TECHNOIR (13 page)
When the war started in 1995 the UN and others believed the conflict at first was the product of tribal and ethnic rivalries. The Rwandan government, for instance, told the world they invaded the DRC, their neighbor to the West, to go after those who committed atrocities during
the 1994 genocide that killed over 800,000.
Some in the UN didn’t buy it. The Rwandans were shedding blood for something far cheaper. They were shooting it out for the mines that pockmarked the volcanic mountains of DRC’s eastern regions. Mines that contained deposits of cobalt, uranium, gold and, of course, coltan.
Sometimes going undercover, the UN began investigating. Soon enough, a UN Panel of Experts report would expose the resource war in 2001, releasing several publications all entitled
“The Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the DRC.”
The reports made disturbing charges against scores of multinational mining companies, like Eagle Wings Resources International and the Chemie Pharmacie Holland. The UN alleged the mining companies indirectly were fueling the war, paralyzing the DRC government, and using the conflict to keep the coltan flowing cheaply out of the Congo. The UN also discovered some of these mining companies were aligning with elements of the warring parties, thus creating those “elite networks.”
Fast forward to today, and RAID, which is funded by the Queen Elizabeth House, remains determined to convince several of the world’s most powerful governments to investigate the UN’s allegations. Stealing natural resources amidst the chaos of a war violates guidelines set-forth by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which administers these ethical standards endorsed by over 30 nations, says RAID. The International Criminal Court has also started its own investigation, and RAID is calling on all governments where these mining companies are based to cooperate with the court.
But there’s one major problem: nearly all of the governments have essentially brushed RAID off; even though RAID, for example, filed a formal complaint with the US State Department. Indeed, all named governments are refusing to initiate an investigation. Even though Richard S. Williamson, who was US Ambassador to the UN at the time, told the UN Security Council “the United States government will look into the allegations against these companies and take appropriate measures [and] not turn a blind eye to these activities.”
His statement must have been a flat-out lie. Because not long after the 2001 report from the UN Panel of Experts went public, the UN incredibly exonerated all US companies. RAID claims diplomatic pressure from the US and other governments made the UN cave. “The US government was one of the most determined to quash the UN Panel's reports but this is also true of Canada, the UK and Belgium,” says Tricia Feeney, executive director of RAID. “All [US companies] were exonerated. The UN Panel said the cases had been resolved.”
Feeney says just because the UN laid down, doesn’t mean the companies are innocent. “Essentially the UN was forced to drop the case but as they explained, 'resolved' didn't mean that the initial allegations were unsubstantiated,” she says. “The [US] companies have tried to hide behind the technicality of 'resolved' but the UN itself made clear that this classification didn't mean that the companies had not behaved in the way described in the UN reports.”
The UN said it stands by the report, but added it is up to the governments to make their own investigation and prosecute if need be. RAID says the UN has cowered because if Western-based mining companies are prosecuted out of Africa, China may step in. It is widely known the West grows more concerned by the day as China continues to sign more and more resource concessions with African nations, such as Sudan and Nigeria.
During phone interviews with me, several of the named companies insisted they were not involved with any wrongdoing in the Congo. The CEO of Eagle Wings Resources International, for instance, who did not offer his name for publication, swore “on the Bible” he was unaware his company may have been acting unethical by purchasing coltan from rebels who may have killed to get it or used violence to control the mine from where it was dug.
Both a mining company and coltan broker, Eagle Wings was one of a handful of US companies accused of using child labor in one of their mines in eastern DRC. Eagle Wings was also an alleged business partners with an “elite network” of Rwandan military officers, politicos and businessmen. Accusations of child labor have bankrupted Eagle Wings, said the CEO. Put simply, after finding out his company had been charged by the UN, his customers abandoned him.
But even if the mining companies have taken the brunt of the blame from RAID and the UN, some experts say there’s a whole other dynamic when it comes to who is to blame for the the PlayStation War.
When the war started gaining serious traction in 1998, the race for every adult in the West to have a cell phone was well past the starting line. A computer in every household was also becoming a reality. And by the end of 2000, millions of Americans were still waiting for a PlayStation 2, a second-generation video game console, which SONY says was delayed due to manufacturing issues.
To fulfill the mass personal-tech desire of hundreds of millions of Western consumers, SONY and other manufacturers needed miniature electric capacitors. Capacitors, of course, made with tantalum because of its ability to withstand extreme heat. So as multiple technological revolutions occurred in unison at the end of the 1990s, the worldwide demand for tantalum began to boil, causing its price to rocket. From the beginning of 1999 to the beginning of 2001, roughly two years, the price of tantalum on the international market went from
US $49.00 a pound to $275.00 a pound
. Again, at the end of 2000, millions were still waiting to purchase a PlayStation 2, which was delayed at the factory, said SONY, but they never admitted as to why. At the same time, the price of tantalum was skyrocketing because it was so hard to get.
Experts keeping an eye on Rwanda reported, to no surprise, that the Rwandan army in 2000 and 2001 made at least $250 million by selling eastern Congolese coltan with the help of mining Western companies and metal brokers. In 2000, Rwanda as a nation produces 83 tons from its own mines,
but finds a way to export a total of 603 tons, a figure reported by a prominent Rwandan bank.
Several years later, American-based Kemet, the world’s largest maker of tantalum capacitors during the height of the PlayStation War, would swear off coltan from the Congo because of human rights violations and make their tantalum suppliers certify origins.
“But it may be a case of too little, too late,” stated the UN Panel of Experts. “Much of the coltan illegally stolen from Congo is already in laptops, cell phones and electronics all over the world.”
