[link:www.globalissues.org/article/442/guns-money-and-cell-phones|Guns, Money and Cell Phones]
By Kristi Essick

The Industry Standard Magazine
Issue Date: Jun 11 2001

The demand for cell phones and computer chips is helping fuel a bloody civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The offer turned up a few weeks ago on an Internet bulletin board called the Embassy Network. Among the postings about Dutch work visas and Italian pen pals lurked a surprisingly blunt proposal: "How much do you want to offer per kilogram? Please find me at least 100,000 U.S. dollars and I will deliver immediately."

The substance for sale wasn't cocaine or top-grade opium. It was an ore called Columbite-tantalite - coltan for short - one of the world's most sought-after materials. Refine coltan and you get a highly heat-resistant metal powder called tantalum. It sells for $100 a pound, and it's becoming increasingly vital to modern life. [link:www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/02/23/sm_mobilephone123.xml&page=3|For the high-tech industry, tantalum is magic dust, a key component in everything from mobile phones made by Nokia (NOK) and Ericsson and computer chips from Intel (INTC) to Sony (SNE) stereos and VCRs.]

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Selling coltan is not illegal. Most of the worldwide tantalum supply - valued at as much as $6 billion a year - comes from legitimate mining operations in Australia, Canada and Brazil. But as demand for tantalum took off with the boom of high-tech products in recent years, a new, more sinister market began flourishing in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There, warring rebel groups - many funded and supplied by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda - are exploiting coltan mining to help finance a bloody civil war now in its third year. "There is a direct link between human rights abuses and the exploitation of resources in areas in the DRC occupied by Rwanda and Uganda," says Suliman Baldo, a senior researcher in the Africa division at Human Rights Watch, a New York-based nongovernmental organization that tracks human-rights abuses worldwide.

The slaughter and misery in the Congo has not abated since the country's president, Laurent Kabila, was assassinated in January. (Kabila's son, Joseph, was quickly appointed the new head of state.) Human Rights Watch researchers, working with monitors in the Congo, estimate that at least 10,000 civilians have been killed and 200,000 people have been displaced in northeastern Congo since June 1999. Rebels have driven farmers off their coltan-rich land and attacked villages in a civil war raging, in part, over control of strategic mining areas. The Ugandan and Rwandan rebels "are just helping themselves," Baldo says. The mining by the rebels is also causing environmental destruction. In particular, endangered gorilla populations are being massacred or driven out of their natural habitat as the miners illegally plunder the ore-rich lands of the Congo's protected national parks.

The link between the bloodshed and coltan is causing alarm among high-tech manufacturers. Slowly they are beginning to grapple with the possibility that their products may contain the tainted fruits of civil war. A similar controversy, after all, wracked the diamond industry in the late 1990s, when global demand for the gems helped finance civil wars in Sierra Leone, Angola and Liberia. Since then, the international community has clamped down on the diamond trade, imposing tougher import and export regulations.

But with tantalum, such regulations may be difficult to enforce. The market for the metal is based on secretive and convoluted trade links subject to few international regulations, and the ore is not sold on regulated metals exchanges.

[hr]
Rape of the land
The first wake-up call to the high-tech industry came in April when the United Nations issued a damning report on the "illegal exploitation of natural resources and other forms of wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo." After six months of field investigations, a panel of experts in the region assembled by the U.N. Security Council reported its findings.

Among the most alarming of the report's allegations was that Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian rebels had looted and smuggled thousands of tons of coltan from the Congo into their countries to export to the global market, using the profits to finance their militias. Indeed, the official statistics provided by these countries' governments - which many human-rights observers believe hide large amounts of black-market trading - show that Uganda and Rwanda dramatically increased the export of coltan following their occupation of northeastern Congo. For example, Uganda reported 2.5 tons of coltan exports a year before the conflict broke out in 1997. In 1999, the volume exploded to nearly 70 tons.

The U.N. report documents the rebel groups' use of forced labor, illegal monopolies and civilian murder in their high-stakes game to extract this valuable resource. These accusations have not been taken lightly; several members of the U.N. panel that prepared the report have since received death threats. Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi have issued protests to the United Nations over the report, claiming it to be inaccurate and unfounded.

