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Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka News - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...49569

africa china copper development extractive industry international katanga

shared by Arabica Robusta on 01 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Corruption DRC: Mining multi-nationals get deal of the century 2008-07-18 http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/corruption/49569 Printer friendly version There is potentially enormous mineral wealth in the DRC province of Katanga. In exchange, investors from all over the world, and especially China, are prepared to offer money and infrastructure to revive the DRC after 15 terrible years of war and invasion. The potential for ecological disaster, social exploitation and corruption is almost limitless. Le Monde diplomatique ----------------------------------------------------- July 2008 MINING MULTINATIONALS GET DEALS OF THE CENTURY Copper colony in Congo There is potentially enormous mineral wealth in the DRC province of Katanga. In exchange, investors from all over the world, and especially China, are prepared to offer money and infrastructure to revive the DRC after 15 terrible years of war and invasion. The potential for ecological disaster, social exploitation and corruption is almost limitless. by Colette Braeckman Lubumbashi is the capital of Katanga, the southernmost state of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Day and night, huge trucks roar through its streets, making for the nearby Zambian border with cargoes of copper and cobalt on their way, via the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam, to Asia. Every month new stores open: fast food joints with American names, and shops where the locals stare in wonder at Chinese consumer goods, finally within their reach.
  • Lubumbashi is the capital of Katanga, the southernmost state of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Day and night, huge trucks roar through its streets, making for the nearby Zambian border with cargoes of copper and cobalt on their way, via the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam, to Asia. Every month new stores open: fast food joints with American names, and shops where the locals stare in wonder at Chinese consumer goods, finally within their reach.
  • And there is a third, social threat. The small-scale exploitation of mineral deposits is coming to an end as the big multinationals move in, driving out independent miners. Until a few months ago the Étoile mine at Ruashi, a few kilometres outside Lubumbashi, was just an open pit where men worked unprotected. Children scurried through unsupported tunnels, pulling out rocks striated with green copper or yellow cobalt and cramming them into jute sacks. Cave-ins and fatalities were so frequent that the miners had their own mutual insurance scheme to cover hospital or funeral expenses.
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  • The terms granted to private companies associated with Gécamines took the commissioners aback. The investment of external partners was systematically overvalued and that of the Congolese (the value of mineral deposits and existing Gécamines infrastructure) underestimated. Fiscal and para-fiscal concessions (such as 30-year tax exemptions) deprived the state of essential revenues. Mining rights were acquired for purely speculative ends (the partners sold the shares on the stock exchange before even starting work on the ground), while social and environmental clauses were ignored, local skills undervalued, local workers underpaid and concession boundaries extended without authorisation.
  • Unlike western governments, incapable of releasing the credits necessary for the reconstruction of a country four times the size of France, China has been quick to get down to work: several projects have already begun in Katanga, Kivu and Kinshasa, where 250km of roads and 1,000 units of social housing are to be built. The people's hopes are undermined by fears that the arrival of Chinese workers and engineers heralds a new wave of colonisation. The unconcealed displeasure of the West, Belgium especially, could endanger the stability of the government. But the Congolese government is determined to pursue its relationship with China.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - The invention of the indigène - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...70061

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 16 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • The violence in Congo may seem unintelligible but its roots lie in institutional practices introduced under colonialism, which 50 years of independence have only exacerbated. At their heart is an institution known as the native authority. Since the colonial period, native authorities have had jurisdiction over ‘tribal homelands’. As a system of power, the native authority claims to represent age-old ethnic identity. But ethnicity refers to cultural difference, and there is no necessary link between culture and territory.
  • The colonial system thus rested on a dual system of institutionalised discrimination dressed up as cultural difference: by race in the cities and tribe in the countryside.
  • Ethnic cleansing is rarely spontaneous; it requires elite conspiracies and methodical popular organisation.
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 16 Jan 11
       
