Resource-rich Congo is the first battle in New Cold War. India can’t miss out on cobalt

For countries like India, the stakes are enormous. To participate in the post-hydrocarbon global economy, the country needs secure and fair access to Congo's minerals.

File photo of Indian army Peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo | ANI

From neck to waist, the young black man’s skin had been peeled by the metronomic application of a metal-tipped whip until his ribs showed through: The punishment for stealing a packet of cigarettes. “The air seemed filled with a bloody haze,” recalled a young American signals intelligence officer. Colonial Léopoldville’s black residents were clubbed off the sidewalk for not stepping aside for Whites. To amuse themselves, perhaps, white drivers who ran over a black person would sometimes turn around and do it again.

Even Americans shaped by segregation-era race values, historian Susan Williams records, were shocked by the brutality of Belgian-colonial Congo—but they weren’t there to build democracy. The uranium that would be used to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki was being mined in Katanga by slave labourers of the Belgian company Union Minière. The Americans needed the job done.

This week, as ethnic Tutsi M23 insurgents overran swathes of the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC, killing thousands, it’s become clear the cursed country is in the middle of potentially the most fateful battle of the New Cold War. The DRC is the world’s largest producer of cobalt—critical to producing batteries—and holds vast reserves of strategic minerals like niobium, tantalum and coltan.

For countries like India, the stakes are enormous. To participate in the post-hydrocarbon global economy, the country needs secure and fair access to these minerals. Even though India has troops in place in the DRC, their hands are tied by rules of engagement prohibiting active involvement in the conflict. This reduces United Nations peacekeepers to what the researcher Thierry Vircoulon has called a state of “exemplary inutility”.

Like many other post-colonial states, India lost out in the First Cold War and is again threatened with being cut off from access to critical resources by the China-West conflict.

An old Cold War

Led by the warlord and accused war criminal Sultani Makenga, M23 has the support of Rwanda and its president Paul Kagame—his regime, in turn, is held up by the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States. For its part, China—whose dominance in industries like electric vehicles rests on its investments in the region—is backing the DRC and its military. The conflict has been underway since 1996, spawning what international organisations are calling the most significant humanitarian crisis in the world.

The imperial ambitions of King Leopold II of Belgium set the stage for the carnage in Congo. The 23 years of his rule, which ran from 1885 to 1908, is estimated to have cost the lives of 10 million Africans. Adam Hochschild’s majestic history, King Leopold’s Ghost, reveals that Belgian power rested on the chopping-off of hands and genitals, floggings, mass killings and the burning down of entire villages.

Figures like Alice Seeley Harris, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and Arthur Conan Doyle campaigned against these atrocities—but morals could not compete with the world’s greed for cheap rubber. Even though Nazi leaders would be punished for using slave labour in Europe, there was no trial for the Belgians who made America’s nuclear bombs possible.

The summer of 1960 finally brought independence to Congo—and, given its enormous natural resources, prosperity ought to have followed. The new state, however, simply did not have the tools for self-governance. Lawrence Freedman writes that “of 5,000 government jobs, only three were held by Congolese. There were no Congolese doctors, lawyers, economists, or engineers.” The commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Joseph Mobutu, had never been promoted past sergeant.

Led by one-time beer salesman Patrice Émery Lumumba, the new country found itself facing multiple crises. Following rebellion in the country’s fledgling armed forces, Belgian troops intervened on multiple occasions. The mineral-rich province of Katanga declared secession, followed by Kasai. Lacking revenues and an institutional apparatus, Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union for support.

The consequences were predictable. Lawrence Devlin, the Central Intelligence Agency chief in Léopoldville, now known as Kinshasa, warned of a looming communist takeover. The United States, an official document records, initiated plans to overthrow Lumumba, through assassination if necessary. Even as the United Nations tried to rein in an increasingly erratic Lumumba, led by the eminent Indian diplomat Rajeshwar Dayal, the country tipped towards the edge.