The pillaging of the Congo's natural resources is exacting a devastating human and economic toll, says Leonard She Okitundu, the Congo's minister for foreign affairs and international cooperation. He told the United Nations Security Council in early May that "a consensus was clearly emerging in the council and in the international community on the links between the shameless looting of Congolese natural wealth and the massacres of the Congolese people." The fighting, he reported, has led to "assassinations of civilians, deportations, torture, rape and deliberate spreading of HIV/AIDS," as well as the displacement of millions of refugees.

The U.N. report does not directly blame computer manufacturers and mobile phone makers for the bloody trade, citing instead the companies trading minerals as "the engine of the conflict in the DRC." But the high-tech industry's demand for tantalum clearly has fueled an increase in coltan mining worldwide - including in the Congo region. After all, the trading companies sell coltan to processing companies, which in turn sell to tantalum capacitor manufacturers - whose clients are none other than high-tech companies such as Ericsson, Intel and Nokia.

These companies deny any knowledge that tantalum originating in the Congo is used in their products. That's not surprising, considering how murky the supply chain out of the Congo is and how complicated the global trade in tantalum gets. The reality is that there's little way to prove that the tantalum used in our cell phones and laptops is or is not from the Congo. Still, 8 percent of the tantalum ore imported into the United States in 1999 came from the Congo, and that doesn't count the ore U.S. companies imported from Rwanda and Uganda that may have originated in neighboring Congo. And there is much more of the precious dirt where that came from. At the moment, about 15 percent of the world's supply of tantalum comes from Africa. (Australia is the biggest producer, accounting for about 70 percent of the global supply of tantalum-bearing ore.) But the Congo is sitting on a potential gold mine. The mineral-rich nation is tied with Canada in having the world's fourth-largest coltan reserve, according to research firm Roskill Information Services.

[hr]
Worth its Weight in Gold
Coltan - which is found in 3 billion-year-old soils, like those in the Rift Valley region of middle Africa, western Australia and central Asia - has become a critical raw material in high-tech manufacturing. The tantalum extracted from the ore is used mainly to make tantalum capacitors, tiny components that manage the flow of current in electronic devices. Many semiconductors also use a thin layer of tantalum as a protective barrier between other metal coatings. The metal, which is also found in other minerals and can be extracted as a byproduct of tin refining, is used in the airline, chemical, pharmaceutical and automotive industries as well.

The market for the material is huge. Last year, about 6.6 million pounds of tantalum was used around the world, 60 percent finding its way into the electronics industry, where it can be found in products like mobile phones, computers, game consoles and camcorders. (The United States is the largest consumer of tantalum in the world, accounting for 40 percent of global demand.)

In 2000, demand for tantalum capacitors exploded in tandem with the mobile phone and PC markets, causing a severe shortage. Tantalum ore prices shot up, with per-pound charges for refined powder climbing from less than $50 to a peak of over $400 at the end of last year. Today, with demand softening worldwide, prices have fallen to around $100 a pound.

In response to the increased demand, coltan miners all over the world increased production. In the Congo region, both legitimate and rogue coltan merchants joined the rush. The boom brought in as much as $20 million a month to rebel groups, as well as independent factions, who were trading coltan mined mostly from northeastern Congo, according to the U.N. report. That money helps fuel the war.

[hr]
Passing the Buck
Tracing the coltan supply chain through the Congo is no simple task. Ore originating in the Congo often passes through at least 10 hands before it winds up in a cell phone or a VCR. One thing is certain: Rebels are involved in just about every step of the process until the coltan leaves the DRC.

According to the U.N. report, most coltan mining in the Congo is done by peasants because the war has forced the once legitimate Congolese mining companies out of business. These novice miners sift for coltan in riverbeds or dig it out of abandoned mines. The rebel groups also are believed to mine coltan directly, using laborers (sometimes prisoners) to extract the ore, then smuggle it out of the country.

