Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (59 page)

The promised mining El Dorado failed to materialize.

As Kinshasa leveraged its copper, cobalt, and diamond mines to obtain Zimbabwean support, the Rwandans and their RCD allies funded their military operations in the Congo largely by trading in Congo’s gold, coltan (used for capacitors in cell phones and video game consoles), tin, and diamonds. The key difference is that a racket run largely by Rwandans and their allies, not by Kinshasa, was perceived as foreign exploitation, a strange distinction given that Laurent Kabila had been brought to power by the Rwandans and had not been confirmed by elections.

To understand mining in the eastern Congo, airports are a good place to start. Given the collapse of roads and railways in the country, planes were often the only way to get from one place to another.

Pierre Olivier was an institution in Goma.
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The son of a local chief who had worked for the Belgian colonial administration, he has chestnut-colored eyes and big, muscular features that make his limbs seem oversized, almost bloated. I got to know him over several years; he could often be found on local soccer fields on the weekend, protecting the goal line and chatting with friends. He had been taught to fly by his father, who had had a passion for hunting. In the late 1970s, when the hinterlands of the Kivus only hosted a quarter of its current population, they would take a small Cessna to overgrown airstrips in the jungles of Walikale and Maniema to camp out in the wilderness and hunt for antelope and hippopotamus. In some places, pygmy trackers with bows and poison arrows would accompany them; once, he remembered, a local chief with a feathery headdress came to meet them, borne on a palanquin.

By age fourteen, Pierre had learned to fly and shoot a double-barreled shotgun. When he was sixteen, he and his father founded their own airplane company, flying merchandise into jungle towns to the west of Goma and taking bags of minerals and palm oil out. They would land on roads and on bumpy, dirt airstrips overgrown with elephant grass. “Back then, our only problem was paying off Mobutu’s thugs,” he said, laughing. “That was problem enough.”
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As soon as the second war started in August 1998, it was clear that there had been a shift in motivation. “Business,” Olivier said emphatically. “The first war had been about getting rid of the refugee camps and overthrowing Mobutu. The second was about business.”

The security imperative was still present for Rwanda. The northwest of their country was engulfed in a brutal insurgency, led by Rwarakabije’s Hutu rebels. But the second war was a much more costly exercise, involving up to 35,000 Rwandan soldiers who became bogged down in trench and counterinsurgency warfare hundreds of miles into the Congolese jungle. In addition, some Rwandan businessmen, together with leading RPF politicians, had become aware that there were hefty profits to be made in the Congo, particularly in the minerals trade.

Rwanda’s shifting priorities became clear to Pierre in his flights. He flew their troops into mining areas, where Rwandan commanders would be in charge of loading tons of tin and coltan into airplanes. Pierre proceeded to count towns off on his thick fingers: “Lulingu, Punia, Kalima, Kindu, Walikale—we emptied the minerals stockpiled there at the beginning of the second war. There was so much ore, it took us weeks.”
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This first phase of profiteering targeted the low-hanging fruit, assets that were easily converted into cash. Between November 1998 and April 1999, the Rwandan army and its RCD allies removed between 2,000 and 3,000 tons of tin ore and up to 1,500 tons of coltan from the warehouses of SOMINKI, a state-run mining company active in the Kivus, worth between $10 and $20 million, depending on the grade of the ore.
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The Congolese commander of the RCD troops, Jean-Pierre Ondekane, brazenly entered the Central Bank offices in Kisangani and seized between $1 million and $8 million in Congolese francs, which he then dispatched to Kigali.
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Similar looting was carried out in the area controlled by the Ugandan army.

For the most part, this initial pillage targeted state companies and large businessmen. In many towns the Rwandan troops were relatively disciplined and even arrested or executed soldiers who stole. The occupying army, however, had a difficult time maintaining logistics chains into the deep Congolese forest, and they often granted advancing columns the right to sustain themselves through pillage. A Belgian missionary based in Kongolo, northern Katanga, described the arrival of Rwandan troops there:

