Congo Gov't Must Bring Order to Mines

Congolese soldiers from the integrated force rest in a graveyard in the area of skirmishes on Saturday, in Kinshasa, Congo, Sunday, Nov. 12, 2006. Shootouts between supporters of rival presidential candidates in an election held to end years of war killed three civilians and a soldier in Kinshasa, the governor of the Congolese capital said Sunday. (AP Photo/Schalk van Zuydam) (Schalk Van Zuydam - AP)

Rwanda became a major exporter of coltan, which it does not produce. When Laurent Kabila tried to end the pillaging he had started, Rwanda sent in fighters and Congo became embroiled in a war that drew in half a dozen African armies. Among them was Zimbabwe's, which Laurent Kabila allowed mining concessions in return for troops and war materiel.

A 2002 peace deal ended the war and brought rebel leaders into a transitional government. By then, Joseph Kabila had inherited leadership from his father, who was assassinated by his bodyguard in 2001.

Even after the peace deal, the U.N. report noted, the pillaging continued. Nations had set up conduits to continue stealing Congo's minerals before they withdrew their troops, the report said. And the plunder continues today, according to the parliamentary investigation that was published in February after months of opposition.

The commission denounced contracts including several signed by both Kabilas.

The commission condemned contracts that never were put to tender, give massive tax breaks including complete exemption for up to 30 years, and benefit mainly foreign mining companies and a few Congolese.

The commission singled out sales of Congo's crown jewels _ copper and cobalt concessions of the state mining company Gecamines, whose production has collapsed from an annual 450,000 tons of copper with a turnover of US$1 billion in the 1980s to less than 10,000 tons worth some tens of millions.

Contracts were negotiated from positions of great weakness, said the head of the other large state-mining company, diamond-mining MIBA, Tshitala Luabeya.

"Our struggle is to get investment in difficult times when nobody has confidence in the country, when no bank will give us credit, and when we are known throughout the world as a high-risk country," Luabeya said.

RAID has called on the World Bank to investigate why Gecamines contracts were awarded without international tender under the bank's watch, and why warnings made as early as 2003 were not heeded from consultants hired by the bank who said a "fire sale" of Gecamines' assets was being plotted. The bank recently appointed independent auditors to look at the contracts, but no report has been published yet.

The Congo commission's report was never discussed in Parliament, put off to avoid damaging disclosures ahead of elections. Then all the major authors and many legislators joined an electoral coalition that supported Kabila.

"The people who should create the conditions for this report to be discussed, the accuser, the accused and those who should judge, all are in the same camp now," said Francois Muamba, the departing budget minister who is party secretary-general for Kabila's rival, former warlord and current Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba.

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On the Web:

http://www.raid-uk.org RAID's Web site

www.http://www.freewebs.com/congo-kinshasa/ Parliamentary commission report, in French

http://www.cd.undp.org/PNUDRDC.htm UNDP in Congo