Lumumba, a Belgian parliamentary investigation later concluded, was murdered in 1961, under the supervision of high officers of that country.  Army chief Mobutu now seized power and crushed efforts by Lumumba supporters to regain control, using the shadowy South African mercenary Mike Hoare. Estimates made by the economist Stephanie Mattie suggest Mobutu and his cronies embezzled between $4 billion and $10 billion of the country’s resources, leaving little for education or health. Enabled by the West, Mobutu’s long despotism continued until 1997.

The rise of China

Following the end of the First Cold War, the West lost interest in the DRC. Beijing was quick to step in. China’s involvement in Congo’s cobalt is staggering. Following a 2007 deal, two Chinese firms built roads and public infrastructure in exchange for a 68 per cent stake in the Sicomines copper and cobalt mine, one of the largest mines in Africa. From 2015 to 2020, China’s imports from the DRC of cobalt increased by 191 per cent, cobalt oxides by 2,920 per cent, and copper ore by 1,670 per cent. Of the 19 cobalt operations in the DRC, 15 are now owned or co-owned by Chinese entities.

Well over two-thirds of the world’s cobalt is mined in the DRC—and four-fifths of that is then sent for processing in China. As control of the Middle East’s oilfields underpinned American and European domination of cars, railways, and aeronautics for a century, the minerals of the Congo are the foundation on which China’s domination of electric power is being built.

The rise of China had its genesis in genocide, which swept Rwanda in 1994. Ethnic Hutu militia, following their defeat by Tutsi militia based in Uganda,  fled the border into the DRC, then called Zaire. They used their new bases across the border to wage a war of attrition against President Kagame’s regime. Kagame responded by unleashing his army against the forces of his numerically superior but resource-strapped neighbour.

Laurent-Désiré Kabila, a one-time Left leader, was chosen by Kagame to lead the DRC from 1997 after the Mobutu regime collapsed. Trained at the People’s Liberation Army’s National Defence University, Kabila found Beijing willing to enable his kleptocratic regime. His son and successor, Joseph Kabila, who ruled from 2001 to 2019, consolidated the agreement.

The investigative journalists Michael Kavanagh and Dan McCarey revealed that the Kabila family was at the centre of a web of companies with stakes in the mining sector, siphoning off multi-million dollar revenues. Global Witness, another transparency watchdog, estimated that at least $750 million—about a fifth of Congo’s mining revenues—was misappropriated between 2013 and 2015.

Endless suffering

The long and bloody conflict—which has seen Uganda and Zimbabwe forces fighting proxies for Rwanda—has been fuelled by greed for the DRC’s mineral resources. The DRC government uses its wealth to purchase military technology from China, as well as regional troops from South Africa and Tanzania, and a range of ethnic militia, including Hutu rebels. East European mercenaries have surrendered in large numbers to Rwandan forces, and some fear Russian mercenaries could also be involved in future fighting.

For his part, Kagame has recruited the support of Turkey and Qatar, as well as allies in Europe, especially France and Belgium. Even though the United States has called on Rwanda to withdraw from the DRC, it is leveraging its role as a counter-terrorism partner against jihadists fighting in Mozambique.

For most Congolese, however, life remained not much dissimilar to that under colonial rule. Three-quarters of the population live on less than $2.15 a day. Wealth has proved a curse.

The lessons aren’t hard to understand. The global order that US President Donald Trump says he wants to dismantle sought, among other things, to provide norms for nation-states to cooperate to protect resources of value to the global community. Even though the First Cold War routinely witnessed savagery—among them the slaughters of civilians in the Koreas, Vietnam or Afghanistan—the Great Powers also collaborated to ensure stable global access to resources like hydrocarbons and to build smooth transnational trade.

Like Congo, many regions of the world could fall into the abyss, pushed by superpower competition and greed. The price will be highest for countries like India, which is a good reason for New Delhi to push hard for new cooperative systems to keep the peace in the fragile regions that hold the world’s future.

Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)