Montage of Congo pictures soldiers walking through water, tanks in bush, miners.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has endured one of the most bloodthirsty, most devastating wars in Africas history. Around four million people have died. Now though, there is peace, officially. But the killing hasnt stopped. And it is all about one thing. Control of Congos vast mineral wealth.
10:00:00 Aerial shot of plane landing on Walikale road Deep in the forest, a long way from anywhere, a short tarmac'ed road with one straight bit. Walikale. One of the busiest airstrips in Congo.
10:00:15 Landing / Planes on road being loaded up with sacks of cassiterite
They call this the Walikale Express; 15 or more planes in and out every day, pillaging two-million dollars' worth of loot every week from a jungle outpost that's been at the heart of this deadly conflict.
Within 50 miles of here, ten mines. In these sacks, the mineral everyone's after: a red rock, cassiterite, better known as tin ore, the most traded metal on the London Exchange. It's now used for electronic circuit boards and prices have hit a ten year high. Here, the battle is on for control of the mines and the trade. But we've been warned not to film soldiers.
10:01:06 GVs Walikale / UN patrol
The UN's here, but they don't venture far from base. Peacekeepers have never set foot in the mines. Yet it's the plundered ore that fuels the conflict, by buying more guns. Civilians continue to die. A thousand a day. The crisis festers like a tropical ulcer.
10:01:26
SYNC:Emile Fakage
Save the Children Fund
There has been a lot of fighting in Walikale and it's affected everyone. During the war, they were all forced to flee into the jungle, and you can only imagine what it was like. No water. No food. No help. They were bad times.
10:01:41 Setting out on jungle walk
Man in blue track suit is Buto Muiso
Thousands of desperate people had abandoned their farms and fled to the mines. But few had come back. So what was keeping them out there in the jungle? The biggest mine, Bisiye, was said to be lawless and remote, forty miles through the forest. Even Buto Muiso, the head of the government's mining division had never been there.
SYNC
Buto Muiso
Government Mining Representative
These are the difficulties we are in the process of getting to know. Imagine with the size of this territory, we have to walk through the bush, sleep wherever, be displaced, not eat, have nothing. Its shameful. But thats why we are working for our country. We must do everything possible to visit every corner where mineral exploitation is happening.
Walk
Like him, we wanted to find out who was in charge there and who was making the money. We were told we might reach Bisiye in one day, maybe two. No westerner has made this journey before.
10:02:19 Soldiers in jungle
Throughout the trek were were to catch fleeting glimpses of government soldiers, making their way towards the mine. At Bisiye, we were told, they are the predators.
10:02:31 Jungle
This primary forest was for more than a decade infested by genocidal killers and half-starved militias -- until they were routed by the Congolese army last year. The trail was rugged and arduous.
10:02:47 Porters on jungle path
But it's busy as a motorway. 4,000 porters ply this route carrying sacks of rock heavier than they are. Each of their 50 kilogram packs of cassiterite is worth 400 dollars on the world market. Government soldiers often force porters at gunpoint to carry the rocks free of charge; if they're lucky, though, they can make up to five dollars a day.
10:03:10 Prince setup shot (listening shot)
Prince was a merchant until the last maurauding army burned and pillaged Bisiye and stole all he'd earned. Like everyone else, he had to start from scratch.
10:03:23 SYNC:Prince Porter
I'm exhausted. I am carrying 50 kilos. I have a wife and two children. But we don't earn much and we endure many hardships. Sometimes you end up with no pay at all. You could die along the way too. When you reach Bisiye, you will see the graves of porters like me.
10:03:51 Prince walks into forest
Prince had already slept one night in the jungle. He had another 15 miles to go. If he was to make it to Walikale Airstrip by sundown, he had to get moving.
10:04:05 Reporter meets crowd of porters
Other porters are eager to share tales of hell. Hundreds, they told me, had been killed in the last bout of fighting at Bisiye between crazed militias I'd not even heard of. Not one of them knew their cassiterite was destined for the electronics industry in the rich world. One man claimed he knew: it goes to America, he said, to rebuild the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
10:04:34 More jungle walk / Arrive at night camp
The trail, unforgiving, wound on and on, up and down, for mile after endless mile through the humid forest. After nine hours, we arrived at a jungle clearing in which was a squalid encampment. We were still a long way short of Bisiye.
