At cobalt and copper mining locations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Amnesty International accuses multinational corporations of using forced evictions, threats, intimidation, and fraud against local populations.
Amnesty International and the Initiative for Good Governance and Human Rights, based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, examined the effects of four projects—the Kolwezi Copper and Cobalt Mine, Mutoshi Mine, Metalkol RTR, and Kamoa-Kakula Mine—on human rights in the report titled “Fueling change or the status quo?” on Tuesday.
The two groups think that residents have been forcibly evicted from their homes and farms as a result of the rush to develop these mining operations.
These evictions, “carried out when companies seek to expand industrial mines (…), destroy lives and must stop immediately”, says Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International.
Instead of benefiting from the growth of the mining sector, people living in the Kolwezi region “are being forced to leave their homes and farmland to make way for the expansion of large-scale industrial mining projects”, according to the report.
These evictions are often carried out by “mining operators who have little regard for the rights of the populations concerned and equally little respect for national laws designed to limit forced evictions linked to the mining sector”.
Entire villages have been destroyed, like that of Mukumbi, says the report.
“The whole village was burnt down, nothing was salvaged. No one had any money left. We had nothing to survive on. We spent nights and nights in the bush,” Kanini Maska, a former resident, told Amnesty.
“This eviction shattered my dreams (…), I lost everything and I live permanently with the fear of losing everything, even if I were to settle down again somewhere,” explained Papy Mpanga, another former inhabitant of the village.
Over 70% of the world’s cobalt, a necessary metal for batteries used in gadgets and electric vehicles, is supplied by the DRC, Africa’s largest mining producer.
Rechargeable batteries are critical to the shift to clean energy, according to Amnesty International. The NGO warns that “decarbonizing the global economy must not result in fresh violations of human rights.”
