Wednesday 23 August 2017

Congolese Troops to Protect World's Richest Untapped Tin Deposit

Congolese Troops to Protect World's Richest Untapped Tin Deposit

23/08/2017


The Bisie Tin Project’s Mpama North prospect in North Kivu
 in the eastern region of the DRC is one of the most 
significant tin deposit in the world.

The Democratic Republic of Congo has promised to help Alphamin Resources Corp. to protect the world’s highest-grade untapped tin deposit.
Construction of the mine has already started in a remote part of North Kivu, an eastern province, and Alphamin intends to have the $152 million project fully funded by the end of the year, Chief Executive Officer Boris Kamstra said Tuesday. A large part of the project’s success will depend on maintaining security in an region that hosts armed militia groups and eliminating illegal mining.
“The DRC government has been hugely supportive in that we now have a very strong military presence in our area,” Kamstra told reporters at a Johannesburg briefing attended by North Kivu Minister of Mines Anselme Kitakya. “In essence we’ve got a military curtain between ourselves and the east of us which is largely unpopulated forest.”
A military and police presence will help make sure Alphamin can mine unhindered by local bandits, and authorities have also pledged to ensure stability following an upcoming national election. The vote was first due in November but has been delayed, meaning President Joseph Kabila has remained in power despite being required by the constitution to step down last year.
There are also as many as 800 artisanal miners in the area and Alphamin is working with the government to move them to legal sites where small-scale mining is allowed, Kamstra told
The government has signed a treaty to define a framework for Grand Baie, Mauritius-based Alphamin to operate within its territory and any illegal mining activity will “resisted,” Kitakya said.
As many as 15,000 diggers descended on Bisie, as the site is known, in 2008 when tin prices soared to more than $25,000 a metric ton, creating a clapboard town complete with bars, money lenders and brothels. The mine became the focal point for advocacy groups including Global Witness, which said the trade in minerals from eastern Congo that found their way into consumer electronics was driving war and violence.
“It was the poster child for conflict minerals,” said Richard Robinson, managing director of Alphamin Congo. “We’re continuing to struggle with the criminal interests behind the artisanal trade” but the company is working closely with government officials to secure the site, he said.
With more than 3.5 million tons of reserves at a grade of 4.3 percent of tin per ton, Bisie will deliver an internal rate of return of 49 percent, according to Alphamin’s website. That’s based on a tin price of $17,300 a ton. Tin has climbed about 40 percent since the beginning of 2016, and traded at $20,335 a ton in London on Tuesday.
Bloomberg

Monday 14 August 2017

UN Experts Accuse Congo Army General of Mining Gold Illegally

UN Experts Accuse Congo Army General of Mining Gold Illegally

14/08/2017

Major General Gabriel Amisi Kumba (Tango Four)


  • General alleged to own company dredging gold in eastern river
  • Group says $409 million of gold smuggled out of Congo in 2013
A group of United Nations experts said it’s gathered evidence that a sanctioned Congolese military officer owns gold mining operations in the northeast of the country, contravening the country’s mining code.
Tax officials, mine workers and dredge owners told the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo that Major-General Gabriel Amisi Kumba owns dredges that are mining gold on the Awimi River in Tshopo province, the group said in a report published on the UN’s website Sunday. The group also collected testimony that the management of La Conquete, a company allegedly owned by Amisi, is protected by Congo’s military.
Amisi is currently the Congolese armed forces’ commander of the First Defence Zone, an area that includes the capital, Kinshasa. Last year, the U.S. and the European Union imposed travel bans and asset freezes, on Amisi, citing the role of units under his control in lethal crackdowns on demonstrations by Congolese opposition supporters in January 2015 and September 2016.
In November 2012, Amisi was suspended as commander of Congo’s land forces after a previous report by the group of experts accused him of distributing weapons to armed groups and poachers operating in the conflict-ridden east of the country. General Amisi was cleared by the military authorities in July 2014 and appointed to his current position in September the same year.
The group was unable to reach Amisi and Bloomberg wasn’t able to find contact details for him to request comment. General Leon-Richard Kasonga, spokesman for the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, said he hadn’t seen the report and couldn’t comment.
The group’s report also said that it “confirmed almost all artisanally sourced gold in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was exported illegally and underestimated in both value and volume.” The group has made similar claims in previous reports, estimating that during 2013, 98 percent of artisanally produced gold, valued at as much as $409 million, was smuggled out of Congo.
Established in 2004, the group of experts’ members are appointed by the UN secretary-general to gather information about conflict, abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law in Congo.
By William Clowes
Bloomberg 

