn’t look outside the country for culprits.” These cynical and misleading statements are designed to conceal the responsibility of the great powers—and France’s is overwhelming—in wars that are the product of decades of pillage and imperialist rivalries.
These rivalries date back to the colonial division imposed on Africa at the 1885 conference in Berlin. Congo Leopoldville, the future DRC, a region as vast as Western Europe, situated in the Congo River basin, was initially a colony, the personal property of the Belgian king, Leopold II, established without any respect for populations, languages or customs. Great Britain got its hands on Uganda, while Germany colonized Rwanda and Burundi, which were reclaimed by Belgium in 1918.
Divide and conquer, the colonial powers established the human groups they called ethnicities. In Rwanda, the colonizers favored Tutsi elites. But in neighboring Congo, they dismissed traditional Tutsi chiefs from Rwanda, whom they considered insubordinate. They also displaced populations according to their labor needs. In 1937, the Belgian colonial administration created the Banyarwanda Immigration Mission, which deported Tutsis from Rwanda to Congolese regions. Rwandan Hutus were also moved to work in the gold mines of Kivu and the copper mines of Katanga. By using ethnic divisions, the Belgian colonizers, like the British and French in their respective empires, planted the time bombs that are still exploding today.
In 1960, when Belgium conceded independence to the Congo, the country’s unity was extremely fragile. Nothing in the colonial past had forged solid links between the different regions of this immense country. The economy had been entirely built for the benefit of the metropolis. There was no solid national bourgeoisie, or even a unified ruling class. Barely independent, the Congolese state was subjected to strong separatist pressures. Each political clan, attached to a province, defended its access to the country’s wealth. And behind each of them was a major power. From 1960 to 1963, the Belgians and French supported the secession of Katanga, a region rich in copper and cobalt.
The United States, however, took a dim view of the country’s break-up. This might have benefitted the U.S.’s less powerful competitors, but it could also have destabilized the entire region and favored Soviet influence. In 1963, through the U.N., the United States intervened militarily to bring Colonel Mobutu Sese Seko to power, against the Katangese secession, but also against the revolt and guerrilla movements that were shaking the Congo. Leaders who, in the eyes of the population, embodied an anti-imperialist policy were systematically attacked and even assassinated, like Patrice Lumumba, the main Congolese leader. Killed on January 17, 1961 by Katangan, French and Belgian mercenaries, with the blessing of the CIA, Patrice Lumumba became a symbol of the struggle against imperialism, in the Congo and far beyond, right up to the present day.
In the independent Congo, guerrilla groups referring more or less to Marxism emerged, such as that of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who would make his name thirty years later. Kabila welcomed Che Guevara into his maquis, with 150 Cuban instructors. This period also saw the political awakening of workers, like the miners evoked in Jean Ziegler’s L’Or du Maniéma. In this novel, the workers were politicized by militants who had taken refuge in Portugal. But the workers’ combativeness was contained and led astray by the guerrillas, who claimed to be Marxist in order to gain the support of the USSR, but defended only their apparatus and their leaders, in rivalry with the central power supported by imperialism.
For 32 years, Mobutu’s dictatorial regime carried out widespread plundering of the country’s wealth, leading to the degradation of all infrastructures, from the few public services to industrial and mining enterprises. This plundering could only continue with the constant military, financial and political support of the big powers, for whom Mobutu was the most loyal leader in the region. From the 1980s onwards, as the price of raw materials plummeted, the economic situation became catastrophic. Structural adjustment plans imposed by the IMF and World Bank wiped out what few schools, hospitals and clinics remained.
In the 1990s, Mobutu’s regime was on its last legs. The economic crisis sharpened the divisions and exacerbated centrifugal forces. The national army could no longer afford to equip itself or pay its soldiers. In the east, politicians used ethnic rivalries to strengthen their local power and enrich themselves by organizing their own troops. As early as 1993 in North Kivu, the demagoguery of politicians led to anti-Tutsi pogroms, which left 7,000 people dead and 250,000 displaced. But it was the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, organized by the French-backed Hutu regime, that tipped the region into war. The genocidal armies, defeated by Paul Kagamé’s U.S.-backed army, fled to the protection of the French army, which had seized their weapons, only to return them.
