Conflict Minerals and the Ongoing Agony of Eastern Congo, Iowa City, Iowa, October 29, 2012

- [Alan Brody] We have to introduce our speaker who's sitting in the middle. That's J. Jeffrey Hoover. Another Hoover, brother Bob Hoover, which is not a reference to, necessarily-- - [J. Jeffery Hoover] To my profession. - [Alan Brody] To his profession but, he is, actually, the brother of Jeffrey Hoover, and so, who better to know how best to introduce him? So I'll ask Bob to make that introduction, thank you. - [Bob Hoover] Jeff and I, and our brother, Dave, grew up in small-town Iowa. Rudd, a little town, of almost 400 people, up near Mason City. Not necessarily an auspicious place for international relations interest, except behind, on the wall of the dining room, behind the kitchen door, Mom always had a world map. And so, when conversation turned around the world, we, we had a question, we'd go to the map. So, it's not surprising that I, when I graduated in '61, teaching in the Katanga sounded like an, in a secondary school, in the bush, in the Katanga, sounded like an interesting thing. Katanga was a breakaway province from the Congo, at that period of time, to be a breakaway province. I, during that time, I got bit by mosquitoes and love bug, married a nurse. We came back after four years, and told stories. About the Congo. That mighta had something to do with Jeff, when he was doing his PhD in African History in Yale, deciding to do his research by, in Kapanga. Just to the north where I, Jo and I had been. We were at Mwazhing, which was an open-country bush school. Jeff was in Kapanga, which had been a pre-colonial African city. When the Belgians came in, they didn't want that city to grow, they wanted their own stuff, so, the city was sort of, it wasn't, it didn't grow like it naturally would have. But it was a focus of the local chief, of the Naria chieftainship. And so, Jeff had the privilege of not only being in that kind of setting, but when the chief died, and a new chief was appointed, he was chosen, asked to be a historian for the initiation, the, the ceremony. In which they took a pilgrimage. In which they relived some of the history of that chieftainship. And so, that was the kind of setting that Jeff did his research on, of the kind of, the history of that chieftainship. So, it's been my privilege to have something to do with introducing him to the Congo, and now my privilege to listen to him talking about the Congo. - [J. Jeffery Hoover] Thank you. I'm going to give a few caveats before we go on. I'm not an economist, I'm not a metallurgist, and I'm not a political scientist. I'm a historian. And my own research has been in pre-colonial history, rather than the more recent time. I'm speaking as someone who has lived in Congo, now, for 33 years. But in a different region, teaching students, working with colleagues who are from Eastern Congo, following their concerns, their stereotypes, their prejudices, their news from their home areas, mourning with loss of family members, hearing of people fearing expropriation from their ethnic community in the 1990s, that turned out to be the beginning of what became the first Great African War. It's been a long history of living with news of this unfolding tragedy. The topic, if anything, has become even more appropriate, in a sense, more newsworthy, since we first began talking with the committee. There was a hearing by the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs. Very interesting title, The Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights. What an interesting three things to combine in a subcommittee title. Talking about the ongoing anarchy in Eastern Congo, in late September, and we knew several of the people who were called to testify before that committee. The Congo has been the archetype, alongside Somalia, but in a very different way, of what political scientists have been calling a failed state. Philip Gourevitch spoke of Congo some years ago, and said, "Oh Congo, what a wreck! "It hurts to look "and listen. "It hurts to turn away." It's not an easy country to work with, and I must say, that we have not been in the most difficult part of Congo, but, by any means. It's the third-largest country in Africa by area, the fourth-largest by population. It was at the same developmental level as South Africa in 1960. But by the early 2000s, by 2004, it was 153rd of 153 countries listed by the World Bank in their developmental list. The Mobutu regime, from 1965 until 1998, knew periods, particularly in its first five, 10 years, of popular support and stability, even seeming progress, but in later years, we experienced 4000% annual inflation, multiple currency systems, different colors of money, in different cities, and the same country, things that make it look like a keystone cops country in some ways. Mobutu was overthrown by a coalition called the FDL in 1997, 1998. Masterminded by a coalition of Congo's neighbors determined to get rid of the really embarrassing regime. And Laurent Kabila, who was the first president after Mobutu, was really the surviving member of a group of Congolese chosen to put a Congolese veneer on what was, essentially, an international operation. Then,in 1999, in late 1998, Kabila fell into conflict with the partners, particularly Rwanda, and Uganda, and a second Congolese War broke out, sometimes called The Great African War, sometimes called Africa's World War. I see, in your questions, that you had, your little test before the talk today on the table, it was referred to as the Second Congo War. And Uganda and Burundi came and allied themselves with Rwanda on the one side, Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, allied