Blood in the Mobile

Maybe it’s a quirk of night-filming that the minister’s eyes look blood-red. But the earth in the Democratic Republic of Congo is Martian too, especially near the hell-hole where many of the minerals that power our mobile phones and laptops are mined. Danish director Frank Piasecki Poulsen enters that hole, motivated it seems by unusually visceral guilt that, even in liberal Scandinavia, casually used electronic paraphernalia is linked to terrible crimes.

As we often half-hear, 5 million people have been killed in the last 15 years of civil war in the DRC; 300,000 women raped. This is death on the scale of the Holocaust. And the laptop on which I’m typing, and whatever you’re reading this on, likely contains the materials funding and fuelling the war. Poulsen goes to the headquarters of his own cherished mobile brand, Finland’s Nokia, and into the DRC, with polite stubbornness and crazy bravery, to bring these links alive.

The DRC is Conrad’s heart of darkness of course, the worst of Africa’s imperial nightmares, where Belgium’s bad King Leopold had slave-workers’ hands lopped off at the 20^th century’s start. He became obscenely wealthy because rubber for the cars and bicycles we just couldn’t live without came from the old Congo. Poulsen proves that little has changed.

That Congolese minister with the seemingly bloody eyes is responsible for mining, and privately profits from it. A conflict of interest, surely, the Dane observes. No, an advantage, says the unabashed Kinshasa nabob: “I’m a scientist, and a businessman. Not a politician.” This vision of corruption waves him into the jungle interior. Amused or vain soldiers let him pass towards the Walikale mine “where,” a Congolese warns him, “they kill people... you can’t imagine what is going on, man”. Haunted and disgusted, he tells Poulsen anyway of a man being chopped up and his wife forced to lie on his pieces, his penis stuffed in her mouth, when she was raped for the first time. “Pay attention,” he says urgently, trying to wake the Dane to the danger he’s in.

The UN have their biggest military force here, keeping to the cities and main roads, off which atrocities go unchecked. They “seem frightened”, Poulsen notes, and the UN won’t fly him towards Walikale, where a “rampage campaign” by one of the competing military groups, regular as wind in hurricane season, is underway. Poulsen and his cameraman get there anyway.

With the help of a sad-eyed child miner, they go underground. They can’t stay long. Their lights play on a heaving mass of people, picks chipping with pathetic determination at rock, though there’s barely room to move. Cave-ins are common. One outraged man keeps hollering and lunging at them in the confined space with great threat, telling them not to film him. It seems obvious the film-makers, like their subjects, could be killed at any moment.

Poulsen doesn’t comment on his sweatily frightening experience. Unlike many first-person documentaries, the stoic Dane knows he isn’t the subject, but our journalistic guide. His point is that the miners who make it back up have their work ruinously “taxed” by marauding soldiers, who sell the minerals to fund their wars. These are the first steps in a chain ending in the products of Western electronics companies.

So Poulsen’s next stop is Nokia HQ. His trips there are equally memorable, as his polite but increasingly outspoken stubbornness gets him seen by equally polite Nordic apparatchiks, reasonably high in the building’s gleaming comfort. Their vague neo-liberal rhetoric, well meaning and perhaps believed, rings hollow because of what Poulsen’s seen. “You cannot reap the benefits of civilisation on the back of this," he argues. But corporations, and the Western wealth we’re used to, couldn’t exist without that disconnection, apparent in every mealy-mouthed word from these employees who can’t say anything else if they are to stay in their jobs, and can’t grasp what mass war crimes being laid at their door really means.

Poulsen offers a solution: a clear, published supply chain, from minerals’ first extraction to the mobiles we cheerfully text on. Nokia’s spokesperson weasels around the fact that this would be commercially disadvantageous. Meanwhile, the slaughter continues. This brave, compact documentary hopes consumer protest will stop it. Meanwhile, we diligently recycle our newspapers, and casually, needlessly junk and replace our electronic toys. There is a sort of madness here. This film gives it a face.

Watch the trailer for Blood in the Mobile