Roots of Africas´ Misery

If you are one of those people wondering why there are so many wars and so much suffering on the so called "black continent", just like me, then you shouldn´t miss this entry.

I think everyone of us has seen those pictures in the newspapers or on TV. But how many of us actually know why there are so many people living under such horrible circumstances? The only cause often mentioned are rebels. Rebels?! Aren´t rebels suppose to be groups or individuals rebelling (!) against authorities?

What kind of rebels are those abusing, torturing and slaughtering innocent people in their thousands?

Since I wasn´t satisfied with the journalists´ (at least the mainstream journalists) explanations, I decided to do some online research myself. And this is what I found out:

Africa is endowed with an overwhelming abundance of gems, metals, minerals and other natural resources. But is this wealth a blessing or a curse?

As we know from our history lessons, the whole of Africa used to be colonized, the population enslaved and the resources plundered. In the following you´ll find out that it is not much different today.

Today at Tilbury dock (London) there is nothing to prevent the import of timber, sold to fund distant conflicts. Diamonds arrive at Heathrow airport, where customs can’t detect ‘blood’ gems sold for arms by warmongers. Mobile phones made with the mineral coltan – a rare substance also traded by brutal combatants in the Democratic Republic of Congo – are ubiquitous. In financial hearts of cities around the world, unpoliced investments and financial institutions have profited from some of Africa’s bloodiest wars.

Private interests from warlords to unscrupulous corporations to arms dealers and organized crime have helped to fuel African conflicts over the past decade as they vie for control over valuable resources. Globalization has added a key dimension to contemporary warfare – armed groups from some of the world’s most remote places can be directly linked with commerce in the "modern society". A complex international network of smugglers, brokers and traders means that everything from diamond rings and garden furniture to the components of mobile phones and Playstations may have originated as the booty of Africa’s conflicts.                                                                                                  

Let´s take a look at history. It was actually a ship worker who first discovered the truth about Belgian King Leopold’s brutal exploits in the Congo. In 1897 Edward Morel stood on the quayside at Antwerp watching shipments being unloaded from the Congo. He noticed that though ivory and rubber of enormous value were being brought in by ship, the only goods being sent back to the Congo in exchange were bullets and firearms. He deduced that there was just one explanation for this – slave labour. He wrote:

"I have stood on that quay in Antwerp and seen the rubber disgorged from the bowels of the incoming steamer. To my fancy there was mingled with the sound of musical chimes of the old cathedral tower another sound – a sigh breathed in the gloomy Equatorial forest by those from whose anguish this wealth was wrung." He went on to form the worldwide international human rights campaign, the Congolese Reform Movement.

But we who end up with Africa’s wealth – when we fill up our petrol tanks, buy a gold watch or throw away a mobile phone – do not see the connection or the plunder at the other end of the resource chain. For the brutal reality of where many of these raw materials originate is a far cry from fair and ethical trade.

Africa is vastly rich in natural resources but the continent has paid a terrible price for this wealth. In the past decade horrendous wars in Angola, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Liberia have been fuelled by fighting for control over diamonds, timber, gold, minerals and oil.

An old joke popular in Sierra Leone is bitter testimony to this fact: ‘When God created the world, He endowed Sierra Leone with such a wonderful wealth of natural resources that the angels protested. “Don’t worry,” God replied. “Just wait until you see the people I’ve put there.”’ In a 10-year-long horrific civil war, warlords from the armed rebel group the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) amputated hands to terrorize the population and sold diamonds to fuel killing sprees with names like ‘Operation No Living Thing’. I mean, again, what kind of people are they? Calling themselves rebels?!? (Definition of 'rebel' by MSN Encarta) Some 75 000 people died in the war and over two million were displaced. Ibrahim Kamara, Sierra Leone’s UN ambassador, said in July 2000:"We have always maintained that the conflict is not about ideology, tribal or regional differences… The root of the conflict is and remains diamonds, diamonds and diamonds." But which woman remembers the pictures of starved, tortured and slaughtered people she saw just days ago on TV, when her lover presents her a beautiful ring with a big sparkling diamond which he paid tons of money for?

"When ignorance reigns, life is lost!"

This is the so called ‘paradox of plenty’: the more a country is enriched by the extraction of primary resources and the more its dependency on them deepens, the lower its ratings for human development drop. Thus while the soil is rich with diamonds, the average Sierra Leonean can expect to live for just 34.5 years. Angola, too, has diamond and oil wealth of enormous value, yet a quarter of all Angolan children die before the age of five. Angola’s diamonds and oil were used by 'rebels' and the government to enrich themselves and to buy arms to fight one another at the expense of an impoverished, brutalized population.

Great, and the average consumer in industrialized countries, like you and me, is at the end of the chain. We are the ones that just add petrol to the fire.

In a quarter of the roughly 50 wars and armed conflicts active in 2001, resource exploitation has played a key role. These are known as ‘resource wars’ and with good reason. A poor country with weak infrastructure, few options for making money and possessing significant ‘lootable’ resources is four times more likely to experience war than a similar country without them.

In a vicious circle, resource exploitation fuels war, and war facilitates continued exploitation of the resource. Groups making money from war have a vested interest in perpetuating conflict. Thus these wars are less about one side winning, than about the ability to engage in profitable crime under the cover of warfare.

Of course resources are not the only cause. Conflict comes from a complex combination of political, social, economic and military factors. And the states that descend into chaos are typically weak, repressive, undemocratic and economically vulnerable. But how do such states get into this situation? The benefits of activities such as mining and logging typically go to a tiny fraction of foreign and local business and government élites. Thus a state heavily dependent on oil and mineral extraction is statistically very likely to be highly corrupt, authoritarian and maintaining a massive military budget – all of which leads to a heightened risk of civil war. And though there are exceptions to the rule, such as Botswana, they are few and far between.

Across sub-Saharan Africa many governments are in a state of decay. Under pressure from Northern governments and institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to repay debts and restructure their economies, the public sector and social infrastructure have been decimated. Meanwhile leaders and their politically powerful cronies siphon off state revenues for personal gain.

Young men typically join 'rebel groups' in these places because the government provides nothing and there is little else for them to do. Seizing valuable resources is their ticket to wealth and power.

These factors create a brutal dynamic. Resource wars often feature ‘extreme atrocity’ against the population, because corrupt governments’ power relies on large resource revenues, and not popular support. Meanwhile fighters are only interested in loot and have no need to win over local 'hearts and minds'. In fact quite the opposite is true. Plunderers clear areas rich of resources they wish to control by terrorizing civilians through systematic rape and torture. Others are forced to serve as prostitutes, semi-slave labourers and child soldiers.

At the height of the war in Sierra Leone it emerged that RUF rebels – whose favoured way to terrorize people was to amputate their hands – were selling diamonds that were ending up on the world market.

So what, if any, is the degree of complicity among consuming nations? How do diamonds get from an artisanal mine in Africa to a ring on your finger? How does the mineral coltan get from a mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo into a mobile phone you might buy in the local shops?

Between the two are complex networks of smugglers, fixers and arms brokers. International commerce is the key to understanding how these networks operate so effectively. The illegal economy feeds into the legal economy in this underworld of crime and high finance.

tags: africa  poverty  exploitation  blood diamonds  diamonds  diamond trade  sierra leone  

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