Going from house to house, they first stole everything they could find for food, including goats and chickens. For firewood, they took furniture that they found in the houses, even the cradles! Afterwards, as they were installing themselves for a long period, they stole beds, mattresses and sheets. They also got their hands on generators and heavy material, sending these home to Rwanda by road and air.... They took more than five hundred gallons of fuel and two vehicles belonging to the medical service, not to mention the beating and injury of the parish priest and the theft of his belongings.
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The occupying forces then set up structures through which they could extract new resources. In the area occupied by the Rwandans, this was done systematically, by controlling all stages of mineral production, from the digging to air transport to the export company in Kigali. The Rwandan army sent hundreds of prisoners—mostly Hutu who had been accused of taking part in the genocide—from jails in western Rwanda to work in coltan, gold, and tin mining pits. “You should have seen the look on the faces of those people,” Pierre said, recalling the ones he transported. “They were sad, exhausted, depressed.” Elsewhere, the diggers came voluntarily and were paid for their work, but were often supervised by soldiers. At the landing strips, it was always Rwandan soldiers or their RCD allies who accompanied the shipments of coltan and cassiterite (unrefined tin ore).

According to Pierre, only several businessmen close to Kigali were allowed to ship minerals out from the Rwandan-controlled mines. “They monopolized the mines,” he insisted. Benjamin Serukiza, the former RCD vice governor of South Kivu, confirmed this: “I had to mediate between local businessmen and the Rwandan brigade commander here. He only wanted to allow one Rwandan trader, who was close to the Rwandan government, to have access to the mine. He said it was for security reasons, but we knew it wasn’t.”
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The initial profits, however, were nothing compared to what was to come. “Everything changed in 2000, when the coltan price soared,” Pierre Olivier remembered. It was a fluke. That year, the information technology bubble coincided with heightened demand for cell phones and the Christmas release of a Sony PlayStation console. Demand for tantalum, the processed form of coltan, had been rising steadily for years, but now the markets got caught up in a buying frenzy. Within months, the local market price of tantalum shot up from $10 to $380 per kilo, depending on the percentage of ore content, while the world price peaked at $600 per kilo of refined tantalum.
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Dozens of
comptoirs
—mineral trading houses—opened up in Bukavu and Goma to take advantage of the coltan rush.

That rush injected millions into the local economy. Exports from the eastern Congo and Rwanda soared to somewhere between $150 and $240 million in 2000 alone, and profit margins were high.
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Cities in the region were flush with cash, and wild rumors circulated of small-time traders becoming millionaires within months. As most Congolese do not have domestic bank accounts, their investments went overseas or were put into local real estate, fueling a construction boom. Everywhere you looked there was scaffolding made out of eucalyptus saplings, especially along the popular lakefront properties. The nightclubs were full, and patrons paying in hundred-dollar bills were not uncommon.

Olivier had his own stories of opulence. In 2000, in the middle of the coltan boom, he flew to Kigali, where a sullen man in a cheap suit boarded the plane with a jeep-load of battered cardboard boxes, sealed with cheap tape. It was evening, and the man insisted on sleeping onboard the airplane, along with several of his bodyguards, before flying to Bukavu the following day. It was only when his customer was disembarking that the strange man approached him with an impish smile and confided to him: He had been sleeping on $15 million in Congolese and U.S. bills, he cackled, and hurried off. “Cash flow,” Olivier said, shaking his head, “was always a huge problem. The banks didn’t work, so people had to travel with tens of thousands of dollars on them.”

The coltan price stayed high between June 2000 and July 2001, producing record profits for the RCD, the Rwandan government, and their business associates. Some researchers estimate that net profits made by Rwandan companies could have been as high as $150 million for this period for coltan alone, while other researchers calculate total profits made off the minerals trade at $250 million per annum throughout their occupation.
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For Rwanda, whose entire annual budget was $380 million at the time, this income made its expensive involvement in the Congo possible. President Kagame himself described their involvement in the Congo as “self-sustaining.”
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He was more than right. Rwanda’s official military budget was $55 million in 2001, almost a third of total spending, but the London-based International Institute for Security Studies put the real amount at $135 million.
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But was it just about sordid greed? Were the vampires sucking blood just to quench their grisly thirst, or was there a more nuanced explanation? Individual Rwandan commanders did get rich—it was difficult not to notice the influx of luxury SUVs and the construction of elegant houses in Kigali during the war. Nevertheless, for the most part, the profits facilitated the war. The Rwandan government had an army of 60,000 soldiers to pay and supply. At the same time, the regime was facing its own political challenges. Its first two prime ministers had defected, along with dozens of high court judges, ministers, diplomats, army officers, and even soccer players. They all protested widespread abuses by the security services, a repressive political climate, and a general authoritarian drift. Like many one-party regimes that faced stiff opposition, the Rwandan Patriotic Front increasingly resorted to patronage and repression to deal with dissent.