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Shocks from underground

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 Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat—nominated for best documentary feature at this year’s Academy Awards—is about the events that led 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 …

• “[M23 are] trying to get their hands on conflict minerals, and they’re using rape as a tool of war to empty the villages in the region. A large part of the money in eastern Congo comes from selling minerals, that are often slouched off across the border to Rwanda—not only coltan and lithium, which are used in the batteries in Apple’s iPhones and Tesla’s cars, but also gold. Rwanda’s sale of gold to the United Arab Emirates has gone up in the last few years. But there’s hardly any gold in Rwanda itself, so that must come from Congo’s Kiva province.”
• “What’s happening now is similar to what we saw in the 1960s and even earlier. During the Second World War, the U.S. used uranium from Congo to make its nuclear weapons. It’s what the writer In Koli Jean Bofane calls the “Congolese algorithm”: A huge part of the minerals that were sourced for war-making in the 20th century came from Congo, but the Congolese population hardly benefitted from that trade. And that still goes on today. There are so many resources under the ground in Congo that even at the time of King Leopold II of Belgium, who founded the Congo Free State and was its sole owner from 1885 until it became a Belgian protectorate in 1908, it was called ‘the geological scandal.’”
• “There are United Nations peacekeepers in Congo, but the UN doesn’t want to step in to stop the fighting. Neither does the European Union. They’re basically looking the other way, letting Kagame carry on with his support for M23. I think if they held Kagame accountable, that might really change things on the ground, but they’re not doing that—so the situation might now escalate instead. The Congolese are really upset. There have been huge demonstrations in Kinshasa. Western embassies are under siege. At the end of [Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat], you see pictures from 1961 of the Belgian Embassy in Cairo in flames. Something similar could now happen inside Congo. And yet the United Nations is still incapacitated.”

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Then came the challenges to European, especially Ukrainian, security: The U.S. and Russia arranged talks with one another in Saudi Arabia last week, excluding Ukraine and Europe, while European leaders met separately in Paris—where they ignored the tariffs and struggled to align their positions on Ukraine’s future security arrangements.

Why can’t Europe get its act together? In this week’s member’s dispatch, we return to our conversation with Matthias Matthijs about the simultaneous, epochal problems the Continent is facing—and why its political systems are struggling to produce the kind of strong government necessary for the moment.

—Michael Bluhm

• The conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has won Sunday’s German national elections, with Friedrich Merz likely to become the next chancellor. Alternative für Deutschland, a populist-right party with extensive ties to Germany’s far right, surged to second place—almost doubling its vote share. “The most important thing,” Merz says, “is to re-establish a viable government in Germany as quickly as possible”—though he’s refusing to establish a coalition with the AfD.Last month, the German Bundestag passed a nonbinding motion, drafted by the CDU, to cut off undocumented immigration at the country’s land borders. To pass the motion, Merz relied on AfD votes.
• Pope Francis remains in critical condition. On Sunday, the Vatican released a medical bulletin on the pontiff’s health, emphasizing the uncertainty of the situation: “The complexity of the clinical picture, and the wait necessary for the pharmacological therapies to give some feedback, require that the prognosis remain reserved.”
• Simulations run by NASA researchers appear to have identified a striking spiral structure at the outer boundary of the solar system: “The Oort cloud began as the unused remnants of the solar system’s giant planets (Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus and Saturn) after their formation 4.6 billion years ago. Some of these remnants are so large, they could be considered dwarf planets. As these planets began orbiting the sun, their movements kicked the excess material far beyond Pluto’s orbit, where they reside today.

• The world of entertainment and media drives new trends in business and the economy. It’s also complex and fast-moving. How to keep up? Read TheFutureParty, a free newsletter with the latest developments and insights from inside the industry. Sign up here.

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