with the Kabila government on the other side. That war has largely ended almost 10 years ago, but in Eastern Congo the conflict continues. It is true, it is fair to say that there have been great changes in Congo in the last 10 years. There have been major improvements for many people. There have been improvements in relative freedom, in infrastructure, in construction booms in the cities, particularly in Katanga, which is the most stable area of the country. But, the developments have certainly not satisfied the population. It has not been what they hoped for. It has not been as fast as they had hoped for change. If we talk about conflict, minerals in Congo, what are they? What are we talking about, and how important are they, really? There's an old saw about Congo being a geological scandal. But there's two particular regions in Congo that are the most mineralized. I'll talk about the south, first, because we can then leave it. That's the area where we've been living. Southern Katanga is part of the Central African Copper Belt, with Northern Zambia. It's characterized by industrial mining of copper, and, more recently, the associated cobalt ores. Cobalt was originally a nuisance contaminant with the copper ores, and Congo was the primary producer of refined cobalt, before the 1970s, and it was a niche market. More recently, it's become something produced by many copper producers as a byproduct. That's a mark of Congo's instability, as much as anything else. And it takes very large requirements, very large investments, for industrial mines, and refineries. In the past, large investments in railroads, in electrification, in other things, to produce copper and cobalt in that way. Katanga has known considerable artisanal mining since the mid 1990s with the collapse of Ge-camines, the, originally, the Belgian company, Union Minere du Haut Katanga, and, so, I can't say that artisanal mining is unknown in Katanga, but, it's been a substitute showing the collapse of the industrial system. And since 2005, there's been a rush of new industrialized mining companies, and in the artisanal miners are mainly picking over the remains of old mines for the ores rich in cobalt that were once discarded, known, locally, as Heterogenite. I don't think that's a geological term that means anything in particular, but in Congo, it means copper ore that has too much cobalt for the old processing. And so it's been something that's been sort of a parasite on the copper mining industry picking up things that were unwanted, sometimes disrupting mining sites for companies, and interfering with their own plans. But, it's been fairly marginal, and the processing has been done out of the country until, more recently, some of the processing, concentration has been done, locally in industrial processing plants. The other main mineralized area is the east. Areas along the, that are affected by the tectonic movements that created the Great African Rift Valley, with Lakes Tanganyika, Kivu, Edward, Albert, and so forth, associated all the way up to the Red Sea and the Jordan Valley in the Middle East. And in these areas, the main mineral resources, are tin, in the form of cassiterite, gold, tungsten, columbite, tantalite, which is an ore for niobium and tantalum, two fairly rare metals that are used for their high heat, high temperatures of melting, some of their electrical qualities, and so forth. Tantalum, in particular, is prized for its high electrical conductivity, in capacitors, the main use for it is for cell phones and laptop computers. It's also has a very high melting point of almost 4000 degrees Celsius. So, it's used in high-temperature steel alloys. It's also very resistant to corrosion and acids, and so, it finds a home in artificial hips, and other kinds of prosthesis, because it doesn't react with the human body. The ores in Congo are extracted manually, and concentrated by washing with water. In the case of gold, people use mercury to produce a mercury amalgam, and then remove the gold from the dust in the ground rock. And the transport is often by airplane, even helicopters, because of the mountainous terrain in Eastern Congo, the poor roads that were never very good, and the very high value per weight of the minerals that are concerned. The smelting is done in Thailand and China, and so there is no stimulus for local industrial development, there's no stimulus for road improvements or industrial development in east Kivu. It's very much a simple extraction and export commodity. Michael Nest has a book, published in 2011, called Coltan. He's a political scientist, and he has five chapters that break this down in a fairly indicative way, of the controversies around Coltan. Coltan is the short form, in Congo, for columbite tantalite. The principle Congolese ore for tantalum. The first chapter is Facts, Figures, and Myths. The second is Organization, Production, and Markets. The third, Coltan and Conflict. The fourth, Advocacy, Campaigns, and Initiatives. And finally, The Future of Coltan Politics. What are the facts and figures about Coltan? About this seemingly unknown metal, for most of us who took chemistry 30 or 40 years ago, that has become the source of lots of human rights campaigning around the world in more recent times? Central Africa, including Congo and Rwanda, where much of the Congolese ore is smuggled, and, it's mixed with local Rwandese production, only represents about nine percent of world reserves of tantalum, but it produces about 20% of the tantalum on world markets. It's not the major producer; Australia is. Most world production is actually a byproduct of tin production, and