10:04:57 PTC
So we're here in the jungle for the night, setting up camp alongside all the cassiterite porters. We pased hundreds of them today, carrying their 50kg packs of rock. I must say the electronic circuit boards their cassiterite will end up being used for seems a million miles from here.
By chance we meet a chief from Bisiye and his son, enroute to Goma to lodge a formal complaint about the treatment of local people. They say the traditional inhabitants of Bisiye mountain have been thrown off their land at gunpoint to make way for mining.
SYNCRamazani Kokoli, Tribal Administrator
I find it very hard being here in Bisiye. The militia set fire to the town and all the houses were destroyed. I managed to escape but lost all my possessions.
SYNCChief Akudala Mayani, head of the Bangandula Tribe
I am the chief of the Bangandula tribe. In the name of all Bangandula I want this mountain to come back to us. I am not happy at all because it is others who gain all the profits from what was left to me by my ancestors. I dont benefit and that makes me sad.
10:05:20 Night in camp
The dank air reeked of stale sweat and exhaustion. The porters ate their only meal of the day. It rained all night, but no one seemed to notice for at Koba camp you sleep like the dead.
10:05:40 Morning
Woman being carried At dawn, the cassiterite porters moved on. And so did we. Late morning, an ambulance passes by. Too sick to walk, this woman faces two or three days on this porter's back before she reaches a small hospital only recently reopened by Medicins sans Frontieres.
10:06:04 Graveyard
Five hours into day two, we stumble across a graveyard in the jungle, as Prince, the porter had said we would. We knew we must be close to Bisiye. Here lay victims of war, starvation, overwork, malaria, typhus and cholera.
10:06:22 River miners
By a river, the first signs of mining. We've been told there are around 6,000 miners here.
10:06:32 Walking up mountain
At this point the trail goes straight up. No one had seen the likes of us in these parts before. As we near the top, work stops as they gather to stare. In the absence of any mine management, government soldiers rule here by gun law. By the time we'd got to the top, all the soldiers had removed their uniforms and hidden their guns. But on the way up, one member of out team grabbed this shot. Troops here can go unpaid for months; they make up for lost earnings though. Congo's tin soldiers make a killing.The miners were cheering because word had gone round we'd come to help end their plight. Among them, looking on, the malevolent presence of soldiers -- it's just that we don't know who's who. The mining has left a huge scar down the mountain, once sacred ancestral land for the local tribe. Most of the work goes on deep underground.
10:08:02 PTC
This is it. Cassiterite, tin oxide. Looks like a rock, but it's much heavier. It feels like a chunk of metal.
10:08:13 Miners inside dark shaft
Even deeper inside the mountain, down the shafts and rickety ladders, conditions are subhuman.
10:08:24 SYNC:Kawaya Muhanga - Miner
In the hole you have to crawl and squeeze and suck in your belly, to make it through. The next danger is the huge rocks above; often they bury us and once they move, it's instant death. Then there's the darkness. And there's no air. Once you get down more than 200 feet, the air flow stops altogether. It's up to you to figure out how to breathe. As you crawl through the tiny hole, using your arms and fingers to scratch, there's not enough space to dig properly and you get badly grazed all over. And then, when you do finally come back out with the cassiterite, the soldiers are waiting to grab it at gunpoint. Which means you have nothing to buy food with. So we're always hungry.
Miners in hole
10:09:13 Porter crawling up hill
The miners don't work for money. The rocks the soldiers don't steal are traded for food. Most become deeply indebted to traders, who themselves get stuck here for months, able only to witness the horror of daily life here.
10:09:34 SYNC:Regina Maponda - Trader
The miners work for nothing; the soldiers always steal everything. They even come to shoot people down the mineshafts. Yes, not long ago, they shot someone. They force the miners to give them everything and they threaten to shoot anyone who argues. They're always ready to shoot. We are really penalised. We earn nothing. But we pay a lot. The soldiers -- they are all around us here, but they are in civilian clothes.
10:10:03 Setup shot for Buta Muiso
Even the government's own ministry of mines has been rendered powerless by the greed of the Congolese army.