Sunday 6 August 2017

Child miners aged four living a hell on Earth so YOU can drive an electric car: Awful human cost in squalid Congo cobalt mine that Michael Gove didn’t consider in his ‘clean’ energy crusade

Child miners aged four living a hell on Earth so YOU can drive an electric car: Awful human cost in squalid Congo cobalt mine that Michael Gove didn’t consider in his ‘clean’ energy crusade 


06/08/2017


  • Sky News investigated the Katanga mines and found Dorsen, 8, and Monica, 4.

  • The pair were working in the vast mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

  • They are two of the 40,000 children working daily in the mines, checking rocks for cobalt.


Picking through a mountain of huge rocks with his tiny bare hands, the exhausted little boy makes a pitiful sight.

His name is Dorsen and he is one of an army of children, some just four years old, working in the vast polluted mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where toxic red dust burns their eyes, and they run the risk of skin disease and a deadly lung condition. Here, for a wage of just 8p a day, the children are made to check the rocks for the tell-tale chocolate-brown streaks of cobalt – the prized ingredient essential for the batteries that power electric cars.

And it’s feared that thousands more children could be about to be dragged into this hellish daily existence – after the historic pledge made by Britain to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2040 and switch to electric vehicles.

Eight-year-old Dorsen is pictured cowering beneath the 
raised hand of an overseer who warns him not to spill
 a rock


It heralds a future of clean energy, free from pollution but – though there can be no doubting the good intentions behind Environment Secretary Michael Gove’s announcement last month – such ideals mean nothing for the children condemned to a life of hellish misery in the race to achieve his target.

Dorsen, just eight, is one of 40,000 children working daily in the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The terrible price they will pay for our clean air is ruined health and a likely early death.

Almost every big motor manufacturer striving to produce millions of electric vehicles buys its cobalt from the impoverished central African state. It is the world’s biggest producer, with 60 per cent of the planet’s reserves.

The cobalt is mined by unregulated labour and transported to Asia where battery manufacturers use it to make their products lighter, longer-lasting and rechargeable.

The planned switch to clean energy vehicles has led to an extraordinary surge in demand. While a smartphone battery uses no more than 10 grams of refined cobalt, an electric car needs 15kg (33lb).


He then staggers beneath the weight of a heavy sack that 
he must carry to unload 60ft away in pouring rain

Goldman Sachs, the merchant bank, calls cobalt ‘the new gasoline’ but there are no signs of new wealth in the DRC, where the children haul the rocks brought up from tunnels dug by hand.

Adult miners dig up to 600ft below the surface using basic tools, without protective clothing or modern machinery. Sometimes the children are sent down into the narrow makeshift chambers where there is constant danger of collapse.

Cobalt is such a health hazard that it has a respiratory disease named after it – cobalt lung, a form of pneumonia which causes coughing and leads to permanent incapacity and even death.

Even simply eating vegetables grown in local soil can cause vomiting and diarrhoea, thyroid damage and fatal lung diseases, while birds and fish cannot survive in the area.

No one knows quite how many children have died mining cobalt in the Katanga region in the south-east of the country. The UN estimates 80 a year, but many more deaths go unregistered, with the bodies buried in the rubble of collapsed tunnels. Others survive but with chronic diseases which destroy their young lives. Girls as young as ten in the mines are subjected to sexual attacks and many become pregnant.

Dorsen and 11-year-old Richard are pictured. With his 
mother dead, Dorsen lives with his father in the bush 
and the two have to work daily in the cobalt mine 
to earn money for food.