other metals work, and is under long-term contract. And so, the Central African production is a very, is a much larger proportion of the spot market in these metals than it is of total production. And, therefore, it's very tied to volatilities in price and availability. There were major price spikes in 1978, to 1982, and, again, in 2001. After a lot of reflection, Nest concludes that these were, these price spikes were largely based on speculation, and market mechanisms, rather than real shortages at the level of consumers, or shortages at the level of production. But, it shows that these metals are volatile in price. Congolese tantalum was produced during the 70s and 80s as a byproduct of tin mining by the former mechanized tin producers, but since nine, the late 1990s, with the war, it's been produced by artisanal miners, derived from richer tantalum ores, and it's extracted by washing and concentrating the heavy minerals from the soil, rather than by chemically separating it from other minerals such as tin. The 2001 price spike corresponds with the back end of the Second Congo War, as international forces were trying to put an end to the conflict between Rwanda and Uganda, and their allies on one side, and Congo and its allies on the other side. And so, the tenfold increase in price on the spot market was accompanied by a major move of the various fighting groups into exploiting metals production, tungsten, particularly Coltan, also gold, other things, as a way of financing the continuing war, and that, in turn, became a pretext for continuing the fighting even after peace treaties, and after there was no longer any movements of the fronts. In general, it's fair to say that none of the major conflict minerals in Congo, gold, Coltan, tungsten, tin, represent a large enough part of the world supply to be a critical factor in world prices or strategic considerations. But, given their primitive mining and concentration techniques, and their role on the spot market, Congolese supplies have greater influence than their quantity might imply. In the Congolese context, they have huge importance because it represents a very large flow of money in a restricted area, and because it is extremely militarized. Military groups control the production, although they don't usually provide the labor, but they control the production, they certainly control the distribution and exports, and pocket large amounts of money. Sometimes in direct exchange for arms and munitions. There are a series of recent books, in the last two years, three years, on the Congo War. I'll just mention them because there's much more information there than I could possibly communicate in the time we have here. The first of these three books is by a French journalist and political scientist, Gerard Prunier, Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe, published by Oxford in 2009. Two others in 2011, Peter Eichstaedt, Consuming the Congo: War and Conflict Minerals the World's Deadliest Place. And Jason Stern's Dancing to the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, by Public Affairs Press in 2011. Prunier's very detailed, if slightly older book, is basically a follow-up of his detailed study of the Rwandan Genocide. And so, it has to be read as the second part of a study that he began on the Rwandan side. Stern's is a longer and the broader of the two books form 2001, and fits very, very well with our own experience living in Congo during that time. There are things that I learn by reading it, but nothing that really surprised me, or that changed my understanding of events that I had lived through, or that people had told me of living through. It's clear, from these works, that war came to eastern Congo for political reasons. Overthrowing the Mobutu regime, by a group of African states, Rwandan security concerns about the large Hutu refugee camps right on its borders. Mobutu had kept the Hutu refugees very close to the border, and allowed the former Rwandan army to control them, militarily, and organize them. We had friends who were aid workers with humanitarian organizations in the camp. Everyone knew that the military were taking attacks on all of the food stocks, and were trading it in the local area to raise money to buy arms and prepare to re-invade Rwanda. Rwanda certainly had political concerns about this and it's, was no surprise to people when they invaded Kivu to drive the refugees farther from the border. It's also clear that financial gain became the key to the ongoing conflict in the area after the early 2000s, when the political threats had been largely taken care of, or the political problems were such that they could have been resolved by diplomatic negotiation. The large groups of refugees were no longer on the borders. The small groups of military militias that were controlling the minerals trades could have been disarmed and moved, if there'd really been a will by all the parties to do so. And so that leads us to the issue of Congo as a failed state. The death toll statistics are truly, truly shocking. Les Roberts' epidemiological studies for the International Rescue Committee were very scientific estimates using standard techniques, and, again, your test before lunch quoted the figures, as they'd been most recently brought up to date. The first studies were first done in 2000, then updated in 2004. And the millions kept going up for the excess deaths in Congo that could be attributed to the war in eastern Congo. We're talking about a fairly small area. South Kivu, North Kivu, and Ituri, along the eastern border. There are anecdotal stories of individual massacres that you will find in the books that I just