10:10:10 SYNC:Buta Muiso - Head of Government Mining Division, Walikale
Security is not respected, we live in a state where only the fittest survive. Different armed groups do what they want with the population for their own ends. The state doesn't benefit at all. We need to bring back order and get respect for the ministry of mines because at the moment, everything is done for those who are the strongest. We demand that order is re-established. In that way everyone can be in their rightful place: the military in their barracks.
10:10:45 Miners digging
One hundred years ago, the novelist Joseph Conrad described the colonial plunder of Congo as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the human conscience." Nothing's changed.Cassiterite is mined and portered by people who are canon fodder for our industries. Five armies have battled over control of Bisiye mine in just five years.
10:11:43 Man digging / Wide shot of mine
The morality of trading in Congolese cassiterite is now under the spotlight. Having seen what goes on here, we wanted to track down the middlemen who were making handsome profits, literally off the backs of these people.
More porter shots as transition
10:12:00 Walikale airstrip
Back down on the airstrip, it was business as usual. Soldiers everywhere, guarding their loot, which is flown out of here by middlemen who sell the mineral on to Congolese export agents and the foreign importers. Demand for cassiterite has surged because new laws in Japan and Western Europe have resulted in tin replacing lead in the manufacture of electronic circuit boards. Global demand for tin is directly linked to human rights abuse and the battle for control over mines such as Bisiye.
10:12:41 Plane takes off / inside plane
Destination: the provincial capital, Goma. Old Russian plane, Ukrainian pilot. No seats.
10:12:50 PTC
We've hitched a ride on a cassiterite plane going back to Goma, the Walikale Express. I'm sitting on about 1.7 tonnes of the mineral.
10:13:00 Plane taking off over huts
It's a hefty payload; some planes don't make the corner.
GVs Goma, tanks going up road, etc.
Meet Cswede. Takes us into comptoir.
The eastern border town of Goma. Congos cassiterite capital, where theres a heavy UN presence but no intervention in the mineral trade. Much of Walikales ore is transported illegally across the border to Rwanda for international export. But first, it is washed, ground and sorted here. These trading house are called comptoirs.Cswede Chisungi is a Congolese businessman who knows the trade inside out. He insists there is nothing immoral or illegal about it.
SYNC Cswede Chisungi - Businessman
We buy it in Walikale in the bush, and then transport it to Goma. In Goma we work on it and then we pay tax to get it exported, and we export it. Its not stolen.
Exterior grinding place
Cswede takes us to a private compound where the ore is being ground and prepared for export.An argument breaks out over whether we should be allowed to film in the comptoir. Cswede himself may not feel theres any reason to be worried by our presence here but others are. The global tin trade is a secretive world.
We are in search of a British businessman, who was proving particularly elusive and media shy. We knew that he was one of the two biggest cassiterite buyers in eastern Congo.
10:13:10 Bukavu driving shots / ext Kotecha HQ
We eventually caught up with Ketankumar Kotecha in Bukavu, another border town. His family, the Kotechas, have been in business for more than 40 years. We spent an hour and a half talking to Mr. Kotecha in this office, discussing the corporate ethics of buying minerals in a conflict zone. Our conversation became increasingly uncomfortable. His firm, Afrimex, has been exporting cassiterite from EASTERN CONGO for more than twenty years. But Mr Kotecha refused to go on camera, agreeing instead that I could represent his views in our report. I was about to do exactly that when the provincial Security Chief arrived.
UPSOT:
"We've got to go to the station.
10:14:05 Night shots
At police headquarters we were questioned and our camera and passports were confiscated. We were released without charge the following day and put on a boat back to Goma.
10:14:16 On boat
We could only speculate that Mr Ketankumar Kotecha, a powerful man, had had enough of our questions.
10:14:23 PTC
Now, what he did tell us yesterday, in defence of his interests in the cassiterite trade was that what he is doing is legal. He said, and I quote, "Yes, salary structures are very low but it's better that miners and porters earn something than nothing. If I didn't do this," he said, "someone else would. I am not here," he said, "as some kind of moral saviour."
10:14:48 Shots of miners at Bisiye
But it's a moral saviour that Congo needs. Its powerless, impoverished people at the mercy of other people's greed. Things are so dire here that there is no expectation that life will ever get any better. Congo's government can't control its own army or protect its own people, a people cursed by the riches under their feet.
