The Democratic Republic of the Congo (henceforth, Congo) recently joined the East African Community (EAC), an economic bloc comprising 7 East African nations that stretches from the Indian to Atlantic oceans and includes over 300 million people. The decision was met with hopes of boosted trade, development, and economic and diplomatic cooperation across some of the fastest growing economies of the world in a region flushed with resources, both human and mineral.
Members agreed to create a joint military task force to combat the innumerable armed groups that currently operate in the Congo’s eastern frontier, aspiring to bring peace to the tumultuous, mineral rich country. The calls for optimism were soon questioned, however, as violence erupted yet again in the country’s eastern provinces, which border 3 of the 7 EAC members. The recurrent bursts of violence overshadow the EAC’s hope of becoming a diplomatic and trading power. The violence indicates that regional cooperation and promise for development does not advent an era of peace, but that better understanding of its conflict dynamics just might.
The Congo holds a special place in the popular imagination. Its thought often conjures up images of dense impenetrable jungles rich in wildlife. Today, the Congo often brings visions of violence, a cited poster child of the resource curse and poor governance. Its stormy trajectory following Belgium’s departure is often categorized as that of a state ill-equipped to govern a territory twice the size of Europe and endowed with abundant resources that plants it at the center of global trade and supply chains.
Producing over 80% of the world’s coltan (columbite-tantalites), necessary for all electronic devices, is a case in point. These resources have justifiably drawn attention towards the Congolese crisis. Most attempts to understand the conflict in Eastern Congo have focussed on the mining economy and how abundant resources in the context of weak state capacity facilitates the proliferation of armed groups that want to stamp their ‘right’ over these mines through force.
The truth, like in most cases, is more complicated. The seeming intractability of the Congolese conflict and the continued persistence of the discourse of the resource-conflict causal link implies a lag in our understanding of the crisis. A reevaluation is thus in order. The greed and resource curse perspective runs the risk of a narrow causal link between minerals and conflict and denies us the opportunity to understand the multi-dimensional nature of this complex crisis. A good starting point could be to better understand the dimensions that revolve around the mining industry.
Land in the Eastern Congo is one often overlooked, yet crucial dimension. It has played host to multiple ethnic groups competing for rights to reside, demographic pressure from migration, and population growth. It has also historically been the source of wealth, power and many livelihoods as a result of the minerals that lay underneath it. With intense competition for the limited resources, and because these minerals are an extension of the land, understanding how land rights are accessed, controlled, and distributed sheds light on the nature of power relations that are in operation.
The politics around land rights is more complicated than the Manichaean control by an armed group or the legal institutions of a minimally present formal state. In reality, ostensibly diffuse stakeholders work, compete, and cooperate with each other and other prominent local actors to continue mining and enforce property rights. Since these mines play a pivotal role in armed group proliferation and the regional economy, to understand the facets on how its access and operations are maintained is necessary to ensure an accurate reading of the conflict. The recent skirmishes along its eastern frontier amidst the hopes of a new economic bloc means this issue, unfortunately, remains as relevant as ever.
A focal point of conquest, war and immigration, Eastern Congo’s Great Lakes region has had to accommodate an ethnically diverse and relatively large population. Land increasingly became scarce and thus its access became a deciding factor in a group’s survival. Belgium’s colonial penetration saw the land divided into native and vacant land. The latter was where Western individual property rights were enforced by the colonial state and reserved for the colonists. The former was where individual property rights didn’t exist, but instead ‘native’ Africans were ruled by customary chiefs through cultural norms and traditions.
The colonial administration’s modus operandi of indirect rule meant affiliating with these customary chiefs around ethnically curated lines, effectively ensuring the only avenue to access rights to live and extract from the land rested upon the acceptance of chiefs as the sole political authority. This compartmentalized African subjects into tribes, creating ethno-regional territories where resource exploitation and appropriation norms could be imposed.
Following his rise to power in 1965, the infamous dictator Mobutu Sese Seko centralized power using a hierarchical administrative set-up that was highly clientelistic and patrimonial, consisting of close ethno-regional and personal ties to the president. He abolished alternative forms of political authority and co-opted them into the state’s political hierarchy.
