While I am not a regular reader of Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly, I know people who are. And they are not happy about this story from the Congo…
Congolese security forces have seized a jeep belonging to the United Nations peacekeeping operation and arrested a UN employee suspected of trying to smuggle over tonne of minerals out of the country, the government said on Monday.
The incident will embarrass the UN force, MONUSCO, which has helped prop up Democratic Republic of Congo’s weak armed forces but is also often accused of not doing enough to protect civilians and has been involved in sexual abuse scandals.
What happened?
Congolese Information Minister Lambert Mende said the incident took place on Sunday evening at the border crossing in the eastern city of Goma.
“Border police … and other security services … have seized a load consisting of 24 packages of cassiterite (tin ore) each weighing 50kg, on board a MONUSCO jeep,” he said.
A police investigation is under way and two people, including a Congolese U.N. staff member, have been arrested, Mende said.
As the lovely portrait of a lump of cassiterite at the top of this post suggests, trying to move a tonne of the stuff around by jeep might not to be the most subtle plan ever. For good discussions of how to monitor, rather than exploit, the DRC’s extractive industries, look at the papers from CIC collected here.
