The Land of Gold and Blood

THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC of Congo is one of the world’s poorest countries. In 2014, Congo ranked 186 out of 187 on the United Nations’ human development index—vying with Niger for the bottom of the list.

Yet Congo is extremely rich in soil, water, forests, and minerals. Diamonds, copper, gold, oil, uranium, and coltan are all mined, purchased, and traded from the DRC.    

Coltan is the ore used in electronic devices. The so call “war of coltan” in the mineral-rich eastern Congo has left millions dead and more than a million women raped. Transnational corporations are able to exert extreme pressure on Congo’s weak government and economy. As a result, the country’s natural resources have become an important factor in increasing poverty and violence rather than wealth and development.

The Catholic bishops in Congo (about half of the country’s population is Catholic) repeatedly have denounced three specific kinds of evil: a climate favoring genocide, outbreaks of religious fundamentalism, and a push toward Balkanization.

Sébastien Muyengo, author of In the Land of Gold and Blood, is the Catholic bishop of Uvira in eastern Congo. As a result of the mineral wars, he writes, the country’s poverty has become a mental, human, and structural poverty, rather than predominantly material. Yet Congo has resources the rest of the world wants.

Bishop Muyengo argues that after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which led to the death of 800,000 people, Rwanda transferred its conflict between Tutsis and Hutus to the eastern DRC. As a result, since 1996 more than 5 million Congolese have been killed, but this genocide has been ignored by the international community. The violence continues unabated and is carried out with impunity.

In “Our Cry for the Absolute Respect for Human Life” released in May, the Catholic bishops of the Bukavu region wrote: “The criminals brutally killed with machetes, knives, or axes; some of their victims had throats cut, the arms of many children are maimed, pregnant women are disemboweled, and entire families are decimated. These are acts of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.”

The bishops contend that young people (both Congolese and foreign) are “deceived by unscrupulous recruiters who promise scholarships for the Middle East, Europe, or Canada.” Instead, the youth are trained as soldiers in a “jihadist spirit,” then deployed into an arena of international terrorism.

Several stakeholders are maintaining conflicts in Congo, according to the bishops, with the clear intention of Balkanizing the country. “The perpetrators establish a systematic treatment of terror, a strategy of forced displacement of populations to progressively occupy their lands, and the installation of religious fundamentalism outbreaks and terrorist training bases,” they wrote. “All this happens in a context of an economic mafia and a military-political racketeering fueled by widespread looting of abundant natural resources: mining, forestry, animal, and oil. The population of the East has the net impression it is unprotected by its own state and abandoned by the international community.”

The bishops said that the Kabila administration does not prioritize security, peace, and national integrity—and even asked if the government is incapable of addressing the violence or “complicit” with it.

The same question can be asked of the international community. Despite the presence of a U.N. force, the violence has not slowed. According to Muyengo, mass murders have not been sufficiently investigated at either a national or international level. Yet they are planned killings, he says, aimed at destroying whole communities. They should be considered genocidal acts.

All of these factors create and aggravate poverty and violence, which explains the paradox of poverty in the resource-rich DRC.

To foster justice and peace, the Catholic Church’s initiatives have to be recognized and supported. First, the 1998 massacre of 648 persons, including priests and nuns, at Kasika and the 1999 incident where 15 people were buried alive at Mwenga must be memorialized. “True forgiveness, true reconciliation, and sustainable peace,” writes Muyengo, “are grounded in the willingness of assuming the memories of the past and building a better future.” Second, governance committees need funding and organization to foster political participation at the grassroots. Third, international pressure must be put on President Kabila to not run for a third term, which would be a violation of the constitution.

The questions raised by the Catholic bishops in Congo must be echoed by the church worldwide. To raise the DRC off the bottom of the world’s poverty list requires empowering Congolese people to organize for the protection of their rights and human dignity. It is necessary that civil society in Congo become an agent of its own liberation.