https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/rwanda-is-the-wild-west-and-should-be-removed-from-the-mineral-supply-chain
Rwanda is the 'Wild West' and should be removed from the mineral supply chain
Mining industry elites use their power to shield companies exporting massive amounts of smuggled minerals out of central Africa
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Diggers at an entrance to a cassiterite mine in South Kivu, eastern Congo, 2015. Photo by Phil Hatcher-Moore.
Mark Twain, who wrote about thieves and conmen in America's "Wild West," famously said that a mine is a hole in the ground with a liar on top. If there is any country where Twain's maxim has contemporary relevance, it is Rwanda. Over the last decade Rwanda has positioned itself as an exciting hub for producing and trading minerals essential to the global economy, chief among them tantalum, a metal that stores electricity and is used to manufacture cell phones, camera lenses, computers, jet engines, and weapons systems.
By 2018, Rwanda was said to have become the world's leading tantalum producer and exporter. By then, the United States was importing an astonishing 39 percent of its tantalum ore and concentrates from this tiny central African country, substantially more than from any other, including neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), whose mineral deposits next door have never been in dispute. Amid the resource wars of the 21st century, tantalum (a derivative of coltan ore) has become one of the most strategically coveted minerals by Washington's military industrial complex. It is no longer possible for the US to wage battles abroad without tantalum. Quite apart from the fact that the mineral was now a key ingredient in nuclear reactors and Tomahawk missiles, tantalum has also become a critical component of the quintessential American warrior's armour: it is among a few dozen metals used to manufacture the US Navy's elite special forces' gear. And yet the US is unable to produce any tantalum of its own—it has become increasingly reliant on central Africa for the steady, cheap supply of this commodity.
Rwanda—seemingly a stable, structured nation—has been eager to show that it is a legitimate supplier of strategic minerals. In 2018, Rwanda's showcase artisanal mine for the international audience was H&B Mining, whose minerals were exported by Minerals Supply Africa (MSA). MSA's chief executive was David Bensusan, a British national who was known as Kigali's king of trading. For decades, Bensusan exported the lion's share of Rwanda's minerals, procuring and processing 3T minerals—tin, tungsten and tantalum—for the global market.
It was only fitting, then, that the global trade association for tantalum, the Tantalum Niobium International Study Centre (TIC), hold its annual general meeting in Kigali in October 2018. MSA (Bensusan's personal export vehicle) along with H&B and the Rwandan government's Mines, Petroleum and Gas Board hosted the event. The visit to H&B's mine in the eastern town of Rwamagana was an opportunity for a hundred or so mining delegates to see first-hand the production of tantalum and tin ore in Rwanda. In 2011, H&B became a member of ITSCI, a London-based initiative set up by industry to label and trace the origin of minerals as part of ostensible efforts to curb the violence, abuse and criminal networks associated with mineral extraction in central Africa. It was generally understood that minerals "bagged and tagged" under the ITSCI system came from mines that did not use child labour and were not exploited by armed groups. Minerals tagged in Rwanda meant they were not smuggled from the DRC. After years of inflicting unspeakable brutality on Congolese civilians in order to plunder its minerals and other natural resources, Rwanda wanted to prove to outsiders that it could conduct business legally and ethically, at home.
But shortly after the mining conference the curtain came down on H&B. Rwanda's most important tantalum mine quietly ceased operating, without explanation, and H&B's mining assets were sold off. To anyone paying attention and familiar with Rwandan mining, the closure was overdue damage control and made absolute sense. For many years, Bensusan and his Rwandan colleagues had an implicit contract with industry experts that doing a good job meant pretending Rwandan mines were producing increasing amounts of strategic minerals (and the economy was soaring). A CNN report announced that Rwanda had exported US$800 million in minerals in 2018. That figure came from the International Trade Association, an agency of the US Department of Commerce.
One industry player who has worked in mining for decades told me he'd been curious about H&B when he was in Rwanda. He went into H&B's tiny tunnels to find out. "I wanted to see the way they were working and what they were producing; I saw there was nothing really there." H&B was used along with other companies in Rwanda to launder minerals. "The minerals were coming from the DRC and crossing the border." Other sources who worked in Rwanda's mining community told me H&B had long been Bensusan's Potemkin Village that hid extensive fraud. H&B was merely one of many dummy mines where little or no minerals were actually extracted. Dummy mines are used by the Rwandan government to facilitate the illicit trafficking of minerals, to convince the international community that the vast amounts of 3T minerals being exported are actually produced in Rwanda.
