Congo's Tin Soldiers

Updated on 30 June 2005

By Jonathan Miller

Jonathan Miller reports on the thousand of tin miners slaving to bring the raw materials that keep the world's electronics turning.

>>Watch the report

Deep in the forest, a long way from anywhere, there is a short stretch of tarmac road with one straight bit: Walekali - one of the busiest airstrips in Congo.

They call this the 'Walikale Express'; 15 or more planes in and out every day, pillaging $2 million worth of loot every week from a jungle outpost that's been at the heart of the world's deadliest conflict - nearly four-million dead in eight years.

Within 50 miles of here, are ten mines which contain the mineral everyone's after: a red rock, cassiterite, better known as tin ore, the most traded metal on the London Exchange.

It's now used for electronic circuit boards and prices have hit a ten year high. Here, the battle is on for control of the mines and the trade. But we've been warned not to film soldiers. The UN's here, but they don't venture far from base. Peacekeepers have never set foot in the mines. Yet it's the plundered ore that fuels the conflict, by buying more guns. Civilians continue to die - almost a thousand a day. The crisis festers like a tropical ulcer.

"There has been a lot of fighting in Walekali and it's affected everyone. During the war, they were all forced to flee into the jungle, and you can only imagine what it was like. No water. No food. No help. They were bad times." - Emile Fakage, Save the Children

Thousands of desperate people had abandoned their farms and fled to the mines. But few came back. So what was keeping them out there in the jungle? The biggest mine, Bisiye, was said to be lawless and remote, forty miles through the forest. Even Buto Muiso, the head of the government's mining division had never been there. Like him, we wanted to find out who was in charge there and who was making the money. We were told we might reach Bisiye in one day, maybe two. No westerner had made this journey before.

Throughout the trek we were to catch fleeting glimpses of government soldiers, making their way towards the mine. At Bisiye, we were told, they are the predators. This primary forest was for more than a decade infested by murderous killers and half-starved militias - until they were routed by the Congolese army just a few months ago.

The trail is rugged and arduous, but it's busy as a motorway. Four thousand porters ply this route carrying sacks of rock heavier than they are. Each of their 50 kilogram packs of cassiterite is worth $400 on the world market. Government soldiers often force porters at gunpoint to carry the rocks free of charge; if they're lucky, though, they can make up to $5 a day.

Prince was a merchant until the last marauding army burned and pillaged Bisiye and stole all he'd earned. Like everyone else, he had to start from scratch.

"I'm exhausted. I am carrying 50 kilos. I have a wife and two children. But we don't earn much and we endure many hardships. Sometimes you end up with no pay at all. You could die along the way too. When you reach Bisiye, you will see the graves of porters like me." - Prince, Porter

Prince had already slept one night in the jungle. He had another 15 miles to go. If he was to make it to Walikale Airstrip by sundown, he had to get moving. Other porters are eager to share tales of hell. Hundreds, they told me, had been killed in the last bout of fighting at Bisiye between crazed militias I'd not even heard of. Not one of them knew their cassiterite was destined for the electronics industry in the rich world.

One man claimed he knew: "It goes to America," he said "To rebuild the Twin Towers and the Pentagon."

We passed hundreds of porters, carrying their 50kg packs of rock. Here in the jungle for the night, setting up camp alongside all of them, I must say that the electronic circuit boards their cassiterite will end up being used for seems a million miles from here.

The dank air reeked of stale sweat and exhaustion. The porters ate their only meal of the day. It rained all night, but no one seemed to notice for at Koba camp you sleep like the dead.

Late morning, an ambulance passed by. Too sick to walk, one woman faced two or three days on a porter's back before she reaches a small hospital only recently reopened by Medicins sans Frontiere.

Five hours into day two, we stumble across a graveyard in the jungle, as Prince, had said we would. We knew we must be close to Bisiye. Here lay victims of war, starvation, overwork, malaria, typhus and cholera.

By a river, the first signs of mining. We've been told there are around 6,000 miners here. At this point the trail goes straight up. No one had seen the likes of us in these parts before. As we near the top, work stops as they gather to stare.

In the absence of any mine management, government soldiers rule here by gun law. By the time we'd got to the top, all the soldiers had removed their uniforms and hidden their guns.

Troops here can go unpaid for months; they make up for lost earnings though. Congo's tin soldiers make a killing.

The miners were cheering because word had gone round we'd come to help end their plight. Among them, looking on, the malevolent presence of soldiers - it's just that we don't know who's who.