David Barouski
, a researcher from the University of Wisconsin, says it is certain coltan from this conflict is also in SONY video game consoles across the world. “SONY’s PlayStation 2 launch (spring of 2000 to the end of that year) was a big part of the huge increase in demand for coltan that began in early 1999,” said Barouski, who has witnessed the chaos of eastern Congo firsthand. “
Low supply with heavy demand means high prices for
coltan and it byproducts.”
He adds, “SONY and other companies like it, have the benefit of plausible deniability because the coltan ore trades hands so many times from when it is mined to when SONY gets a processed product, that a company often has no idea where the original coltan ore came from, and frankly don’t care to know. But statistical analysis shows it to be nearly inconceivable that SONY made all its PlayStation 2’s without using Congolese coltan.”
SONY, on the other hand, does not say much about their tantalum use and whether they needed conflict coltan from the Congo to satisfy consumer demand for the PlayStation 2 in 2000. However, it still uses tantalum in its video game console parts, said Satoshi Fukuoka, a SONY spokesperson from Japan, to me in an e-mail. He added they are satisfied with responses from suppliers the tantalum they use is not “illegally mined Congo coltan”. This also goes for past purchases of tantalum parts as well, he said, but he did not specify how far back they began demanding parts without Congo coltan. Fukuoka said the PlayStation 2, PSP and PlayStation 3, “are manufactured mostly from independent parts and components that manufacturers procured externally.”
He added, “The material suppliers source their original material from multiple mines in various countries. It is therefore hard for us to know what the supply chain mix is. I am happy to state to you that to the best of our knowledge, SONY is not using the material about which you have expressed concern.”
Nonetheless, when many think of an enormous US military disaster on the continent of Africa, tragic images of crashing Black Hawk helicopters and mutilated bodies in the streets of Mogadishu come to mind. But there is a group of independent journalists and researchers who say the U.S. military was also involved in the PlayStation War – a war that went largely unnoticed by the American mainstream media, and thus a majority of Americans.
Those familiar with Rwandan and Ugandan invasions of the DRC say these so-called invasions turned into a free-for-all. A natural resource grab that arguably benefited the West the most. Yet did the US government secretly initiate the PlayStation War so resources such as coltan would flow out of the DRC at a dirt cheap price? It’s a theory millions of Congolese embrace.
During his eight years, President Bush was pictured glad-handing Rwandan’s long-time president Paul Kagame several times. Kagame took power after the 1994 genocide. He came back to Rwanda, his homeland, to apparently save his ethnic tribe, the Tutsis, over the Hutus, who are alleged to have initiated the 1994 genocide. Oddly enough, for sometime before his triumphant return, Kagame was on American soil, working his way through a US military training program at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
According to investigative journalist
Wayne Madsen
, helping the Rwandan military and its militias to invade the DRC at the onset of the PlayStation War in the mid-1990s were U.S. Special Forces, intelligence operatives, and Private Military Companies. The stated reason at the time for the invasion made by Kagame and the Rwandan government was to counter the remnants of the Hutus ethnicity, who had slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Tutsi’s in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, and then escaped into eastern DRC. But independent journalists such as Madsen suggest the “Hutu problem” was actually a ruse for the resource grab. Madsen is the author of
Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999
; he’s also a former contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA).
In 2001, Madsen testified before the U.S. Congress. His testimony shows how the U.S. Military was knee-deep in Africa’s PlayStation War.
Madsen testified that in 1996, a Pentagon official told a House of Representatives subcommittee the U.S. military was helping train the Rwandan military, which invaded the DRC not long after. In 1998, the Pentagon was forced to admit that a twenty-man U.S. Army Rwanda Interagency Assessment Team (RIAT) was working in Rwanda before a second invasion of the eastern Congo, testified Madsen. Madsen stated the US National Security Agency at this time maintained a communications intercept station just miles from the eastern Congo border that intercepted military and government communications from the DRC and other opposing forces during the first Rwandan invasion.
What could they have been listening to when it came to the eastern Congo? Could it be the troop movements of the DRC and the rebel groups that opposed the invading forces of Rwanda and also Uganda, considered another US proxy during those days?
What was unquestionable during the Rwandan invasions of eastern Congo were the bloody murders of civilians, and in this particular conflict, men of the cloth. Citing French intelligence and Roman Catholic priests who were in the eastern Congo during the invasion, Madsen told Congress, Rwandan troops were probably to blame for the deaths of hundreds of Hutus and a small number of Hutu Catholic priests. It gets stranger: Madsen wrote in his book that DRC forces claimed to have discovered the bodies of two US Special Forces. The rebels said they were Americans; African-Americans to be exact.
In addition to Madsen’s findings, investigators from Human Rights Watch discovered in 1995 the Pentagon had hired the Washington-based Ronco Consulting Corporation to work in Rwanda. Ronco, a company known for clearing land mines from war zones, was funneling military equipment, explosives and armored vehicles to the Rwandan military, even though Rwanda was under a U.N.-imposed arms embargo at the time.
During the first Rwandan invasion of the DRC in the mid-1990s, besides going after Hutus guilty of taking part in the Rwandan genocide, Madsen said Rwanda government, run by Tutsis, wished to overthrow the DRC leader at the time, President Mobuto, because he supported the Hutus. Yet Madsen added Mobuto also did not support Western mining companies wanting to make millions off his country’s natural resources.
“It is my observation that America’s early support for [Rwanda], had less to do with getting rid of the Mobutu regime than it did in opening up Congo’s vast mineral riches to North American-based mining companies,” Madsen testified.