When Sky News investigated the Katanga mines it found Dorsen, working near a little girl called Monica, who was four, on a day of relentless rainfall.

Dorsen was hauling heavy sacks of rocks from the mine surface to a growing stack 60ft away. A full sack was lifted on to Dorsen’s head and he staggered across to the stack. A brutish overseer stood over him, shouting and raising his hand to threaten a beating if he spilt any.

With his mother dead, Dorsen lives with his father in the bush and the two have to work daily in the cobalt mine to earn money for food.

Dorsen’s friend Richard, 11, said that at the end of a working day ‘everything hurts’.

In a country devastated by civil wars in which millions have died, there is no other way for families to survive. Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) is donating £10.5million between June 2007 and June 2018 towards strengthening revenue transparency and encouraging responsible activity in large and small scale artisanal mining, ‘to benefit the poor of DRC’.

There is little to show for these efforts so far. There is a DRC law forbidding the enslavement of under-age children, but nobody enforces it.

The UN’s International Labour Organisation has described cobalt mining in DRC as ‘one of the worst forms of child labour’ due to the health risks.

Soil samples taken from the mining area by doctors at the University of Lubumbashi, the nearest city, show the region to be among the ten most polluted in the world. Residents near mines in southern DRC had urinary concentrates of cobalt 43 higher than normal. Lead levels were five times higher, cadmium and uranium four times higher.

The worldwide rush to bring millions of electric vehicles on to our roads has handed a big advantage to those giant car-makers which saw this bonanza coming and invested in developing battery-powered vehicles, among them General Motors, Renault-Nissan, Tesla, BMW and Fiat-Chrysler.

Chinese middle-men working for the Congo Dongfang Mining Company have the stranglehold in DRC, buying the raw cobalt brought to them in sacks carried on bicycles and dilapidated old cars daily from the Katanga mines. They sit in shacks on a dusty road near the Zambian border, offering measly sums scrawled on blackboards outside – £40 for a ton of cobalt-rich rocks – that will be sent by cargo ship to minerals giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt in China and sold on to a complex supply chain feeding giant multinationals.

Challenged by the Washington Post about the appalling conditions in the mines, Huayou Cobalt said ‘it would be irresponsible’ to stop using child labour, claiming: ‘It could aggravate poverty in the cobalt mining regions and worsen the livelihood of local miners.’

Human rights charity Amnesty International also investigated cobalt mining in the DRC and says that none of the 16 electric vehicle manufacturers they identified have conducted due diligence to the standard defined by the Responsible Cobalt Initiative.

Monica, just four-years-old, works in the mine alongside 
Dorsen and Richard

Encouragingly, Apple, which uses the mineral in its devices, has committed itself to treat cobalt like conflict minerals – those which have in the past funded child soldiers in the country’s civil war – and the company claims it is going to require all refiners to have supply chain audits and risk assessments. But Amnesty International is not satisfied. ‘This promise is not worth the paper it is written on when the companies are not investigating their suppliers,’ said Amnesty’s Mark Dummett. ‘Big brands have the power to change this.’

After DRC, Australia is the next biggest source of cobalt, with reserves of 1million tons, followed by Cuba, China, Russia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Car maker Tesla – the market leader in electric vehicles – plans to produce 500,000 cars per year starting in 2018, and will need 7,800 tons of cobalt to achieve this. Sales are expected to hit 4.4 million by 2021. It means the price of cobalt will soar as the world gears itself up for the electric car revolution, and there is evidence some corporations are cancelling their contracts with regulated mines using industrial technology, and turning increasingly to the cheaper mines using human labour.

After the terrible plight of Dorsen and Richard was broadcast in a report on Sky News, an emotive response from viewers funded a rescue by children’s charity Kimbilio. They are now living in a church-supported children’s home, sleeping on mattresses for the first time in their lives and going to school.

But there is no such happy ending for the tens of thousands of children left in the hell on earth that is the cobalt mines of the Congo.

By Barbara Jones for The Mail on Sunday