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Foreign Affairs Dispatch: Virunga’s Charcoal Cartel

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Foreign Affairs Dispatch: Virunga’s Charcoal Cartel

Posted by Enough Team on May 13, 2016

Editor's Note: This dispatch originally appeared in Foreign Affairs and was written by Enough Project Senior Policy Analyst Holly Dranginis.

On the southwestern flank of Virunga, a protected national park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, there was once a thick rainforest. Today it looks like the surface of the moon, barren and smoking. A resident in the area told me that ten years ago he could walk up the road and see elephants. Now the elephants are gone. In their place are violent militias operating an illegal charcoal trade, cutting and burning Virunga’s rare forests to the ground.

The charcoal cartel is run by the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or FDLR, Congo’s most prominent nonstate armed group, which is known for its links to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. It is responsible for brutal attacks in remote areas of Congo’s dense jungle. Uniforms in tatters, its soldiers are seemingly penniless. But that picture is incomplete.

Although the FDLR survives on a range of illicit livelihoods—gold mining,kidnapping for ransoms, and the looting of villages—these days, according to locals and UN peacekeeping officials, charcoal is one of the FDLR’s most lucrative pursuits. It is worth an estimated $35 million a year. But the costs to nature and human life are immeasurable.

Read the full dispatch in Foreign Affairs.