mentioned. There are more detailed individual witnesses, many people may have seen the movie Hotel Rwanda a decade ago. On the Genocide itself, on that side, and the flight of the refugees out towards the Congo, but then you have more recent works like that of Beatrice Umutesi, one of the Rwandan refugees, that tells of the incredible death toll among the refugees as they, literally, fled from Kivu all the way across Congo, to the Republic of Congo on the west side of the Congo River to get away from the pursuing forces. And only a very small percentage of the group that fled the camps arrived at the other end of the trail. It's something that reminds one of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, and what a small percentage Napoleon got back to the Lithuanian border, with one-tenth of the troops that he set out with. And it's the same kind of thing that happened with those refugees who ran when they heard the gunshots, and ran for almost 2000 miles before they stopped running. The inner, the... The tragedy in eastern Congo is, is certainly, of course, a case of the international community providing too little and too late. If you compared the effort of the United Nations in eastern Congo with Kosovo, there were 50,000 NATO troops in Kosovo, in a country that was one-fifth the size of just South Kivu. One of only three provinces in Congo that were affected by this violence. 20,000 troops at most in Congo, mostly ill-equipped South Asian troops, and that's about the same size as the United Nations force in Darfur. In a desert area with a much, much smaller population. Another African tragedy. But when you compare the territory involved, and the number of civilians involved, Darfur pales in comparison to the Congolese region concerned. The result is that the United Nation troops, now, have been there for a very, very long time, and, essentially, nothing has changed, because it was too little, too late. The effects on the Congolese State have been a reinforcing of the lack of institution building. Sterns has a very nuanced view of the Congolese... In his final section of his book, he has a very nuanced view dealing with the development, Joseph Kabila's regime, after his father's assassination, and his, almost, unexpected thrusting into a position of leadership. Laurent Kabila was somewhat of a twin of Mobutu, from the same generation, but with a little bore of a Marxist pin on his ideology. But he was very much a man of the same time, and had many of the same faults. But spectacularly different ones in some areas. Joseph Kabila was from a totally different generation. He was a very young person when he was thrust into a position of leadership in the country, but within a fairly short period of time, he had managed to position himself, and other young people from his generation in place of those who had put him in power. Of course, there are many carry-overs. It's the same political system that continues, and evolves, with new leadership, but Kabila was very successful, surprising embassies, and Congolese, and his ability to create a system that fit better with his own values and personality that were quite different from his predecessors. But there's a common thread of a lack of strong public institutions. Whether we're talking about the judiciary, whether we're talking of a free press, whether we're talking of a bureaucracy, Congo has a very weak tradition of public institutions. Just an example from the Joseph Kabila government. All the reports are that he micromanages procurement of military equipment, even though the army has a logistics department that's in charge of that. And yet, things are handled through the President's Office, instead of through the structures that are supposedly there to do it. It's a, a generic problem in Congo, of a lack of institution-building, that's taken place. It's not that there's a problem with Congolese themselves. As you heard a little bit from the introduction, Congo once had very sophisticated, very nuanced political systems, that ruled, in some sense, over very large areas. The Lunda Empire that I studied stretched from south of Kinshasa, to Lake Niassa, Lake Malawi, on its furthest fringes. Certainly it was not state that was governed in the sense of a modern state. There was not the technology. There were not the means of transportation. But in the sense of a European state, of the Middle Ages, it was a very large state, and it managed to hold together for several centuries. Laurent Kabila was from Katanga. His father was Luba. The Luba Kingdom was a major power for several centuries. His mother was Lunda, and he knew that tradition, as well. If you read Vansina's work on the multi-ethnic Kuba Kingdom, a very small state, but a very complex one, with multiple ethnic groups occupying the same area. There's plenty of examples in the past of institution-building in very original and very idiosyncratic ways to allow political stability independent of the person, of the leaders. But the intrusion of the world economy with, particularly, the brutal form of the slave trade in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades that reached Southern Congo by the beginning of the 19th century, was a major source of decline of these earlier political things. And Congo had a particularly brutal colonial period with Leopold the second, and, if any of you read Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, when it was a best-seller, 10, 15 years ago, this was a man who was, like many other great leaders in the world, like Napoleon, and others, not normal. And had some spectacular character flaws that had very great damages done in Congo. In 1908, the