10:15:19 ENDS
The Democratic Republic of Congo has endured one of the most bloodthirsty, most devastating wars in Africas history. Around four million people have died. Now though, there is peace, officially. But the killing hasnt stopped. And it is all about one thing. Control of Congos vast mineral wealth.
10:00:00 Aerial shot of plane landing on Walikale road Deep in the forest, a long way from anywhere, a short tarmac'ed road with one straight bit. Walikale. One of the busiest airstrips in Congo.
10:00:15 Landing / Planes on road being loaded up with sacks of cassiterite
They call this the Walikale Express; 15 or more planes in and out every day, pillaging two-million dollars' worth of loot every week from a jungle outpost that's been at the heart of this deadly conflict.
Within 50 miles of here, ten mines. In these sacks, the mineral everyone's after: a red rock, cassiterite, better known as tin ore, the most traded metal on the London Exchange. It's now used for electronic circuit boards and prices have hit a ten year high. Here, the battle is on for control of the mines and the trade. But we've been warned not to film soldiers.
10:01:06 GVs Walikale / UN patrol
The UN's here, but they don't venture far from base. Peacekeepers have never set foot in the mines. Yet it's the plundered ore that fuels the conflict, by buying more guns. Civilians continue to die. A thousand a day. The crisis festers like a tropical ulcer.
10:01:26
SYNC:Emile Fakage
Save the Children Fund
There has been a lot of fighting in Walikale and it's affected everyone. During the war, they were all forced to flee into the jungle, and you can only imagine what it was like. No water. No food. No help. They were bad times.
10:01:41 Setting out on jungle walk
Man in blue track suit is Buto Muiso
Thousands of desperate people had abandoned their farms and fled to the mines. But few had come back. So what was keeping them out there in the jungle? The biggest mine, Bisiye, was said to be lawless and remote, forty miles through the forest. Even Buto Muiso, the head of the government's mining division had never been there.
SYNC
Buto Muiso
Government Mining Representative
These are the difficulties we are in the process of getting to know. Imagine with the size of this territory, we have to walk through the bush, sleep wherever, be displaced, not eat, have nothing. Its shameful. But thats why we are working for our country. We must do everything possible to visit every corner where mineral exploitation is happening.
Walk
Like him, we wanted to find out who was in charge there and who was making the money. We were told we might reach Bisiye in one day, maybe two. No westerner has made this journey before.
10:02:19 Soldiers in jungle
Throughout the trek were were to catch fleeting glimpses of government soldiers, making their way towards the mine. At Bisiye, we were told, they are the predators.
10:02:31 Jungle
This primary forest was for more than a decade infested by genocidal killers and half-starved militias -- until they were routed by the Congolese army last year. The trail was rugged and arduous.
10:02:47 Porters on jungle path
But it's busy as a motorway. 4,000 porters ply this route carrying sacks of rock heavier than they are. Each of their 50 kilogram packs of cassiterite is worth 400 dollars on the world market. Government soldiers often force porters at gunpoint to carry the rocks free of charge; if they're lucky, though, they can make up to five dollars a day.
10:03:10 Prince setup shot (listening shot)
Prince was a merchant until the last maurauding army burned and pillaged Bisiye and stole all he'd earned. Like everyone else, he had to start from scratch.
10:03:23 SYNC:Prince Porter
I'm exhausted. I am carrying 50 kilos. I have a wife and two children. But we don't earn much and we endure many hardships. Sometimes you end up with no pay at all. You could die along the way too. When you reach Bisiye, you will see the graves of porters like me.
10:03:51 Prince walks into forest
Prince had already slept one night in the jungle. He had another 15 miles to go. If he was to make it to Walikale Airstrip by sundown, he had to get moving.
10:04:05 Reporter meets crowd of porters
Other porters are eager to share tales of hell. Hundreds, they told me, had been killed in the last bout of fighting at Bisiye between crazed militias I'd not even heard of. Not one of them knew their cassiterite was destined for the electronics industry in the rich world. One man claimed he knew: it goes to America, he said, to rebuild the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
10:04:34 More jungle walk / Arrive at night camp
The trail, unforgiving, wound on and on, up and down, for mile after endless mile through the humid forest. After nine hours, we arrived at a jungle clearing in which was a squalid encampment. We were still a long way short of Bisiye.