France has a direct responsibility for the chaos in the east of the DRC. Last April, on the anniversary of the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, Macron declared that France “could have stopped the genocide with its Western and African allies, but lacked the will to do so.” This is sheer hypocrisy, for France willingly armed and protected the genocidal militias. The militias then took refuge in eastern Congo, using 1.5 million Hutu refugees as their maneuvering force. There, they formed the Front Démocratique de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), which attacked the Congolese Tutsi population with its 100,000-strong army. In response to FDLR abuses, Tutsi-dominated militias were formed. The current M23, which with Rwanda’s support has become a veritable army, has its origins in these militias.
The bloody chaos in Rwanda thus spread to the Congo. This conflagration coincided with the death agony of the Mobutu regime. Even mining was in freefall, while the electronics explosion sharpened rivalries for control of the minerals. So, in 1997, the United States dropped Mobutu, and put its faith in his old rival Laurent-Désiré Kabila. From his stronghold in the east, and with the support of the Rwandan and Ugandan armies and the USA, Kabila overthrew Mobutu, whose army was collapsing. During this first Congolese war, capitalists linked to Anglo-American imperialism signed mining contracts from which Kabila and the businessmen around him drew solid payments. In this struggle, French groups were out of the picture, as France supported Mobutu to the very end.
But the appetites opened up by the Congolese mining jackpot turned sour. Kabila turned against his former Rwandan and Ugandan allies. From 1998 to 2003, a new war ravaged most of the country, over control of diamonds, copper and cobalt. The east of the country was occupied by Rwandan and Ugandan troops. Up to twelve African countries were involved in this “African World War.”
Not all the players in this generalized war had the same level of responsibility: small-scale warlords, and above them Congolese or foreign troops, were indeed responsible for exactions and endless violence. But, much higher up, the big powers were the ones truly responsible for this disaster. To protect the interests of their industrialists in gaining access to resources, to defend their influence against rivals, the imperialists supported this or that dictator or armed group, producing and having mercenaries and smugglers deliver the military equipment ravaging the region.
No, barbarism is not a congenital defect of the DRC and Africa: it is an export product of imperialism, just like assault rifles and rocket launchers.
In 2003, so-called peace agreements were signed, but the war in the eastern DRC has never stopped. Today, the population is still caught between a multitude of armed gangs. Some are small gangs, controlling an artisanal mine, or a village and its farmland. They may originate from self-defense groups such as the wazalendo (“patriots” in Kiswahili), recently integrated into the DRC armed forces (FARDC) by the current Congolese president, Félix Tshisekedi. Others are larger in scale, such as the Rwandan-backed M23, which includes Rwandan soldiers, or the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a guerrilla group opposed to the Ugandan regime and now affiliated to the Islamic State. Kivu and Ituri in the northeast of the DRC serve as safe havens for armed groups opposed to the regimes of countries in the region. All claim to defend freedom, democracy and the people, but in fact they are only military apparatuses aspiring to seize power and establish their own dictatorships.
Alliances and counter-alliances between these militias and regional armies are constantly changing, as they plunder the minerals that fuel the capitalist economy. There is no unity in the east of the country, where the central state is powerless, and there is no lasting common interest among these warlords, whether they be Congolese or foreign. Each is intent on taking his share of the plunder, in shifting alliances and endless confrontations. But in the end, they all submit to imperialism because their power is fragile, the product of a predatory economy.
The power of President Tshisekedi himself, re-elected last December, remains a house of cards, held together only by the grace of the great powers. He was received in Paris in April 2024 by Macron, and Joe Biden sent a special representative to his inauguration in Kinshasa. In the chaos of unstable alliances, Tshisekedi is no exception. Until November 2021, he was an ally of Kagamé, the Rwandan president, and the two states had signed an agreement for the processing of ores from the Société Aurifère du Kivu et du Maniéma by a Rwandan refinery. The two presidents claimed to be “brothers.” Rwandair flew to Kinshasa and other major cities in the DRC. But this honeymoon was destroyed by rivalries between Rwanda and Uganda.