Belgian government took over the Congo from Leopold and created a very dirigiste, paternalistic administration, where even the Belgians who lived in Congo were foreigners and had to have visas, and had no say in local government. So there was no ability to develop local institutions. Everything was run from Brussels at long distance. And then we have Mobutu's 33-year reign in the later 20th century. And Mobutu very clearly tried to channel Leopold the second, and do the same thing over. He saw Leopold the second as his model of how to build a country. And he intentionally tried to follow the same methods. So you ended up with a system that's not based on institutions, but where the power base and finances for security come from outside the society and come from other places. Mobutu relied on his international allies whenever he was in trouble, and needed troops to put down an uprising. Institutions such as courts, and parliament, and bureaucracy were seen as threats to power, rather than the means to create a state that would produce the revenues to protect its population. Machiavelli would have felt very much at Congo. Very much at home in Congo. In Congolese politics. It was very much like Venice, or Florence, or any of those Italian cities in the Middle Ages. Responsible ethical leaders tend to get spun out of the centrifuge because what counts in day-to-day survival are the personal relationships and the scheming, the attempt to play a zero sum game. So where are we today, and what can we say are strategies that the world community can play in dealing with the Eastern Congo problems around conflict minerals? My remarks here are inspired somewhat by Jason Stern's conclusion, which, I think is the most thoughtful of the four books that I mentioned, in terms of looking forward, toward the future. First of all, we do have to realize that a genocide of the size that has happened in Congo is a real world issue. The world was shocked by a genocide of 800,000 people in Rwanda in 1994, in a fairly short period of time. Well, in that case, a death of five million people over a 10 year period should be equally shocking. And it really is something that should be morally unacceptable. Secondly, we have an obligation to understand Congolese conflict on its own terms, considering the political realities in which Congolese actors find themselves and not simply as a morality tale, as it is sometimes portrayed in newspaper reporting, and, according to the reporter, and according to the year, different people have the black hats and the white hats, but it sounds as if one group has a monopoly of the good, and another of the bad. One is the invaders. It's a very complex situation, and there are layers and layers of recriminations and guilt, and responsibility. The third is to acknowledge that the West does have considerable responsibility for the tragedy. They're not sins of omission, of commission. I don't believe in conspiracy theories, that Western powers were behind these events, but you will find people, many people in Congo who believe them. You'll find people on the internet who propose such explanations. They're rather sins of omission. The role of outside power bases was very important in reducing the importance of institution-building in Congo. The role of specialized metals, spot market trading, what we call conflict minerals, has been very important in financing ongoing misery and abuses. And some of the current human rights efforts to include tracing of these materials by identifying the impurities associated with tantalum, so that you can tell where ores come from, are very promising channels that may have an impact in future years. And, certainly, some of the major international companies, particularly the US-based ones, have scored better in their efforts to try to clean up the sourcing of their raw materials for computers, and cell phones, and so forth. We do have an obligation to ensure that what we do in the West to try to improve the situation in Congo does not aggravate the root causes in an attempt to alleviate the symptoms. Remember that one of the problems is reliance on outside sources of power, instead of building internal institutions. So, government-to-government security support, large financial infusions to the regimes in Rwanda or Congo, are probably not helpful to the long-term resolution of the conflicts. Another factor is that anything that is done will have to be negotiated with all of the fact, all of the, the groups on the site. And people are quite pragmatic, and people are willing to change their positions when they see that there are clear advantages to do so. It's not, at all, a helpless situation where you cannot expect change from Rwanda, from the Congolese actors. They will change, if they are convinced that it is in their advantage to do so. So, there is room for negotiations as to how these trades are managed, and, certainly, from Eastern Congo, the transportation networks are to the east out through Uganda and Rwanda, they have a role to play in the future in supplying and supporting development in Eastern Congo. And as international groups like the Southern African Development Committee, the East African Economic Community, grow and develop, and become more important as common markets, if that will happen, there will be a less and less reason not to work cooperatively in these fields. Fourthly, fifthly, the international community must prescribe certain behaviors. The united report this last couple of weeks, shows, clearly, that the current M-23 guerilla group in North Kivu, respond directly to the Rwandan central high command. And, if they are not employed by the Rwandan