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Many coltan miners are children. Some estimates suggest that 30 percent of schoolchildren in the northeastern Congo have abandoned their studies to dig for coltan. While the promise of striking the mother lode may be tempting, most miners make a pittance. Fraud is rife, and collectors often cheat the miners out of their profits. "Mining coltan is in itself a terrible job," one miner told a researcher from the Pole Institute, a Goma, Congo-based nongovernmental organization, earlier this year. "But there is also the problem of armed bandits who steal our goods, as well as the danger of landslides and collapsing mines."

Nevertheless, the prospect of making a few dollars a day - big money in a poor country with an economy in shambles - remains irresistible to many people.

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Once the ore is extracted, it is collected by local traders - many of whom are suspected of being rebels - who pay between $5 and $10 a pound for the unprocessed coltan. The local traders then sell the coltan to larger regional traders, often located in neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. This is the most difficult part of the chain to trace, because five or six intermediaries can be involved before it reaches the larger regional traders, according to Judy Wickens, secretary general of the Tantalum-Niobium International Study Center, or TIC, based in Brussels, Belgium. Sometimes coltan convoys run by one rebel group are hijacked by enemy rebels, only to be resold to other traders.

At this point, the black-market coltan enters the global market. According to the United Nations, more than 20 international mineral trading companies import minerals from the Congo via Rwanda alone.

These imports, as well as others from Uganda and Burundi, end up in Asia, Europe and the United States. Sabena Airlines, Belgium's national carrier, regularly flies minerals out of the Congo, Uganda and Rwanda. American Airlines, in partnership with Sabena, also transports goods originating in the region throughout the United States. (Sabena says it transports coltan only from legitimate traders.) Tantalum is extracted from the ore by processing companies such as H.C. Starck, which produces 50 percent of the world's tantalum powder, and Cabot (CBT), the second-largest mineral processing company. These firms - which buy from international trading companies and also directly from large mines and local trading concerns - in turn sell refined tantalum powder to capacitor manufacturers - the largest of which are AVX (AVX), Epcos, Hitachi (HIT), Kemet, NEC (NIPNY) and Vishay. Their products go to the cream of the high-tech industry. Alcatel (ALA), Compaq, Dell, Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard (HWP), IBM, Lucent, Motorola (MOT), Nokia and Solectron (SLR) are all major buyers of tantalum capacitors. Chip firms such as AMD and Intel are also increasingly buying tantalum powder in its raw form to use in manufacturing semiconductors.

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[hr]
Chain Reaction
So far, high-tech companies have been reluctant to acknowledge they may be using materials originating from Congo rebels. That said, they can do little to prove they do not. "We first heard about this in April and immediately asked our suppliers if they used tantalum from the Congo," said Outi Mikkonen, communications manager for environmental affairs at Nokia. "All you can do is ask, and if they say no, we believe it."

And so it continues down the line. Tantalum capacitor makers place their faith in their suppliers. One of Nokia's main suppliers, for example, is Kemet of Greenville, S.C., the world's largest tantalum capacitor maker. "We have gone back to our suppliers to ascertain that the material we are buying is not obtained illegally from the Congo," says Harris Crowley Jr., a senior VP.

But tantalum suppliers can offer little assurance to capacitor manufacturers that their product doesn't come courtesy of the Congo rebels. "I'm not in favor of killing gorillas," says Dick Rosen, CEO of AVX, a tantalum capacitor maker in Myrtle Beach, S.C. But "we don't have an idea where (the metal) comes from. There's no way to tell. I don't know how to control it," he says.

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Epcos, a tantalum capacitor manufacturer in Munich supplying the mobile phone industry, is also quick to place the responsibility on its suppliers - which include Cabot and H.C. Starck, as well as smaller processors in Europe and Japan. Heinz Kahlert, a spokesman for Epcos, pointed to a press release issued by H.C. Starck that states "we only purchase raw materials from established trading companies that have worked in various African countries for a long time and are headquartered in Europe or the United States." The press release goes on to claim: "These trading companies have confirmed that H.C. Starck is not being supplied with material from the crisis areas of central Africa."

