By Dominic Odipo

“Every time you use a cell phone or log onto a computer, you could be contributing to the death toll in the bloodiest, most violent region in the world: the eastern Congo. Rich in ‘conflict minerals’, this remote and lawless land is home to deposits of gold, diamonds, coltan, tin and tungsten, some critical to cell phones, computers and other popular electronics.”

These words appear on the front jacket sleeve of Peter Eichstaedt’s latest book, “Consuming the Congo: War and Conflict Minerals in the World’s Deadliest Place.”

Like virtually every book on the former Belgian Congo that has followed in the tracks of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness’’, this book is full of mass murder, mass graves, mass rape and inter-ethnic bloodletting.

But even as the reader cringes from the horrific details that enfold on every other page, there is little doubt that this 216-page book pushes him much closer into understanding the great human tragedy that has become the eastern Congo. It is somber revelation through massacres, machetes, mass graves and the barrels of a thousand guns.

Since 1996, more than 5.5 million “extra” deaths have occurred in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), most of them in the eastern part where five countries — Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania — meet. By “extra” deaths, we mean those deaths over and above what would have been normal in that country if there had been no human or political conflict. With 5.5 million dead, Congo has become the deadliest place on earth, much more deadly than Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Colombia combined.

Why are so many millions of people being killed in the Congo, 50 years after that country attained its independence from its Belgian colonial masters? Why do so many of these deaths tend to occur in the eastern part of the country? Do those rare minerals found in the eastern part of the country such as gold, diamonds, coltan, tantalum, tungsten and tin play the biggest part in generating and fuelling these deaths?

Switching sides

Is the root cause of this conflict political, a high-gear power struggle between the Congolese government faraway in Kinshasa, and those of Rwanda and Uganda, which are based, much closer to the conflict areas?

Is the struggle in the eastern Congo basically ethnic, between the Hema and the Lendu, the Hutu and the Tutsi and the other local tribes, which occasionally take and switch sides on cue? Could a stronger government in Kinshasa whose writ effectively runs in the eastern provinces of Kasai, South Kivu, North Kivu and Orientale be able to deal with this problem?

As Chinua Achebe might have put it, what is the trouble with the Congo?

These, in a nutshell, are the main questions that Eichstaedt tries to answer in this book. Given the vastness and remoteness of the region and the fluid nature of the conflict, one cannot expect any easy answers as even the author himself appreciates and acknowledges.

But when you come to the end of this relatively short book, you find that quite a few scales have dropped from your eyes.

The rape of the Congo’s richest gold mines by both Uganda and Rwanda is laid bare, complete with the dates of military invasion, the battles for control of the booty, the local militias through which the two countries and the Congolese government operated and the means by which Rwanda and Uganda transported the stolen booty back home.

Old ethnic rivalries are exploited to the full with neither scruples nor any respect for human life or the territorial integrity of the Congo.

One month, the Ugandans arm and support the Lendu tribesmen to massacre their Hema neighbours and the very next month, switch their political support and resources to the Hema to enable them massacre the Lendu.

The Rwandans play almost exactly the same game, supporting those opposing the Ugandans at every turn. As rivers of blood flow in this God-forsaken region, millions of dollars worth of Congolese mineral resources are siphoned out of the country into both private and public coffers in Rwanda and Uganda. It is a rogue economy gone lawless and haywire, sustained by haughty greed and human blood and fuelled by age-old ethnic animosities.

In a land of both the mysterious and the mythical, human blood apparently plays an additional, if rather exotic and paranormal role.

According to one of the small-scale individual gold prospectors whom the author interviewed, during those periods of war and bloodletting, which so often afflict this region, gold is much easier to find than during those periods of relative peace and tranquility.

Axes or other weapons

Apparently, the more human blood soaks into the already rich and fertile soils of the eastern Congo, the easier it is for the gold deposits embedded inside to spring to the surface. This is perhaps why so much of the killing that has been done in this region over the years has been inflicted by such rudimentary weapons as machetes, axes or other blunt weapons. In pursuit of gold and other precious metals, real human blood needs to flow!

Over the last 20 years, almost eight times more people have died in the Congo than those who died in the Rwanda Genocide of 1994. Yet the world remembers the Rwanda killings every other day but hardly seems to notice the millions who continue to die in the Congo.

Why? Apparently, Eichstaedt is trying to find the answer.  It is, indeed, a rather bloody trail.

The writer is a lecturer and consultant in Nairobi.

dominicodipo@yahoo.co.uk