government, they are certainly very tightly tied to the Rwandan military establishment. And, they do nothing without the authorization of the Rwandan government. That needs to stop. As with the increasingly-embarrassing Mobutu regime in the 1990s, African neighbors and the world community will eventually be forced to act on the festering Eastern Congo situation, because of the negative effects it will have throughout the region. I'd like to make an analogy, since we're in the middle of an election period, to all of the debate about healthcare reform in the United States. We all know that there are many things wrong with American healthcare. We have wonderful doctors, wonderful technology, but the delivery systems has problems. We don't have such high scores when it comes to public health statistics, in comparison with other developed countries. Yet it's a complex system that is hard to analyze, and it's hard to find any degree of certainty as to what the effects will of pushing any one button when you make changes. There will certainly be lots of tinkering, and there will probably be some important flaws to fix, with Obamacare or whatever system we have. And yet, despite all of the election rhetoric, I doubt that any Congress, or any administration, will simply wipe Obamacare off the books without putting something very similar to it back in its place. The problem are real. Something has to be done, and we've gotten to the point where the United States is getting off the seat, and doing something. Similarly, the agony of Eastern Congo is too great a problem to ignore completely. It's not simple to understand. It's not something simple to analyze, it's very complex, and there's a certainty that there will be unexpected results from any changes made. But putting off working seriously towards a solution only increases the complexities, and will increase the difficulty when the problems are eventually tackled. Thank you. - [Alan Brody] You mentioned a number of cases, you know, you, making comparisons of the Eastern Congo, and how much more attention has been given by the world community. You mentioned, I think, Kosovo, you mentioned, even, Darfur. Rwanda. And yet, we have so many more deaths arising out of Eastern Congo, in quite a recent period. To what do you attribute, let's, what appears to amount to gross neglect of the Congo by the international community? And why has it remained so far off the radar screen? What are the conditions in the world community, or it's the relationships, or perspectives on Eastern Congo that would allow that, which appears to have been a historical thing going all the way back to King Leopold, you mention him. Why is it still there? - [J. Jeffery Hoover] I think the reason for Kosovo receiving much greater attention is, is obvious, it's on the borders of Europe, there were refugees spilling over into Western Europe as far as Denmark, and the low countries. This was an immediate issue that affected NATO countries, directly. Whereas things that happen in the middle of Africa, 2000 miles from the nearest ocean, were much further away. One factor that is directly relevant to the Kivu situation is that the Congolese capital is also 15 hundred miles away on the other side of the country, and the closest international basis would be Kampala, and Kigali. Bujumbura. Which tend, in the past, to have been small diplomatic positions, they're small countries. And, particularly, Kigali, which would be, geographically, the closest to Kivu, has had a very effective government, that has been very effective about... I won't say manipulating, but massaging information flow and communications, has played the guilt for the 1994 genocide to the hilt, with Western countries, and it has been very difficult for people on the eastern side of the border to sometimes understand the perspective of people on the other side of the border. Because it's another country, it's not as easy to get around Congo as it is to get around Rwanda, and we know, from personal friends that, you know, things look very different on the other side. So there's a, there's an information deficit because of the difficulty of access to the Kivu area, among other things. It is the most densely populated part of Congo, however. - [Alan Brody] We have a couple of questions about refugees, and one, what is, what is the life like for them, and can you say anything about which ones managed to leave the Congo? - [J. Jeffery Hoover] Initially, the refugees were moved into holding areas, camps, and these are always placed in vacant land, which basically means that they're, land that is not being used by the local population for some good reason. So they're not ideal locations for large numbers of people. Refugee camps are usually, in the initial stages, hotbeds of things like Typhoid and communicable diseases, because of poor sanitation, because people are living very much day-to-day not knowing what their future is, and how long they will be there. There's a hesitation to invest in the local community, to develop the camp, and yet, these refugee camps in Congo have been very dynamic places where, fairly quickly, people opened up a whole range of businesses, bakeries, all kinds of service food industry, other service businesses. And so, they're not at all people who are necessarily passive. But, by the nature of the fact that they're refugees, they will be in a less-than-ideal place because that's the available land. How long do they stay there? Well, in the case of the Eastern Congo, the people in the camps were pushed out by military attacks, the camps were emptied, some people have filtered into the local society, there's important ethnic