Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
and destroying schools, businesses, and thousands of homes, their Congolese allies realized that the
struggle no longer had anything to do with removing Kabila from power.
The Second Congo War was one of the greatest acts of looting in modern history, and while the
World Bank labeled it a civil war, the UN acknowledged the detrimental role of foreign powers. The
Congolese political scientist Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja calls it the war of “partition and plunder,”
and the evidence supports this description. As Dena Montague writes in “Stolen Goods: Coltan and
Conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” “Between late 1999 and late 2000 the Rwandan
army alone reaped revenues of at least $20 million a month” from the sale of coltan, even though
the mineral was not present in their own territory.
In many ways, the Second Congo War was the culmination of the country's long history of ex-
ploitation. It's hard to imagine a grimmer scenario: a military that has been poorly paid for dec-
ades fighting alongside halfhearted foreign soldiers with no personal stake in the Congo's future.
Their only motivation was the wealth they could extract. The common soldier stole all that he could
carry, but at higher levels, militia leaders enslaved villages, setting them to work digging coltan
and selling it to foreign commanders. Agricultural produce, livestock, automobiles, appliances, and
equipment stolen from the Congo poured into Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, and Zimbabwe, among
other countries. In 2000, as Jason Stearns writes, the price of coltan soared “with heightened de-
mand for cell phones and the Christmas release of a Sony PlayStation console.” The price of tan-
talum—refined coltan—rose from approximately $10 to $380 per kilo. Copper prices increased
sharply in 2001 because of the needs of the industrializing East. Even as Kabila was making des-
perate international deals selling minerals and diamonds to fund his military, the Rwandans and
Ugandans were flying cargo jets out of the Congo full of the same.
Coupled with this pillage on the scale of King Leopold's was massive degradation of the
Congo's natural heritage. Militias and soldiers cut down forests to make and sell charcoal, and des-
troyed habitat to extract minerals. They hunted for food and ran bushmeat markets. The Congolese
were the victims of all soldiers; a military force's allegiance was irrelevant. Soldiers ate the people's
food, stole their belongings, and raped women in many places where they were stationed. To sur-
vive, the Congolese had no choice but to hunt. Bushmeat became the staple, villagers moving deep-
er into forests, setting up traps, selling what they could. Areas known for their abundance of wildlife
became empty overnight, with only the rare bird or small mammal surviving in the forests.
In January 2001, one of Laurent-Désiré Kabila's child-soldier bodyguards shot and killed him.
There were many possible reasons, among them Kabila's decision to execute a commander to whom
the child soldiers had been faithful, though a number of theories hinged on international conspir-
acies as well as Kabila's duplicity and refusal to introduce a democratic constitution.
A committee of military leaders nominated his son, Joseph Kabila, to take his place, believing
they could control him. But once he assumed office, the younger Kabila set about consolidating his
power and ending the war. He met with President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, and within the DRC,
he laid the groundwork for a power-sharing government. He removed from authority men he saw
as a threat to his government and the peace process. The West supported him, calling him one of
a new generation of African politicians. In recent years, however, and especially since the heavily
contested 2011 election, many fear that he will never become the leader they expected and hoped
for.
The war officially ended in December 2002, but while a transitional government was formed on
July 18, 2003, conflicts continued in the Kivus as well as in the Ituri region, in the northeast of the