In November 2021, the DRC signed a military agreement with Uganda, as well as contracts for infrastructure, including a road between Goma, the capital of North Kivu, and Béni, a town of one million inhabitants in the north of the province. The agreement stipulated that the work was to be protected by the Ugandan army: a challenge to Rwanda’s role in the region, where control of the roads is crucial. It is through this network that businessmen import consumer goods and weapons, and export cocoa and minerals. Shortly after the agreement between the DRC and Uganda, the conflict in North Kivu escalated sharply with an offensive by the Rwandan-backed M23. Tensions with the DRC then became explosive, and exacerbated as each side played on nationalism to get the population to rally behind it. In December 2023, during the DRC presidential election, Félix Tshisekedi compared Kagamé to Hitler, accusing him of wanting to get his hands on the eastern DRC. Kagamé responded by denying any involvement, even though Rwandan soldiers are fighting in the M23.
But this is far from being the only militia. There are also numerous “private military companies,” a euphemism for mercenary bands. Wagner is not present in the DRC, but there are mercenaries linked to France. In Goma, the capital of North Kivu, former members of the French Foreign Legion operate alongside shady businessmen such as a certain Olivier Bazin, alias “Colonel Mario,” a military equipment broker. His private military company, Agemira, has signed a contract with the Congolese army for the maintenance of its planes and helicopters, carried out by some forty former Belarusian and Georgian soldiers. Like many post-independence states, the Congolese state is collapsing, leaving power in the hands of mercenary groups who sell themselves to the highest bidder to protect the plundering of the DRC’s natural resources.
In the midst of this chaos, the extraction of minerals has never stopped—it directly nourishes the fighting and deadly displacement of populations. The main mineral is coltan, from which tantalum is extracted, a metal essential to many modern products, including implants and surgical tools, capacitors and electronic equipment, and special alloys used in civil and military aeronautics. The DRC is said to contain 60% to 80% of the world’s coltan reserves, and supplied 44% of global production in 2019, over 2000 tons. Most of this comes from so-called “artisanal” mines, such as Rubaya in North Kivu, which produces 15% of the world’s coltan.
To exploit the mines, the Congolese Ministry of Mines sells concessions to companies. Unlike copper and cobalt mining in Katanga, which is dominated by the Swiss Glencore, the Belgian-Congolese Georges Forrest group, and large Chinese state-owned companies, the companies involved in coltan mining are more modest in size. The capital required is limited, as extraction is carried out with paltry means, using only the muscle power of the miners, who dig like convicts with a spade and a crowbar. The companies managing the concessions change frequently and are highly opaque, as are the companies that then export the ore via Rwanda, Burundi or Uganda.
Two companies currently dominate the export of coltan from the DRC, including CDMC, which is chaired by a British businessman named John Crowley, in business with a Swiss broker, Chris Huber. Minerals are sent to Rwanda or Uganda by land, by canoes across the region’s lakes or by air. There are few passable roads, but many small private airfields. The ores are then shipped to the major ports on Africa’s east coast, such as Dar-es-Salam in Tanzania, and on to smelters in Thailand, Malaysia and China. Finally, the metals reach the giants of the electronics, aeronautics and arms industries, in North America, Europe or Japan, on the production lines of Apple, Intel, Samsung, Motorola, Thales, Dassault, etc. They suck the wealth extracted by the miners of the DRC, with their paltry means, in order to feed high-tech production.
Officially, metals mined in the war-torn regions of the DRC are subject to a ban on exports. Representatives of major Western companies claim to have guarantees that the tantalum or tin they use does not come from “blood minerals.” But who can believe them? Oh, there are some very nice labels, supposedly certifying that the ores do not come from areas controlled by armed gangs. But the certification is carried out by the exporters themselves, which explains a recurring joke in the mining sector: “The wolves are guarding the sheepfold.” These tin and coltan capitalists distribute bribes to officials of the Congolese government’s Ministry of Mines to get the right stamp of approval. These civil servants often have no choice: paid $1 a day, they have to support their families, and those who resist suffer the atrocities of the armed gang in the service of the company that holds the concession.