ties across the border, there are many Rwandese who ended up on the Congo side of the border. When Europeans drew the border, the former states were not based on territorial lines, they were based on people, and the allegiances between people groups, and political states. So there was no way of drawing a straight line and connecting all the people who were Rwandans from the people who were not Rwandans. And so, during the colonial period, there were many Rwandans who came to work, and were encouraged to come, to work in Congo, so, many refugees merged into the local population. Many, as I said, dispersed around the area, and to other countries, when they were attacked in the refugee camps. But the death toll of the refugee camps is very high. And I think that's fairly common, when people are displaced, there's a lot of vulnerability to all kinds of public health issues. How many people got out or were resettled? That depends on foreign governments and what they do. We certainly know of people who were Tutsis, who were attacked in Congo for being ethnic brothers of the traders in Rwanda, and they were interned in camps in the United States. Repopulated a number of these people to the US, but only after a year-or-two delay. And so, there were quite a few people who died, in the meantime, and so forth, in the poor conditions that they were kept in. And I'm sure that kind of thing happened, as well, in Kivu, in those camps, but there's usually a long delay before people are resettled overseas. - [Alan Brody] We have a question relating to the US position and policy, and particularly, what role does AFRICOM, I think that's the US military command, now, for Africa, what role do they play, if any, or should they play, or could they play, in stabilizing affairs? - [J. Jeffery Hoover] I think, I'm not a US government employee, or diplomat, or have personal access to that kind of information, but I would think that in our area of Africa, AFRICOM's more immediate concerns have been terrorism. It's been related to the Somali pirate attacks in the Indian Ocean, that have had a very real impact on the cost of commerce all along the eastern side of Africa, with the Indian Ocean. I don't know, I have no idea, really, what, how much study they put into these problems, which, in a sense, are not directly threatening the United States, or Europe, but are more of a problem that seems to be a threat to African countries and the region. - [Alan Brody] Thank you, I've got a set of sort of related questions. And they come closer to your field, which is history. One is, would you briefly distinguish between the two Congos, and their histories, I don't know if that's relevant in this case, to eastern Congo, but to clarify some of that. There's a question, was the Belgian Congo too large an area to be successfully transferred into, as an independent state? And do you see the Democratic Republic of Congo separating into multiple nations, as we saw with the recent split of Sudan? - [J. Jeffery Hoover] The other Congo, the Republic of Congo, the former French Moyen-Congo, is on the north and west side of the Congo River, between the sea, and the borders with Cameroon and Chad, to the north. Its relationships are with the western side of Congo, and with the western part of Equateur Province, it's totally different, ethnically, agriculturally, geographically, than the mountainous eastern part of Congo, which is tied with Rwanda and Burundi, and western Uganda, they form a historical region, a common culture, common languages, and things. So, The Republic of Congo was only a destination for the refugees to flee to on the other side, it was the back door, as it were, when they got to Mbandaka, and it was a destination. That was the... Remind me of the second question? Is it too large a country-- - [Alan Brody] Yeah. - [J. Jeffery Hoover] --to govern, and do you think it will break up? I think that there has been enough movement around Congo, particularly in the 50 years, 52 years now, since independence, that it's unlikely that the country will break up into separate countries like Sudan. There is not such a striking cultural or physiognomical difference between the different parts of the country, although, when you live there, if you see a group of people, you can sort of distinguish who's likely to be from Kivu, or Bakongo, or Equateur, the way you can in Europe, and you can guess between Norwegians and Italians, but then you will find a blonde Italian, and a brunette Norwegian that will always prove you wrong. I had a friend in graduate school named Erik Rodriguez, and his mother was Norwegian, his father was Spanish, but it was his father who was blonde and blue-eyed, and it was his mother who was brunette and gave him his black hair and his dark eyebrows, so you can't go by stereotypes, but, obviously, they do indicate something. I think the Congo is beyond that. But I also think that, in the building of institutions, Congo is going to have to move more towards decentralization, and towards a response, giving responsibility, not to people who say they are originally from an area, but to people who are invested, and residents, in the American sense, in an area. Those who have chosen to commit themselves to an area, and that's still a foreign concept, because in Congo, until fairly recently, identity cards told where your grandfather came from. And I had a student at the university who was in big, big trouble in 1991, because his identity card said he was from Kasai, and two of his four grandparents were from Kivu. One of this grandparents was a Belgian, and only one of them was from Kasai. But when he had to give up his European name