Why Miners Look For Buried Treasure In Belgian Museum --- Legacy...

Why Miners Look For Buried Treasure In Belgian Museum --- Legacy of King Leopold II, Its Maps and Rocks Direct Firms to Congo Hot Spots
By John W. Miller

20 March 2007
The Wall Street Journal
Source: Dow Jones

TERVUREN, Belgium -- For decades, geologist Johan Lavreau has minded a musty maze of African maps, papers and rocks stored in the bowels of a museum celebrating Belgium's colonial stewardship of the Congo between 1885 and 1960.

It was a lonely job. He saw few visitors other than geology students and academics.

Now the 63-year-old's archives, beneath the Royal Museum for Central Africa in a leafy suburb of Brussels, are a hot destination. Clamoring to pore over the maps: global mining operations hungry for clues about where to find the Congo's vast riches of copper, cobalt, gold, tin and other treasures.

Mr. Lavreau's recent visitors include a who's who of big diggers: Australia's BHP Billiton, De Beers of South Africa and Areva, a French nuclear company -- all driven by the boom in commodity prices. China and India, thirsty for raw materials to keep up their explosive growth, are largely responsible.

"I guess we need to start thinking like a business," says the career civil servant, with a trace of melancholy.

Brittle, faded field maps drawn by hand are stacked haphazardly in Victorian cabinets smelling of old wood, red brick and damp plaster. Nearby lie other colonial relics brought home by the Belgians, including 8,000 monkey skulls, 600,000 stuffed fish and six million bugs.

The only trace of modernity: a steel door leading to a radioactive bunker with a 1,300-pound chunk of Congo uranium, unearthed from the same spot that produced the fuel for the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II.

For mining firms, not only is the prospecting a lot easier in a Belgian basement, it often yields more than geologists find with the most sophisticated radar and sonar technology. Today, gathering detailed information in the country made famous by Joseph Conrad's novel "Heart of Darkness" is both wildly expensive and dangerous. One of the world's bloodiest civil wars only recently ended there. Armed militias still patrol the bush.

"The old colonial mapping was more thorough and detailed," says David Ovadia, head of the British Geological Survey's international division. "Today, it would be a military operation to get what one colonial geologist on a horse could get in one lifetime."

Meanwhile, a French institute housing records from former colonies like Algeria and Laos also reports rising interest. "They started knocking on our door 18 months ago," says Marielle Arregros, a map historian at the Bureau des Recherches Geologiques et Minieres in Orleans.

The BGS, which is home to old maps from Afghanistan to Zambia, now generates half its annual $106 million revenue from consulting work.

But few places are hotter than the Democratic Republic of the Congo, long known as one of the globe's richest mineral troves. The charge for poking around in Mr. Lavreau's stacks is a modest $332 a day. The only physical risk: a hangover from the strong Belgian beer sold at the popular brasseries across the street.

Selling access to the Brussels archives, which belong to the Belgian government, has raised some eyebrows in Kinshasa. "It's a legitimate question why they're not here," says Valentin Kanda Nkula, director of the Congo's national geological service. "It would be nice to share revenue."

The Congo once had copies of the same archives, but most were lost, looted or destroyed. The country, adds Mr. Lavreau, ground up its rock samples to make gravel for a parking lot.

Miners can thank Belgium's King Leopold II, who controlled the Congo until 1908, for the riches preserved in Tervuren.

The brooding, autocratic king ordered surveyors -- and their slaves -- up and down the vast country. They mapped the land by hand. Their followers panned millions of soil samples and collected millions of rocks.

In 1940, the Belgian colonial government in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) ordered private mining companies to turn over their records to help the Allies find resources that could help in the war effort against Germany. The Congo shipped millions of tons of copper and tin -- and some uranium -- to the U.S.

After the war, crates of papers, some copies of the originals, and rocks were moved to Leopold's museum, built in 1898 as a celebration of the virtues of colonization. Today, Belgium's colonial administration is best known for its brutal treatment of slaves forced to collect rubber.

In 1997, a company called Anvil Mining Ltd. of Perth, Australia, wanted to dig in the southeast of the Congo where Belgian companies had mined copper in the years following 1910. Anvil asked the museum for help analyzing new satellite maps.

"We took a 1953 map color-coded for soil type, based on even older records, and superimposed it over a satellite map to give a total picture," says Mr. Lavreau.

With a capital expenditure of only $6 million, including a small fee for the museum, Anvil began producing copper in 2002. The project is expected ultimately to generate net profit of $19 million, despite recent controversy.

The United Nations said Anvil in October 2004 provided vehicles and planes to government troops to quell an uprising near its mine. The troops killed scores of villagers, including children, the U.N. said.

Anvil didn't return calls and email seeking comment. It has denied any wrongdoing.

Sometimes, the Belgian archives steer companies away from bad investments. Two years ago, BHP Billiton decided, after analyzing modern computer-generated maps, that there might be enough bauxite -- a raw material used to make aluminum -- near the Congo's Atlantic coast, to merit a new mine.

BHP called Guy Franceschi, a Belgian geological consultant in Ghent. He suggested a visit to the museum.

Luc Tack, a senior geologist at the museum, recalls escorting BHP officials to the museum's basement.

Without help from Mr. Lavreau and his team, finding what you need is next to impossible. Mr. Tack picks out a thick book of loose papers sandwiched in cardboard and tied with string, and finds the map that he showed BHP.

Made in the 1950s, the map is covered in a grid, with each intersection representing a spot every 200 yards where Belgian engineers dug a well and collected a soil sample. Inside each box are small pink squares showing where bauxite had been found. Mr. Tack then fetches a small plastic bag of loose rocks and sand: soil samples from the grid.

After three weeks of analysis, BHP concluded the quantity of bauxite underground wasn't sufficient to merit a new dig.

BHP's total bill was just over $9,300, a fraction of what it would have had to pay to explore the site and reach the same conclusion. "If we had to repeat all the drilling today, it would cost a significant amount of both time and money," says Harri Illtud, a spokesman for BHP Billiton.

These days, Mr. Lavreau's only regret is not having the time or solitude to wander undisturbed among his rocks and papers, as he and his predecessors in the Congo once did.

"Nowadays," he says, "people only have time to look for money."