British firm linked to Congo's illicit mineral trade

Global Witness report says trade is prolonging 12-year conflict between rebels and army, but firms deny wrongdoing

Xan Rice in Nairobi and Julian Borger

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 21 July 2009 12.32 BST

A miner searches for cassiterite, better known as tin ore, inside a mine in Nyabibwa, Democratic Republic of Congo. Photograph: Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images

The continuing violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo is being fuelled by western companies who are buying the country's minerals without properly checking their origins, a new report alleges today.

Global Witness says the Congolese army and other armed groups in the east of the country control much of the mining and trade in tin ore (cassiterite), coltan, wolframite – often using forced labour.

The report argues the trade is prolonging the 12-year conflict there, which has seen mass killings and rape. About 100,000 people have been driven from their homes in the past few months alone.

"As long as the warring parties can fund themselves through international trade, they will continue to be able to inflict widespread violence on the population," said Patrick Alley, the director of Global Witness.

The report calls for UN sanctions against foreign firms that buy the minerals from intermediaries without exploring who was profiting from their purchase. Many of the firms accused are Belgian but Global Witness also calls for UN sanctions against a British firm, the London-based Amalgamated Metal Corporation (AMC), whose subsidiary, Thaisarco, buys tin ore in eastern Congo.

Global Witness acknowledges that Thaisarco purchases minerals from legal, government-authorised brokers, but argues the firm should do more to find out who is supplying those brokers. It points to a UN resolution calling for sanctions, including the freezing of assets of individuals or companies helping Congolese armed groups through the trade in natural resources.

The report alleges Thaisarco's main supplier in the South Kivu region, the centre of the conflict, gets its tin ore from mines controlled by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), one of the main warring factions. Its leaders include Rwandan Hutus involved in the 1994 genocide.

AMC has denied any wrongdoing, saying it has always followed UN guidance in its trade in the region and is in the process of implementing more thorough measures aimed at increasing the transparency of the tin trade.

"Both AMC and Thaisarco have always sought to comply with the requirements and recommendations of the UN in respect of minerals originating in the DRC. In accordance with this, Thaisarco purchases DRC minerals subject to a recently enhanced, formal and detailed due diligence programme which ultimately is aimed at providing transparency throughout the supply chain," the statement said.

The new industry-wide measures, know as the Tin Supply Chain Initiative, were launched on 1 July, after the Global Witness report was completed.

"The Supply Chain Initiative has traceability of the minerals as its key objective in order to ensure that the trade does not benefit renegade or rebel groups," AMC said. The foreign office issued a statement yesterday recognising that illegally traded minerals were "one of the factors in the instability in eastern DRC".

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009