At some point though, the wall of plausible deniability starts to break down. While H.C. Starck is adamant it is not being supplied with black-market coltan, one of its own suppliers, U.K.-based trading company A&M Minerals and Metals, is less sure. A&M works mostly with Nigerian and Bolivian miners, but also buys up to 3 tons of tantalum-bearing ore a month from Uganda. "I couldn't tell you for 100 percent that this material [from Uganda] didn't come from the Congo," says managing director James McCombie. "It could have been smuggled across the border."

The company works with peasant producers and local traders, and McCombie admits that "once you get to that level, it is very difficult to check the provenance. It would be silly of us to try to pretend that we know the origin of every pound of [coltan] we get in our hands."

Then there's Brussels-based Sogem, another international trading company that sells the unrefined coltan it buys in the Congo and Rwanda to processing companies in the United States, Europe and Asia. It offers only a vague reassurance about the origins of the ore it resells. "We have been told that our money goes directly to the population," says Sogem spokeswoman Moniek Delvou. Sogem doesn't deal with rebel-backed traders and monopolies in the region, Delvou says. But she declines to name the mines and local trading companies that supply Sogem and admits she isn't 100 percent sure of the original source. "How can you be 100 percent sure of anything in life?" she asks.

With that kind of uncertainty creeping into public view, some high-tech manufacturers are worried that Congolese coltan will tarnish their reputations. Ericsson says it requires its suppliers to comply with company environmental, ethical and human-rights policies. "We are putting demands in place and will follow it up," says Mats Pellback-Scharp, environmental manager of consumer products. Meanwhile, Kemet says it will start requiring ore suppliers to certify that their tantalum does not come from the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi or Uganda. "If everybody takes a stance, maybe it will dry up," says Kemet's Crowley.

For its part, Intel has begun a review to determine the source of the tantalum it uses. "We'd like to be able to know the answer," says spokesman Chuck Mulloy. Compaq has issued a statement saying it "condemns the reported activities of illegal miners in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park and the Okapi Wildlife Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo." But, as spokesman Arch Currid says, "Most of the components that we get [come] from third-party providers, so where they get their raw goods is hard to determine."

Motorola also says it has asked its suppliers to ensure that no rebel-generated Congolese tantalum comes to them. "We deplore the activities alleged against illegal miners in the environmentally protected region of the Congo and fully support the efforts of relevant authorities to protect regions where the environment or wildlife is threatened," says the company. Hewlett-Packard officials also denounce the situation in the Congo and say the company intends to work with the Electronic Industries Alliance to ensure no tainted tantalum ends up in HP products.

Other high-tech companies such as AMD, Dell, PMC Sierra and Solectron were unable to provide procurement guidelines or did not return calls seeking comment.

[hr]
The Fight for an Embargo
The U.N. report calls for much more than guidelines. It proposes an all-out trade embargo on the import and export of coltan and other minerals from or to Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda "until those countries' involvement in the exploitation of the natural resources of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is made clear and declared so by the Security Council."

Trade groups, notably the TIC, say that would be unfair to the legitimate trading companies that do business in the region. "There have been exports from Zaire/Congo for 40 years," says the TIC's Wickens. "If there is an embargo, this will carry off the legitimate as well as illegitimate mining."

But given the problems in policing the coltan trade, Baldo of Human Rights Watch believes only an embargo will begin to reverse the tide of abuse in the Congo. "I would encourage the U.N. Security Council to adopt an embargo against Rwanda and Uganda, because they rely on international assistance," says Baldo. Sanctions imposed by foreign governments could thus have an immediate effect in the region. Rwandan and Ugandan rebels "are exploiting resources illegally and know sooner or later this will become unacceptable," add Baldo.

Implementing such an embargo is easier said than done. One member of a large, well-respected nongovernmental organization, which he didn't want to name because it is preparing a report on the Congo, says his group is "in support of sanctions and the withdrawal of all troops from the DRC." But the difficulty, he says, "is to come up with sanctions on minerals such as coltan that don't have an impact on the people."

It remains to be seen whether high-tech companies would go along with a U.N.-backed embargo. An Alcatel spokeswoman, for example, says that "once it is voted by the Security Council and becomes a resolution, yes, we would abide by it." But Ericsson is not in favor of dumping suppliers just because they might use some products from the Congo. "If we found out our suppliers were getting tantalum from the Congo, we wouldn't kick them out, that would not help," says the company's Pellback-Scharp. "We would rather try to influence them" to stop doing business there. But, he adds, "If there was a huge international boycott, we would support it."

