Shocks from underground

At the edge of Lake Kivu is the Congolese city of Goma, which the Rwanda-backed, mainly Tutsi rebel group M23 seized last month. Next, M23 began taking nearby towns one-by-one. A week ago this past Friday they reached the outskirts of Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu province. The United Nations estimates that more than 400,000 people fled the fighting in January alone.

M23—the March 23 Movement, whose name comes from the date in 2009 when the Congolese government signed an ultimately failed peace deal with a predecessor Tutsi rebel group, the National Congress for the Defense of the People—has been sporadically fighting the government in eastern Congo, near the border with Uganda and Rwanda, since 2012.

Rwanda, for its part, claims it’s menaced by militia groups based in eastern Congo, like the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, some of whose founders are Hutus who’d participated in the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda. Congo’s foreign minister recently told the UN Security Council that Rwanda was committing “a frontal aggression, a declaration of war which no longer hides itself behind diplomatic maneuvers.”

Meanwhile, the UN Security Council’s expert group claims that M23’s decision to capture the Rubaya last April “was primarily motivated by a strategic need to monopolize the only viable route for mineral evacuation”—in particular, of coltan, which can be refined to tantalum and used in capacitors for high-tech devices. With the conquest of Goma, M23 now controls areas rich not only with coltan but also tungsten and gold.

Neither is Rwanda the only foreign power with eyes on Congo’s mineral riches. Last December, the United States announced an initiative to invest more than US$600 billion in a railway project to connect the Angolan port city of Lobito with Congo’s cobalt, copper, and lithium mines as well as Zambia’s copper region. That’s obviously a lot of money, but the U.S. doesn’t have a hold on the mining market in Congo; China does—with Chinese entities owning 15 of Congo’s 19 cobalt operations. How is this shaping the conflict?

Johan Grimonprez is a filmmaker whose most recent documentary, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat—nominated for best documentary feature at this year’s Academy Awards—is about the events that led up to American jazz artists crashing a UN Security Council meeting in 1961 to protest the murder of Congo’s Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. After Congo acquired its independence from Belgium in 1960, Lumumba proclaimed that Congo’s resources should be used for Congo’s own betterment instead of being siphoned off to Western companies—leading many of his Congolese enemies, Belgian mercenaries, and even the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, to begin planning his murder. What we’re seeing play out now, Grimonprez says, is largely consistent with that history: Foreign powers are competing over Congo’s minerals; and in the process, they’re exacting a terrible cost on the country’s people. Still, even though history weighs heavily in Congo, civil-society groups, often led by women, have begun putting together a response to the violence …

Gustav Jönsson: How do you understand what M23 is up to in eastern Congo?