      "Elite conspiracies ... methodical popular organization" and ethnic cleansing.  Why is it so difficult to draw a bead on the ethnography of these elite conspiracies, the co-opting of the vulnerable, and the planning of "spontaneous violence"?
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  • In Katanga, where the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga – a partnership formed in 1906 between King Leopold II, the Société Générale de Belgique and British interests – demanded a flow of cheap labour to exploit the region’s mineral resources, the government obliged with a series of decrees, in 1906, 1910 and 1933, requiring that each ‘tribe’ be identified, separated and resettled in its own ‘homeland’, supervised by its own native authority. One district commissioner complained of his duties that some ethnic groups were ‘totally jumbled’: ‘It will be very difficult to organise them.’ The separation was accomplished between 1925 and 1930, by means of ethnic cleansing.
  • When they confronted the militant Luba trade unions in the mines of Katanga, the Belgians forged an alliance with the indigenous Lunda, and proclaimed a coalition of ‘civilisers’ and ‘authentic Katangans’.
  • The government of the newly independent Congo responded to the secession in Katanga by sending in troops. Ordered to also put down the South Kasai secession on their way to Katanga, the Congolese National Army went on a rampage, slaughtering civilians. Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, the Congolese political historian, has argued that the prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, committed his ‘first major political blunder’ when instead of seeking to heal the rift in a ‘bitter inter-ethnic conflict’ between ‘indigènes’ and ‘non-indigènes’, he chose to side with one group against another. His political enemies held Lumumba responsible for the ensuing political violence; on 5 September 1960 Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN secretary general, described it as ‘genocide’. On the same day, the president, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, dismissed Lumumba.
  • A census tagged every villager as a ‘native’ of a particular tribal homeland. ‘Forced relocations,’ Johan Pottier writes, ‘were the norm.’
  • Part constitutional conference, part transitional government, the CNS was meant to be the mechanism that took Zaire into the post-Cold War world of multiparty democracy.
  • The proceedings of the CNS were televised throughout urban Congo, inspiring the growth of civic organisations and strengthening the opposition, but as it prepared to deal with two of the most sensitive dossiers on its agenda – ill-gotten gains and political assassinations – the conference was abruptly closed in December 1992 and never reconvened. This was a sign of the regime’s continuing strength, and the fragility of the opposition. The key weakness of the opposition was that it failed to move away from nativist definitions of political belonging, which fragmented it again and again, to an inclusive understanding of citizenship, which might have appealed to immigrants who had come to Congo at different periods and united them in a single movement.
  • The existence of the Hutu camps, armed and funded, and home to two million refugees or more, had a devastating effect on civilian life in Kivu. It led to the dollarisation of the economy and price rises (including rents) well beyond the reach of local people. As the Interahamwe unleashed a regime of terror against Congolese Tutsi, another wave of younger men moved across the border to enlist in the RPF. Among them was Laurent Nkunda, the future commander of the notorious Banyamulenge militia (Tutsi), wanted for war crimes in Congo and now detained in Rwanda. The anatomy of political life in Kivu began to resemble that of Rwanda just before the genocide, where every political party had its own militia: in Kivu, every native authority began to acquire one.
  • Two conferences have been held to try to halt the conflict in Congo, the first in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1999, the second in Sun City, South Africa, in 2002. The Lusaka agreement required the foreign forces to withdraw and the local militias to disarm under UN auspices. Sun City, by contrast, bore a recognisably South African imprint: opposition groups would participate in the transitional government, the national assembly and the senate, while the militias – numbering anywhere between 50,000 and 300,000 men – would be integrated into the new national army along with former rebels, in a process known as ‘brassage’.
  • Why lump rebels and local militias together when the first were organised along ideological lines as a supra-local army and the second were largely a local phenomenon tied to specific communities?
  • The supreme difficulty in Congo, as I’ve said, is the persistence of the native authority, which, for all the complexities of ethnicity, is still in place as an organising principle. It is now the terrain on which new forms of political authority, flaunted by young men bearing arms, confront older forms steeped in patriarchal tradition. (This same confrontation has also unfolded in Northern Uganda and Sierra Leone, where youth-led rebellions have eroded older kinds of authority.)
  • Even the worst perpetrators of violence in Congo must be understood as human actors caught up in a conflict that started with the colonial conquest a century ago. That means shifting the focus from individual acts to the cycle of violence, from atrocities to the issues that drive them. Instead of recognising and facing the real challenge – to reform the native authority so that local militias can be held politically accountable – the ‘international community’ has chosen to induct them into a ballooning, dysfunctional colonial-style army, leaving the native authority to grind along unchanged.
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