Author’s note: This article is part of a two-part series detailing modern imperialism in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan.
“The Democratic Republic of Congo is facing a silent genocide.” “Sudan is on the verge of genocide.” “Nobody is paying attention.”
These harrowing statements have been commonplace on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram after the outbreak of war between Palestinian resistance groups and the Israeli military on Saturday, Oct. 7. Over 50 days and one strained, temporary ceasefire later, the world’s attention is still rightly placed on Gaza, where Israeli airstrikes have killed over 14,000 Palestinians and displaced millions more. It remains of urgent importance that students, organized labor, activists and other politically-engaged groups in the United States confront and dislodge our own government’s involvement in the Israeli government’s extermination campaign against Palestinians in Gaza — most recently in the form of easing Israel’s access to a stockpile of U.S. weapons stored within the occupation.
At the same time, the interests that motivate genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza for the expansion of the Zionist project are shared by imperialist hegemons headed by the U.S. and U.K.; powerful client states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies, as well as rearing economic competitors like China and Russia. At the center of each of these states’ diverse and often countervailing strategic and material priorities lies the unobstructed accumulation of capital by the ruling classes under imperialism (i.e. global capitalism), be they embedded in private enterprise, the government or the military. Social media users — especially young people — have been quick to recognize the shared struggle between the people of Palestine and other nations in the imperial periphery that are encumbered by the historic weight of colonialism.
Even more interestingly, netizens have adopted the term “genocide,” the discursive power of which has been so useful in talking about Gaza, to invite the public to share its sense of urgency between Palestine, the DRC and Sudan — all of which are facing unique, but related crises.
On Oct. 25, TikTok user Sincerely Awa posted a video to raise awareness about the coercive and violent working conditions in Cobalt mines in the DRC, as well as the widespread paramilitary violence and endemic sexual assault pervading the country. The video captioned with the hashtags “#SilentHolocaust” and “#Genocide,” attributed scant coverage by news organizations and the everyday distractions enjoyed by residents of industrialized nations (e.g., streaming platforms) with the lack of international attention around the “atrocities” in the DRC, as well as in Sudan.
The creator’s allegations are far from hyperbole. Labor and human rights advocates have long recognized the devastation of extractive industries and military conflict on the resource-rich former Belgian colony. In “Cobalt Red: How the blood of the Congo powers our lives,” modern slavery expert Siddharth Kara outlines the violent dimensions of the cobalt trade on the people of the DRC.
Cobalt, a naturally occurring element, is an integral component in modern smartphone batteries. According to Kara, “In 2021, a total of 111,750 tons of cobalt representing [72%] of the global supply was mined in the DRC.” Cobalt mining is also an extremely poorly-regulated industry, with more than 100 industrial cobalt mines outmatched by hundreds more “artisanal” cobalt mines, which have individual Congolese “creuseurs,” or diggers, many of whom are children, harvesting the toxic material in unauthorized mines and selling them resellers, most of which are Chinese-owned. Those mines that are authorized by the Congolese government and nonetheless pay workers a dollar a day are also financed or owned by Chinese or Swiss mining companies.
According to Kara, the Congolese cobalt trade is “tainted by various degrees of abuse, including slavery, child labor, forced labor, debt bondage, human trafficking, hazardous and toxic working conditions, pathetic wages, injury and death, and incalculable environmental harm.” Further, the incalculable precarity of female Congolese workers in the cobalt trade makes them especially vulnerable to sexual violence by DRC security forces or by soldiers in the encroaching Rwandan paramilitary group, M23. A UNHCR report estimates that violence between armed groups, many of whom are seeking control of mining towns, has led to 6.1 million internally displaced persons and over a million refugees seeking asylum in neighboring Central African Countries.
The DRC’s cobalt dependency largely hinges on lucrative foreign direct investment deals brokered between the nation’s previous president, Joseph Kabila, and China. According to Kara, Joseph, like his father and immediate predecessor, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, was personally enriched through many of these mining contracts, which contributed to the hollowing out of the Congolese state and further dependency on exported capital. Felix Tshisekedi, the country’s first democratically-elected president since 1961, has expressed interest in renegotiating mining contracts with China to pursue more favorable trade conditions for Congolese miners, but the outward flow of mineral wealth from the DRC to imperialist governments and multinational corporations like Apple, Samsung, Huawei and major automobile companies remains. This signifies that the DRC’s leaders, pending a revolutionary change in society, are still ensnared by commitments to imperialism as opposed to a bold project of nationalization and wealth redistribution undertaken by revolutionaries like Tomas Sankara in Burkina Faso or Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana.
The number of fatalities to the extraction industry in the DRC and related paramilitary violence is nigh-incalculable; as a result, social media users’ claims of “genocide” in the Congo may fall under scrutiny by the same academics that gatekeep and denounce the use of the term in Gaza. However, this does not make the plight of the two million people who are dependent on the meager wages they can earn from artisanal mining, the thousands of women and children uniquely vulnerable to gender violence, environmental health hazards and corporal punishment; and communities subject to land and power-grabs by Congolese and Rwandan military groups any less outrageous. Imperialism works in many ways, whether it be waging genocide against a captive, colonized population with international support or exploiting a country’s land and people for the enrichment of local capitalists and multinational corporations. Whether genocide is occurring in the DRC need not be a question; their struggle against the violent project of imperialism is just as deserving of our solidarity as the people of Palestine.