10:04:57 PTC
So we're here in the jungle for the night, setting up camp alongside all the cassiterite porters. We pased hundreds of them today, carrying their 50kg packs of rock. I must say the electronic circuit boards their cassiterite will end up being used for seems a million miles from here.
By chance we meet a chief from Bisiye and his son, enroute to Goma to lodge a formal complaint about the treatment of local people. They say the traditional inhabitants of Bisiye mountain have been thrown off their land at gunpoint to make way for mining.
SYNCRamazani Kokoli, Tribal Administrator
I find it very hard being here in Bisiye. The militia set fire to the town and all the houses were destroyed. I managed to escape but lost all my possessions.
SYNCChief Akudala Mayani, head of the Bangandula Tribe
I am the chief of the Bangandula tribe. In the name of all Bangandula I want this mountain to come back to us. I am not happy at all because it is others who gain all the profits from what was left to me by my ancestors. I dont benefit and that makes me sad.
10:05:20 Night in camp
The dank air reeked of stale sweat and exhaustion. The porters ate their only meal of the day. It rained all night, but no one seemed to notice for at Koba camp you sleep like the dead.
10:05:40 Morning
Woman being carried At dawn, the cassiterite porters moved on. And so did we. Late morning, an ambulance passes by. Too sick to walk, this woman faces two or three days on this porter's back before she reaches a small hospital only recently reopened by Medicins sans Frontieres.
10:06:04 Graveyard
Five hours into day two, we stumble across a graveyard in the jungle, as Prince, the porter had said we would. We knew we must be close to Bisiye. Here lay victims of war, starvation, overwork, malaria, typhus and cholera.
10:06:22 River miners
By a river, the first signs of mining. We've been told there are around 6,000 miners here.
10:06:32 Walking up mountain
At this point the trail goes straight up. No one had seen the likes of us in these parts before. As we near the top, work stops as they gather to stare. In the absence of any mine management, government soldiers rule here by gun law. By the time we'd got to the top, all the soldiers had removed their uniforms and hidden their guns. But on the way up, one member of out team grabbed this shot. Troops here can go unpaid for months; they make up for lost earnings though. Congo's tin soldiers make a killing.The miners were cheering because word had gone round we'd come to help end their plight. Among them, looking on, the malevolent presence of soldiers -- it's just that we don't know who's who. The mining has left a huge scar down the mountain, once sacred ancestral land for the local tribe. Most of the work goes on deep underground.
10:08:02 PTC
This is it. Cassiterite, tin oxide. Looks like a rock, but it's much heavier. It feels like a chunk of metal.
10:08:13 Miners inside dark shaft
Even deeper inside the mountain, down the shafts and rickety ladders, conditions are subhuman.
10:08:24 SYNC:Kawaya Muhanga - Miner
In the hole you have to crawl and squeeze and suck in your belly, to make it through. The next danger is the huge rocks above; often they bury us and once they move, it's instant death. Then there's the darkness. And there's no air. Once you get down more than 200 feet, the air flow stops altogether. It's up to you to figure out how to breathe. As you crawl through the tiny hole, using your arms and fingers to scratch, there's not enough space to dig properly and you get badly grazed all over. And then, when you do finally come back out with the cassiterite, the soldiers are waiting to grab it at gunpoint. Which means you have nothing to buy food with. So we're always hungry.
Miners in hole
10:09:13 Porter crawling up hill
The miners don't work for money. The rocks the soldiers don't steal are traded for food. Most become deeply indebted to traders, who themselves get stuck here for months, able only to witness the horror of daily life here.
10:09:34 SYNC:Regina Maponda - Trader
The miners work for nothing; the soldiers always steal everything. They even come to shoot people down the mineshafts. Yes, not long ago, they shot someone. They force the miners to give them everything and they threaten to shoot anyone who argues. They're always ready to shoot. We are really penalised. We earn nothing. But we pay a lot. The soldiers -- they are all around us here, but they are in civilian clothes.
10:10:03 Setup shot for Buta Muiso
Even the government's own ministry of mines has been rendered powerless by the greed of the Congolese army.
