Illicit Minerals Trade Fuelling Insecurities in the Eastern DRC (US Congress Bureau of Investigation Report)

Violence in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo continues to rage despite US legislation aimed at preventing the mineral trade from fuelling the conflict, the Government Accountability Office said.

The so-called Conflict Minerals Act that came into effect in 2014 requires publicly traded companies in the United States to investigate and disclose whether their products may contain gold, tin, tantalum or tungsten Congo or its nine neighbouring countries. While company reporting on mineral supply chains has improved since then, the security situation in eastern Congo has not improved, the GAO said in a report released Wednesday.

“Armed groups continue to commit serious human rights abuses, including sexual violence, and to profit from the exploitation of conflict minerals,” according to the report. The number of dead and displaced due to violence in eastern Congo continues to rise, he added.

Mineral-rich eastern Congo has suffered from conflict since the 1990s, when civil war and genocide in neighbouring Rwanda spilled across the border, sparking a series of wars that eventually enveloped more than half a dozen African nations. Despite a peace agreement in 2003, more than 100 armed groups are still active in the region, which has a population of around 20 million, according to the United Nations.

The GAO, which acts as the government’s watchdog, has been tasked by Congress with monitoring the impact of the Conflict Minerals Act, which requires companies like Apple Inc. and Tesla Inc. to submit lengthy reports on their mineral supply chains.
Complex conflict

A total of 1,021 companies filed a conflict minerals report with the Securities and Exchange Commission last year, the GAO said. An estimated 66% of these companies were able to make preliminary decisions about the source of conflict minerals in their products, up from 30% in 2014, the GAO said.

“Companies may have hundreds or more suppliers at multiple levels of their supply chains,” the GAO said. This makes tracking links to the mines a complicated undertaking, he said.

According to the report, regular audits of smelters and refiners and upstream mineral tracing programs in Central Africa have helped companies better understand their supply chains, although some anti-corruption groups question the reliability of some of these initiatives.

Of the companies that conducted further investigations, almost half could not determine where their minerals actually came from, according to the report.
“Companies may have hundreds or more suppliers at multiple levels of their supply chains,” the GAO said. This makes tracking links to the mines a complicated undertaking, he said.

According to the report, regular audits of smelters and refiners and upstream mineral tracing programs in Central Africa have helped companies better understand their supply chains, although some anti-corruption groups question the reliability of some of these initiatives.
Under US law, there are no penalties for a company if it discovers that its minerals come from conflict zones; just point it out. The GAO does not blame the Conflict Minerals Act for the ongoing violence.

“The conflict in eastern DRC is a complex and multidimensional problem, with interrelated factors that vary from province to province and remain unaddressed,” the GAO said.

The report cites weak governance, corruption, ethnic tensions, economic pressures and interference from neighbouring countries, including Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, as major factors in the multiple conflicts in eastern Congo. Uganda and Burundi currently have soldiers in Congo to fight rebel groups, while UN experts say the Rwandan army is secretly supporting a rebellion in the region. UN experts regularly accuse the three countries of profiting from Congo’s illicit mineral trade.

Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi placed two of the country’s eastern provinces under military control last year in an attempt to stem the fighting.
“The state of siege has not improved and may have exacerbated the security situation in these provinces,” said the GAO, which noted that the military itself is sometimes involved in the mineral trade.

The conflict minerals law has made it harder for armed groups to profit from the trade in tungsten, tantalum and tin ore, but the smuggling of Congolese gold, which is worth at least hundreds of millions of dollars per year, has been harder to stop, according to Sasha Lezhnev, a policy consultant with the Washington DC-based anti-corruption group Sentry.

“The United States and the European Union should take bolder financial steps to hold those responsible for supporting armed groups accountable, as well as those involved in the trade in conflict gold,” he said.