The international community's eagerness to underwrite Rwanda's narrative spin and business burlesque has no doubt been useful over the years; the global supply chain for strategic minerals needs feeding and Rwanda is, to this day, considered an easy, "conflict-free" export hub for downstream buyers. The irony is that before he died of cancer in 2021, Bensusan had helped Rwanda plunder minerals from its neighbour for nearly two and a half decades. He had regularly bragged about helping to set up the notorious Congo Desk, a centralized military apparatus that Rwanda used to loot Congolese mineral resources from 1997 until 2003. The Congo Desk was a painful symbol of the ravaging of a nation and its people. Bensusan worked with Rwandan General James Kabarebe and other Rwandan oligarchs to bring Congolese minerals to Rwanda and on to global markets. Kabarebe was commander of Rwanda's first invasion of the DRC in 1996. UN investigators recently accused him and several senior Rwandan military officials of coordinating operations for a militia called the M23, whose members have raped and slaughtered Congolese civilians in the east of the country.
Other Western businessmen have been key frontmen for Rwandan military oligarchs during dark periods of violence in central Africa. Chris Huber, a Swiss national with multiple companies in Europe, Asia and Rwanda is known to be close to the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), led by President Paul Kagame. In recent years, Huber used two companies in Rwanda—Tawotin and Rudniki—to capture a quarter of Rwanda's coltan export market. Huber is currently under investigation by prosecutors in Bern over his business ties to a Kagame-backed militia that committed war crimes and pillaged mineral resources during the Second Congo War. In 2009, a UN investigation provided evidence that Niotan, a Nevada-based company with links to Huber, bought minerals from conflict zones and sold them to major companies manufacturing capacitors. The director of Niotan was John Crawley, the former head of the international tantalum trade association. For decades Huber and his partner Crawley have leveraged their connections to Rwandan officials and their rebel allies. In June 2021 these individuals were linked to trafficking minerals from blood-soaked Rubaya in northeastern DRC, through the purchase of tantalum through a well-known cooperative and exporter based in Goma, along Congo's border with Rwanda. What seemed central to Crawley's continuing ability to enrich himself and dodge the law was his role as industry referee and player. Crawley's global tantalum association plays an important role in the governance committee of ITSCI, the system set up to label and trace the origin of minerals which the OECD, the Security and Exchange Commission and Big Tech companies rely on to assess whether minerals are conflict-free.
Despite being repeatedly singled out by the UN, Crawley and Huber have never been sanctioned. Nor was Bensusan or any of the Rwandan oligarchs he worked with. But their unholy collaboration with ITSCI's bag-and-tag fiasco was finally exposed in 2022 by the international organization Global Witness. In a ground-breaking report based on extensive field work in mining areas and interviews with industry and civil society, Global Witness found evidence that ITSCI had effectively been used for massive mineral laundering, and that the tagging scheme was actually a driver of the smuggling. The NGO also said putting industry in charge of devising and overseeing a due-diligence scheme that its members stood to benefit from was akin to "putting a fox in charge of the henhouse."
By far, the most damning evidence that emerges from Global Witness is how mining industry elites, through ITSCI, used their power year-after-year to shield companies exporting the largest amount of smuggled minerals, and how those minerals undoubtedly entered the global supply chain. Three Rwandan companies linked to Huber exported minerals that were apparently smuggled to Malaysia Smelting Corporation (MSC) and Crawley's Hong-Kong based East Rise. Austrian smelter Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten (WBH) was also listed as a buyer of Huber's companies. Hewlett-Packard was listed as a brand using MSC as a supplier, while Nokia and Blackberry identified WBH as a smelter in their global supply chain. Consumer electronics companies such as Apple, Intel, Motorola, Samsung, Kyocera AVX and Kemet have also sourced from Rwanda, despite apparent warnings that most of the minerals sold in Rwanda were smuggled from the DRC.
What does this all mean for us? As global citizens, we now know that we can't rely on governments, industry regulators or companies to tell the truth and ensure responsible mineral supply practices. So it's difficult to know whether the products we hold in our hands have been a source of funding for armed groups, corrupt practices or slave labour. But as consumers we do have a measure of power in our purchase choices and the information we share. Rwanda, whose ruling elites have enjoyed impunity for nearly thirty years, is the apex predator in mineral-rich DRC. Why should our money be bankrolling these criminals? It's time that consumers demand Big Tech remove Rwanda and their Western mafia from the mineral supply chain.
Judi Rever is a journalist from Montréal and is the author of In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.
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