10:10:10 SYNC:Buta Muiso - Head of Government Mining Division, Walikale
Security is not respected, we live in a state where only the fittest survive. Different armed groups do what they want with the population for their own ends. The state doesn't benefit at all. We need to bring back order and get respect for the ministry of mines because at the moment, everything is done for those who are the strongest. We demand that order is re-established. In that way everyone can be in their rightful place: the military in their barracks.
10:10:45 Miners digging
One hundred years ago, the novelist Joseph Conrad described the colonial plunder of Congo as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the human conscience." Nothing's changed.Cassiterite is mined and portered by people who are canon fodder for our industries. Five armies have battled over control of Bisiye mine in just five years.
10:11:43 Man digging / Wide shot of mine
The morality of trading in Congolese cassiterite is now under the spotlight. Having seen what goes on here, we wanted to track down the middlemen who were making handsome profits, literally off the backs of these people.
More porter shots as transition
10:12:00 Walikale airstrip
Back down on the airstrip, it was business as usual. Soldiers everywhere, guarding their loot, which is flown out of here by middlemen who sell the mineral on to Congolese export agents and the foreign importers. Demand for cassiterite has surged because new laws in Japan and Western Europe have resulted in tin replacing lead in the manufacture of electronic circuit boards. Global demand for tin is directly linked to human rights abuse and the battle for control over mines such as Bisiye.
10:12:41 Plane takes off / inside plane
Destination: the provincial capital, Goma. Old Russian plane, Ukrainian pilot. No seats.
10:12:50 PTC
We've hitched a ride on a cassiterite plane going back to Goma, the Walikale Express. I'm sitting on about 1.7 tonnes of the mineral.
10:13:00 Plane taking off over huts
It's a hefty payload; some planes don't make the corner.
GVs Goma, tanks going up road, etc.
Meet Cswede. Takes us into comptoir.
The eastern border town of Goma. Congos cassiterite capital, where theres a heavy UN presence but no intervention in the mineral trade. Much of Walikales ore is transported illegally across the border to Rwanda for international export. But first, it is washed, ground and sorted here. These trading house are called comptoirs.Cswede Chisungi is a Congolese businessman who knows the trade inside out. He insists there is nothing immoral or illegal about it.
SYNC Cswede Chisungi - Businessman
We buy it in Walikale in the bush, and then transport it to Goma. In Goma we work on it and then we pay tax to get it exported, and we export it. Its not stolen.
Exterior grinding place
Cswede takes us to a private compound where the ore is being ground and prepared for export.An argument breaks out over whether we should be allowed to film in the comptoir. Cswede himself may not feel theres any reason to be worried by our presence here but others are. The global tin trade is a secretive world.
We are in search of a British businessman, who was proving particularly elusive and media shy. We knew that he was one of the two biggest cassiterite buyers in eastern Congo.
10:13:10 Bukavu driving shots / ext Kotecha HQ
We eventually caught up with Ketankumar Kotecha in Bukavu, another border town. His family, the Kotechas, have been in business for more than 40 years. We spent an hour and a half talking to Mr. Kotecha in this office, discussing the corporate ethics of buying minerals in a conflict zone. Our conversation became increasingly uncomfortable. His firm, Afrimex, has been exporting cassiterite from EASTERN CONGO for more than twenty years. But Mr Kotecha refused to go on camera, agreeing instead that I could represent his views in our report. I was about to do exactly that when the provincial Security Chief arrived.
UPSOT:
"We've got to go to the station.
10:14:05 Night shots
At police headquarters we were questioned and our camera and passports were confiscated. We were released without charge the following day and put on a boat back to Goma.
10:14:16 On boat
We could only speculate that Mr Ketankumar Kotecha, a powerful man, had had enough of our questions.
10:14:23 PTC
Now, what he did tell us yesterday, in defence of his interests in the cassiterite trade was that what he is doing is legal. He said, and I quote, "Yes, salary structures are very low but it's better that miners and porters earn something than nothing. If I didn't do this," he said, "someone else would. I am not here," he said, "as some kind of moral saviour."
10:14:48 Shots of miners at Bisiye
But it's a moral saviour that Congo needs. Its powerless, impoverished people at the mercy of other people's greed. Things are so dire here that there is no expectation that life will ever get any better. Congo's government can't control its own army or protect its own people, a people cursed by the riches under their feet.
10:15:19 ENDS