As the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) continues unabated, Andy Storey uncovers the EU’s imperial fingerprints all over the economic and political relations in the region.
In Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness, set amidst the horrific world of the Belgian Congo as its resources are looted by foreign powers, the last words of the visionary and deranged imperialist Kurtz are “the horror! the horror!”. Debate has raged since at what Conrad meant – did the horror refer to claimed African barbarism to which Kurtz had succumbed, or to the colonial exploitation pioneered by the character of Kurtz himself?
European “Garden”
An indicator of where modern European leaders see the location of the horror and the barbarism was provided in 2022 when the then EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, declared “Europe is a garden. We have built a garden… The rest of the world is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.”
Borrell’s formulation (its racist undertones are as striking as they are unavoidable) ignores the way in which Europe’s ‘gardeners’ help cultivate what he terms jungle-like characteristics elsewhere in the world. A prime example lies in present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the successor to the Belgian Congo of Conrad and Kurtz.
Recent news reports have focused on the humanitarian catastrophe caused by the advance of a militia group called M23 across Eastern DRC, such as the artillery shelling and looting that have combined to destroy some 70,000 emergency shelters. The M23 advance has culminated (for now) in the capture of the regional capitals of Goma and Bukavu. It has led to an estimated 3000 deaths (mostly civilians), the displacement of over 700,000 people and sharp upticks in the incidence of summary executions, abduction (including of children) for forced labour, rape and other sexual violence. Millions have been left without access to food, clean water and medical care, prompting upsurges in malaria and measles and risking the outbreak of a cholera epidemic.
This is the latest stage in conflicts that have plagued the DRC since at least 1996, resulting in the deaths of some 6 million people and the displacement from their homes of almost 7 million. (The DRC also hosts 520,000 refugees from other countries, while over 1 million Congolese have been driven abroad).
A variety of external actors have played their parts in those conflicts, neighbouring Rwanda foremost amongst them. The Rwandan Defence Force (RDF) currently supports M23, with 4,000 RDF troops directly helping M23 seize Goma in early February. And who supports Rwanda? Well, as it turns out, the EU does.
EU-Rwanda
The most pertinent plank in that support is an agreement (a Memorandum of Understanding, MOU) signed by the EU and Rwanda last year to help ensure that Rwanda would continue to supply the EU with designated ‘critical’ raw materials, including tantalum/coltan (used in a range of electronic devices), tungsten and gold. Rwanda has been allocated over €900 million by the EU to support its resource extraction capabilities.
It is well documented, however, that much of ‘Rwandan’ resource extraction actually involves the systematic theft of DRC minerals and other raw materials, both directly and through the medium of militias like M23. The gap between Rwanda’s own production and exports of those materials has long been glaring. For example, despite limited domestic production of gold, Rwanda is estimated to have exported a staggering $654 million worth of the stuff in 2022.
Jason Stearns, a former UN investigator of the issue, notes that “Mineral exports from Rwanda are now over a billion dollars a year. That’s about double what they were two years ago. And we don’t know how much, but a fair chunk of that is from the DRC.” The International Crisis Group describes current Rwandan actions on the ground in the DRC as “long-term territorial expansion including grabbing mineral-rich regions”.
The European Parliament has voted overwhelmingly for the EU to suspend the MOU in the light of Rwandan complicity in the latest phase of violence and looting in the DRC. Marc Botenga, a Belgian MEP, puts the case succinctly: “This MOU needs to be suspended. In fact, it should have never been signed.
We know there are Rwandan soldiers on Congolese soil and that is done to steal, to pillage certain natural resources. In fact, this MOU with Rwanda encourages these troops, these armed gangs to do this because this agreement (MOU) facilitates the export of raw materials by Rwanda into European and international markets”.
EU Complicity
The EU commission, however, baldly states that “suspending the MOU could be self-defeating… [it would] undermine an incentive to ensure responsible mineral production and trade by Rwanda”. Quite what is ‘responsible’ about the current situation is not made clear in this particularly disingenuous and obscurantist response.
MEPs have also called for a halt to support to the Rwandan military channeled through the European Peace (!) Facility and earmarked for the deployment of RDF troops in northern Mozambique. What are Rwandan troops doing in Mozambique with the backing of the EU? Well, it turns out it comes down to resource access again.
A vicious civil war has raged in northern Mozambique since 2017 between the government and Islamist rebels. In 2019 French oil and gas company Total announced a €19 billion investment in the mining of offshore gas deposits but this was threatened by rebel activity. In response, the EU has launched a support programme for the Mozambican military, backed up by Rwandan forces whose upkeep is subsidized by the EU. Some of the same Rwandan business interests involved in the looting of DRC resources are also now involved in Mozambique.
The EU’s role is part of an overall support strategy for a regime in Mozambique that monopolises the returns from resource extraction, returns from which poor Mozambicans are excluded, though they bear the costs, including displacement and the loss of farming and fishing livelihoods. It is precisely those costs that have fueled the rebellion. Meanwhile the EU posits a narrative of combating Islamist terrorism while, in the words of Corporate Europe Observatory researcher Kenneth Haar, “the real stakes revolv[e]… around access to gas supplies and the defence of European-French investments”.
The “Civilized” EU
It is a distinguishing characteristic of much EU elite discourse that Europe is a more civilized, enlightened place than the US or China, that it seeks to do good in the world on the basis of its commitments to democracy, human rights, etc. In reality (and why should this come as a surprise?) the EU, and its individual member states, seeks to advance the interests of its dominant economic actors. That it may not do so in a fully consistent or wise manner (what capitalist state has ever done that?) does not challenge that fundamental point.
To take just one very topical example, the US has rightly been blamed for its facilitation of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. But has Europe posed a fundamental challenge to that? Far from it. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen notoriously offered Israel unconditional support; individual member states did criticize Israel on occasion but none backed that up with sanctions or any other substantive penalty. Germany, amongst others, funnels weaponry to Israel. The notion of Europe as a benign exponent of Western power rings hollow in the ruins of Gaza.
To return to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, his narrator at one point remarks vis-à-vis colonialism that “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much”. That conquest of the earth continues today in the DRC, where resources that properly belong to the people of the region are looted by predators who are financed by Europe and then sold on to Europe to power European capitalism.
Casement’s Ghost
Joseph Conrad was friendly with Roger Casement, the Irish internationalist who did so much to expose the reality of Belgian horrors in the Congo – the murderous extraction of rubber and ivory in a way that mirrors the extraction of tungsten and tantalum today. Of all the leaders of the 1916 rising it was Casement who best exemplified solidarity between the colonially oppressed of Ireland and those of Africa, Asia and Latin America. We can only imagine his reaction to Ireland being part of a European economic bloc that exploits Africa and elsewhere, while becoming increasingly intermeshed with military blocs (European and NATO) that are, or will be, directed against the Global South.
WB Yeats wrote that “The ghost of Roger Casement is beating on the door”. That beating has surely reached a deafening pitch by now.