and take a Congolese identity, his father took the identity from his mother, or grandmother, who was the one from Kasai. And that came back to bite them in the tail when there was ethnic tension in Congo, in Katanga, and the Kasaians were being driven out. It's just a source of endless problems, if you identify people from where their ancestors came from. But, that's a personal opinion, and, but there are many Congolese who are feeling that we have to get beyond that. Those origins don't mean much when so many people have married across ethnic lines, and you have to face the fact that that history is nice, but the realities today are moving in a different direction. - [Alan Brody] We're going to keep you running for another minute, or two. There's a set of questions here on developmental issues. One is has the UN been at all successful in starting the processes of building some of those internal structures? And then a set of questions that are sort of relating to the developments, about the status of Virunga Park, and the role of the Catholic Church, and what happened to the Inga-Shaba electric power complex, is it working, and is agricultural development underway? I'll give you those cards so you don't have to keep all that-- - [J. Jeffery Hoover] Right. What is the status of Virunga Park? Many of the militarized groups, and many of the refugees are living inside the park, but they're not living in the part of the park where the gorillas are located. So far, the gorillas are fairly safe. But the edges of the park have been overrun, and many of the mining deposits are inside the park and they're being exploited, constantly. The park is being exploited for charcoal, for the urban areas that have developed as a result of people fleeing the insecurity in rural areas. What is the role of, how was, what has happened with Inga-Shaba? The power line has never been attacked. It was never well-maintained, and Mobutu stopped paying the Swedes to come and maintain the equipment, so capacity fell to half of its rated capacity, and one of the lines was never put into use because there was no need for it. Now, Congo is selling huge amounts of electricity to the south, and they would like to have both lines operating at capacity. They've built connections with Zambia, allowing Zambia to use Congolese power, and sell Zambian power to Zimbabwe and South Africa. And so, there are, one of the visible fruits of the supposed workshop, workplace in construction, and electricity, is new, high-voltage power lines, allowing Congo to export, and use the Inga-Katanga system to export power toward the south. The role of the Catholic Church, today, in Katanga, and the rest of Congo. The Roman Catholic Church is the largest single Christian denomination, and one of those that are best organized. I'm a United Methodist Missionary, and the United Methodist Church is one of the most national and better-organized of the Protestant denominations, and so, one of our bishops was among the people called to Washington by the subcommittee to testify in September. The churches have a clear idea that they need to play a role as a moral guide for the government, in some senses. And yet, there's also, there are traps and temptations for the churches when they get too deeply involved, and so there's a good bit of attention within the churches about what political role they should play. We have had bishops and pastors, from both Protestants and Catholic sides, who have played key roles in refereeing national congresses, in the parliament, and sometimes they've played very, very useful roles, and sometimes they've just been bogged down in situations they couldn't handle. But, some of the churches, at least, not all of them, but, the mainline Protestant churches, and the Catholic Church, are certainly politically-aware, and they are trying to find how they can be useful in helping the country in that direction. They certainly indicate, they certainly represent one of the largest institutions in the country, and, relatively, independent of the government. As a base for civil society. And so that is an important element for the future. Agricultural development. In Katanga we've seen commercial agriculture. Starting. But it's largely elite, political elites investing in agriculture, or business people. All of the misfortune of commercial farmers in Zimbabwe has sometimes helped Congo, because some of our people have hired Zimbabweans to come up and start food production programs around the cities, because the cities in Katanga were importing 90% of their food. And that's untenable. And so, now there's a lot of local production. It's, there are lots of local producers, as well, and there are some people trying to get local producers into that marketing chain by helping them with quality standards, packaging, but it's not nearly as developed as it is, for example, in Zambia, where the ShopRite grocery chain has spent a lot of effort trying to develop small-scale, medium-scale Zambian farmers, who could produce for the commercial market. - [Alan Brody] Well, I, I'm afraid I've been a bad manager of time, because it's now 1:20, so I had one more question, but we'll have to leave it. I want to thank you very much to our listeners on later on, who get this on the internet, and elsewhere. You've been listening to the presentation by Doctor J. Jeffrey Hoover, speaking on conflict minerals and the ongoing agony of the Eastern Congo. We want to, once again, thank our sponsors, UI International Programs, and the UI Honors Program, and, again, for today's program, Mark and Kay Braverman, and AW Welt Ambrisco Insurance. Thank you very much, and we'll see you Friday.