The mining has left a huge scar down the mountain, once sacred ancestral land for the local tribe. Most of the work goes on deep underground. Even deeper inside the mountain, down the shafts and rickety ladders, conditions are subhuman.

"In the hole you have to crawl and squeeze and suck in your belly, to make it through. The next danger is the huge rocks above; often they bury us and once they move, it's instant death. Then there's the darkness. And there's no air. Once you get down more than 200 feet, the air flow stops altogether. It's up to you to figure out how to breathe.

As you crawl through the tiny hole, using your arms and fingers to scratch, there's not enough space to dig properly and you get badly grazed all over. And then, when you do finally come back out with the cassiterite, the soldiers are waiting to grab it at gunpoint. Which means you have nothing to buy food with. So we're always hungry." - Muhanga Kawaya

The miners don't work for money. The rocks the soldiers don't steal are traded for food. Most become deeply indebted to traders, who themselves get stuck here for months, able only to witness the horror of daily life here.

"The miners work for nothing; the soldiers always steal everything. They even come to shoot people down the mineshafts. Yes, not long ago, they shot someone. They force the miners to give them everything and they threaten to shoot anyone who argues.

They're always ready to shoot. We are really penalised. We earn nothing. But we pay a lot. The soldiers - they are all around us here, but they are in civilian clothes." - Maponda Regina, Trader.

Even the government's own ministry of mines has been rendered powerless by the greed of the Congolese army.

"Security is not respected, we live in a state where only the fittest survive. Different armed groups do what they want with the population for their own ends. The state doesn't benefit at all.

We need to bring back order and get respect for the ministry of mines because at the moment, everything is done for those who are the strongest. We demand that order is re-established. In that way everyone can be in their rightful place: the military in their barracks." - Buto Muiso, Head of Government Mining Division, Walekali

One hundred years ago, the novelist Joseph Conrad described the colonial plunder of Congo as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the human conscience."

Nothing's changed. As leaders of the rich world gather next week in Scotland to debate their blueprint for Africa, this is the stark reality of what they're up against.

We've brought a huge tome to the top of the cassiterite mountain - Tony Blair's bold new plan for Africa.

When he launched it back in March he said he feared future generations asking how wealthy people, so aware of such suffering, so capable of acting, could simply turn away and busy themselves with other things. This stuff is mined and portered by people wo are like cannon fodder for our industries. Five armies have battled for control of Bisie mine in just five years. But still we buy it.

The morality of doing so is now coming under the spotlight. Having seen what goes on here, we wanted to track down a British company that's one of the two biggest importers of cassiterite from mines around Walekali.

Back down on the airstrip, it was business as usual. Soldiers everywhere, guarding their loot, which is flown out of here by middlemen who sell the mineral on to Congolese export agents and the foreign importers.

Demand for cassiterite has surged because new laws in Japan and Western Europe have resulted in tin replacing lead in the manufacture of electronic circuit boards. Global demand for tin is directly linked to human rights abuse and the battle for control over mines such as Bisiye.

We've hitched a ride on a cassiterite plane going back to Goma, the Walekali Express. I was sat on about 1.7 tonnes of the mineral. It's a hefty payload; some planes don't make the corner.

We found our man, the British cassiterite importer, in another town, where his family, the Kotechas, have been in business for more than 40 years. We spent an hour and a half talking to Ketankumar Kotecha in this office, discussing the corporate ethics of buying minerals in a conflict zone.

Our conversation became increasingly uncomfortable. His firm, Afrimex, has been importing cassiterite from Eastern Congo for more than twenty years. But Mr Kotecha refused to go on camera, agreeing instead that I could represent his views in our report.

I was about to do exactly that when the provincial Security Chief arrived and told us we had to go to the station.

At police headquarters we were questioned and our camera and passports were confiscated. We were released without charge the following day and put on a boat back to Goma.

We could only speculate that Mr Ketankumar Kotecha, a powerful man, had had enough of our questions.

Now, what he did tell us yesterday, in defence of his interests in the cassiterite trade was that what he is doing is legal.

He said, and I quote, "Yes, salary structures are very low but it's better that miners and porters earn something than nothing. If I didn't do this," he said, "someone else would. I am not here," he said, "as some kind of moral saviour."

But it's a moral saviour that Congo needs. Its powerless, impoverished people at the mercy of other people's greed. Things are so dire here that there is no expectation that life will ever get any better - whatever the rich world's leaders think they can do. Congo's government can't control its own army or protect its own people, a people left to scramble in the dust, cursed by the riches under their feet

- Report by Jonathan Miller, Channel 4 News 30 June, 2005

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