The working conditions of the 240,000 miners who extract coltan, tin and tungsten are inhuman. Reports, often poignant, show the lives of these miners, who dig pits and galleries in the walls of the Kivu mountains, and the women and children who enter the holes to extract blocks of coltan under the constant threat of a landslide. Mining is fierce. Concessionary companies seek to lower the price paid to miners for their ore, and sometimes there are angry outbursts. In 2019 and 2020, miners in Masisi, North Kivu, clashed with the mining police, employed by the concession companies who never paid on time.
Since 2012, gold production in eastern DRC has also been on the rise. Most of the mines are artisanal, controlled by armed gangs. But there are also industrial mines, like the Kibali mine in the northern Ituri province. This is one of the world’s largest gold mines, controlled by South Africa’s AngloGold and Canada’s BarrickGold, with operations subcontracted to a subsidiary of the French Bouygues group. These workers are a little better off, but they belong to the same working class as the miners in the so-called artisanal mines. They are often the same workers, moving from one region to another, from one mine to another, sometimes controlled by a warlord, sometimes by Western capitalists, according to the fighting and the work available. But the outbursts of anger at mining sites, both industrial and artisanal, demonstrate that, as everywhere, workers in the Congo are not just victims of exploitation. Through their work and their indispensable role, they also have the strength to defend themselves.
Faced with the horror of the situation, commentators and non-profit organizations are arguing for better certification of exported minerals. This is an absolute mockery, as long as the authorities and private companies are the ones to carry out this so-called control, and not the workers themselves. Others explain that we should boycott products containing coltan or other rare metals. But tantalum is indispensable for medical equipment and vital electronic installations. Finally, the leaders of the major powers have claimed that U.N. intervention would stabilize the situation. Today, the United Nations Mission in Congo (MONUSCO) is in the process of withdrawing. Worse still, some of its officers have been implicated in arms trafficking.
In the DRC, as in all countries dominated by imperialism, nothing good can come from the U.N. and the great powers, who are primarily responsible. Nothing good can come from the country’s politicians, who are above all preoccupied with gaining a position that gives them access to the crumbs of the plunder left to them by Western capitalists. The states born of independence are collapsing, demonstrating that there is no hope for development under capitalism, even in a country as vast and rich in natural resources as the DRC. Capitalism has turned the eastern DRC into a bloody quagmire to feed the fortunes of American and European billionaires. This chaos is not a problem caused by the Congo, but a demonstration that capitalism has nothing but underdevelopment and widespread violence to offer to countries dominated by imperialism.
But in the DRC, as everywhere else on the planet, there is a working class without which society would not exist, without which the economy would not function. Hope can come only from the working population. These are the workers in the mines, the many small-scale transporters who use trucks or simple bicycles to distribute essential goods to the population. They are the small farmers who produce cocoa; the woodcutters exploited by warlords; the small street vendors, the “diggers.” On the other side of the border, in Uganda or Burundi, life is no easier for workers, who have to contend with the high cost of living, violence from the authorities and their police. The exactions of militias like the M23, and the nationalist rhetoric of politicians, fuel ethnic tensions. This, too, is a way of pitting poor against poor, a demagogy that paves the way for further massacres.
These divisions are not fated. When revolt breaks out, it can spread by contagion, because there are links between all these workers. In East Africa, in Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and as far as Mayotte, there are many refugees from eastern DRC. A tiny minority manage to reach the rich countries of Europe and the United States, where they swell the ranks of the working class. Through the supply chains of capitalist industry, we are all bound together by exploitation.
Only workers can put society back on its feet, because they are the ones who ensure production everywhere on the planet, from the coltan mines to the high-tech electronics factories of the rich countries, via the foundries of Southeast Asia. The chaos spreading across the African continent and elsewhere on the planet is rooted in the domination of the great powers. The next workers’ revolution could start in a mine in the DRC, but it will win only if it spreads everywhere, and overturns the entire imperialist order. The working class can wage this struggle to the end, in countries dominated by imperialism as well as in the citadels of capitalism—and it is the only force which can.