During the 1990s, however, Mobutu’s regime began to crumble. The tensions arising from pre-existing colonial structures and Mobutu’s patrimonial restructuring of resource access based on ethnicity came to a boil and finally erupted in violence. In the eastern province of South Kivu, the tensions were exacerbated by the presence of a large number of immigrant communities from Rwanda and Burundi. It created a mix of local, regional and international dynamics of land allocation and ethnicity that gradually turned into a tenure of increasing violence culminating in the first Congo War (1996-1997).
Social coexistence was thus affected by the local competition for land rights. This ‘rupture’ set the stage for new political, economic, and social claims. The growing importance of mining as a source of livelihood and opportunity for profit in these provinces continued to underline the importance of land tenure.
However, the central state’s control over the provinces receded as an outcome of the war. Its administration and policies were left to adapt to the complex realities on the ground. Locally embedded chiefs wielded the authority to enforce land rights and operated in a context of legal plurality where their authority, stemming from customary law, operated within the state’s superficially existent formal legal codes. These locally embedded chiefs continue to act as intermediaries and often collude with armed groups outsourcing their legitimacy to justify their presence and extract revenue from the mines, usually via illegally imposed taxes and customs duties. In other words, customary authority provides and protects mining rights even in a shadow space where militias impose illegal monopolies of violence.
The Twangiza Gold Mining Concession in conflict ridden South Kivu paints an illustrative example. Located on the Twangiza-Namoya gold belt and including multiple gold deposits, the Twangiza concession is formally owned by a Canadian Mining Corporation called Banro. Gold mining here occurs in a context where supranational actors like the central state in Kinshasa and Banro operate in the backdrop of legal ownership that often comes in direct conflict with claims from local actors. On the ground, multiple stakeholders compete for mining access, including artisanal miners, customary actors and armed militias. Mining in Twangiza by Banro would be impossible without engaging with these actors that usually operate outside the state’s formal legal codes. With minimal state presence, the question of who enforces rights to the land and how comes to the fore.
Actors of customary authority at Twangiza are traditional custodians of the land under customary law. Their history of controlling access to political and resource rights since colonial rule and their co-option into Mobutu’s statist system means that they retained their clout over the province’s land tenure systems despite the ruptures of war. Furthermore, their cultural clout means they retain a social hold over their ethno-regional territory and their co-ethnics. Their approval and active involvement are necessary.
The province’s many armed groups that are situated around its gold and coltan mines, used as a source of revenue, also co-opt traditional political elites for their legitimacy to impose illegal taxes and monopolies. Therefore, in a province where mining provides the only lucrative economic source, the power dynamics at play that determine mining rights and access become highly salient. Traditional political elites, aware of their unique position, often collude with multinational mining corporations, armed militias, local miners, and even the President’s office to facilitate and profit from mining.
The customary institution and the authority it possesses to enforce land rights has been effectively instrumentalized by regional stakeholders as well as members of the institution itself in order to continue mining operations. This collaboration to enforce mining rights underpins the region’s economy and as a consequence plays a direct role in armed group presence and thus the conflict. The mining system and the avenues to ensure continued exploitation highlight the nature of land regimes being instrumentalized for this very purpose.
The presence of subsurface minerals and the salience of mining in Eastern Congo highlight dynamics that enable the conflict’s continuation, specifically as a source of low skilled revenue for armed groups. But by limiting study to these dynamics, we risk overemphasizing the proximate causes of the conflict and not the underlying sources of tensions. The case of Twangiza and an analysis of the region’s history bring forth the salience of land and how the right to exploit it is accessed and controlled as a vital factor that underpins the nature of the Congolese crisis. An inquiry of the Congolese conflict through a study of its ethnicised land regimes, specifically on how it has been instrumentalised by actors operating beyond the ‘formal’ state’s institutions of property rights enforcement, paints a more detailed picture of resources’ role in the conflict. It also highlights the reality of the institutions of power that are often embedded in informal and cultural norms hidden behind the veil of disorder.
Akhilesh Sandeep is an MSc Comparative Politics student at the London School of Economics and Political Science.