Trading conflict for development: utilising the trade in minerals from eastern DR Congo for development
This paper relays that the renewed outbreak of violence in North Kivu in the second half of 2008 saw the long running insecurity in Eastern DR Congo become the top global news story for two weeks as
another humanitarian crisis unfolded before the world. The intense media scrutiny resulted in a plethora of stakeholders working, as the authors assert, to portray the conflict in ways that best fitted their own agendas; in particular, the region’s mineral wealth was implicated as contributing in the violence.
However, this report suggests that trade militarisation is a symptom of conflict rather than its cause, and therefore asks policy makers to address the real causes of insecurity in Eastern DR Congo. These are identified as the ubiquitous governance weaknesses, and the inability of the Congolese state to maintain the monopoly of violence. The report suggests that, instead of trying to ‘stop’ or ‘interrupt’ the minerals trade, formalising a large percentage of it would contribute to achieving long-term security. This is because, as the research states, that stopping or interrupting approaches are not only impossible to successfully implement in the context of Eastern DR Congo; they also have severe retarding effects on regional development.
The paper profers different approaches to the intransigent DRC conflict. These include:
- recognise and prioritise the principal impediments to trade reform and place them at the centre of reform initiatives
- improve governance structures
- encourage formalisation through transparency in tax and customs declarations and by addressing operational difficulties of export regimes
- frame reforms in the context of regional development
- build a functioning national army in the DR Congo.
