Armed conflicts add another dimension to the trade in wildlife and its products that is regrettably well-developed in peacetime. The implementation and compliance mechanisms for preventing and combatting wildlife trafficking, as foreseen in the respective international treaty regimes or developed in practice, are in general not well suited to promote and ensure the protection of animals in conflict-affected countries. Some lessons can be learnt from more recently emerging instruments dealing with conflict minerals. Their focus on the whole supply chain might even potentially result in a more effective prevention and suppression of the illegal trade in wildlife outside the context of war

Leaving aside the narrow framing of the international courtroom, this chapter focuses on the Congolese district of Ituri, caught in the crossfire of larger national and international forces. The collapse of the sprawling Congo nation in the 1990s prompted outside intrusions from Rwanda and Uganda, spreading conflicts across the entire territory. Military stalemates stirred competing national rebel movements, with patronage relations to Congo’s eastern neighbors and to global trading networks. In the midst of country-wide conflict and regional politics, the ICC Prosecutor selected a single outlying district for his criminal investigation. While the trials would reduce complex events and causes to the actions taken by three men placed on trial, the wider matrix of forces continued to shape the overall conflicts. Under international pressure to rebuild the Congolese state, the main national factions bargained over power-sharing political transitions. The fate of local players in Ituri remained outside the national discourse, even as it drew attention from the UN and NGOs about increasing ethnic violence.

Focusing on coltan, Chapter 9 describes how increasingly complex global commodity chains became entangled with conflict in Central Africa. For the majority of consumers of electronics downstream, most of what happens in Central Africa remains out of sight and out of mind. But the violence of supply chains now reaches into many corners of that region, casting people in the dangerous role of foot soldiers of globalization in a context where the wealth they carry is often violently contested. This chapter shows how the disaggregated and patchwork-like nature of global supply chains makes them ideally suited to latch onto eastern Congo’s equally dispersed and fragmented artisanal mining economy. Today’s mineral supply chains, unlike their twentieth-century predecessors, are able to accommodate -- indeed work through -- forms of ordered anarchy such as are found in contemporary Central Africa. In accommodating local forms of violence and competing claims to order-making, they more closely resemble the fragmented political order that emerged around the pre-colonial caravan trade than colonial-era systems of monopolies on the extraction and long-distance conveyance of minerals. However much ongoing supply chain initiatives promise corridor-like, closed-pipeline solutions, they will always remain leakier than the integrated industrial extractive machineries they replaced.

In 2002, the UN Panel of Experts on Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo issued its final report.2 In it, the Panel included a list it had compiled of companies involved in the war economy of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The Panel, which had been mandated by the Security Council to examine the DRC war economy and make recommendations about sanctions and other measures, stated that ‘[b]y contributing to the revenues of the elite networks, directly or indirectly, those companies and individuals contribute to the ongoing conflict and to human rights abuses’.3 The Panel appended to its report several lists: one identified ‘companies on which the panel recommends placing financial restrictions’ and a second consisted of names of ‘persons for whom the Panel recommends travel and financial restrictions’. A third list identified businesses alleged to be ‘in violation of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises’.4

Leaving aside the narrow framing of the international courtroom, this chapter focuses on the Congolese district of Ituri, caught in the crossfire of larger national and international forces. The collapse of the sprawling Congo nation in the 1990s prompted outside intrusions from Rwanda and Uganda, spreading conflicts across the entire territory. Military stalemates stirred competing national rebel movements, with patronage relations to Congo’s eastern neighbors and to global trading networks. In the midst of country-wide conflict and regional politics, the ICC Prosecutor selected a single outlying district for his criminal investigation. While the trials would reduce complex events and causes to the actions taken by three men placed on trial, the wider matrix of forces continued to shape the overall conflicts. Under international pressure to rebuild the Congolese state, the main national factions bargained over power-sharing political transitions. The fate of local players in Ituri remained outside the national discourse, even as it drew attention from the UN and NGOs about increasing ethnic violence.