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The demand for coltan is not going away. As global consumers continue to crave the newest cell phone and the latest computer, high-tech companies will continue to pay top dollar for tantalum capacitors, and their suppliers will continue to take tantalum from wherever it is available. Whether an unregulated industry can effectively police itself based on good faith and written assurances is questionable. But one thing is sure: The links between the cell phones and computers we use every day and the devastation taking place now in the Congo can no longer be ignored.

http://www.globalissues.org/article/442/guns-money-and-cell-phones






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[div class=excerpt style=background:#FEFEFF]
"Congo's been bleeding to death for five centuries...

Fucked by the Arab slavers, fucked by their fellow Africans, fucked by the United Nations, the CIA, the Christians, the Belgians, the French, the Brits, the Rwandans, the diamond companies, the gold companies, the mineral companies, half the world's carpetbaggers, their own government in Kinshasa, and any minute now they're going to be fucked by the oil companies. Time they had a break, and we're the boys to give it to 'em.

-Maxie in The Mission Song by John le Carre
[/quote]

So much misery so we can talk on the phone while shopping :weep:


Here's the worst. The First World Nations are itching to have another "humanitarian" intervention in the Congo, but it's not to help the people, it's to prevent that native "rebel" groups from controlling those resources. Don't we ever get tired of fucking over people halfway around the world so we can steal their resources and protect "US interests"?


[hr]


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQIsLqkuATY

Apocalypse Found
Coltan, Cell Phones and Crisis in the Congo

by Casey Bush and Joshua Seeds

The horror! The horror!" These are the famous last words uttered by Mr. Kurtz, a character in Joseph Conrad's 1902 novella Heart of Darkness. Kurtz is an ivory dealer who set himself up as a jungle demigod hustling elephant tusks down the Congo River to a lucrative European market. That utterance, repeated by Marlon Brando as Col. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 movie, Apocalypse Now, says it all about the night- mare of the white man's burden: a dark dream that continues today.With nearly every use of a new cell phone or compu- ter, American consumers depend on the natural element tantalum, which is extracted from coltan, a mineral often mined illegally in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC.

A tenfold spike in the price of coltan in 2000 brought attention to its lawless extraction in the Congo with head- lines like, "Coltan, Gorillas and Cell Phones," and "Coltan Boom, Gorilla Bust." As in the past with elephants, moun- tain gorillas and millions of innocent civilians today are being trampled in the quest for mineral wealth deep in the heart of Africa.

Earth Island Journal argues that the 2000 spike in coltan prices was caused by the launch of the Sony PlayStation 2 and a new generation of mobile phones. The irony of that observation was not lost on British Labour MP Oona King when she expounded, "Kids in Congo are being sent down into mines to die so that kids in Europe and America can kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms."

The predominant use of tantalum is for capacitors, a component of electronics such as cell phones, computers, DVD players and video-game systems. Capacitors hold an electronic charge and are used for energy storage and the filtering of electronic fields. Superalloys made of tantalum and other metals are extremely hard and find their place in turbines for jets as well as parts for missiles and nuclear reactors. The versatile mineral is also used for surgical tools and medical implants because tantalum coatings do not react with body tissues and fluids.

Coltan itself is "columbite-tantalite," a black mineral found in Brazil, Australia and Canada, with the majority of the world's remaining reserves in Congo. It occurs in ancient rock formations known as granitic pegmatites, where eroded rock has been deposited by water. The pegmatites crystallize slowly and retain a great deal of water and are often enriched with rare elements and gemstones such as topaz and tourmaline. Riverbeds and alluvial deposits are the main source in Congo. Coltan found in these formations is largely composed of two rare elements: niobium and tantalum. Tantalum, discovered in 1802, was not purified until a century later - a difficult task because the element has a melting point of 5,458 degrees Centigrade and can be dissolved only by acids so powerful they liquefy glass. The frustration of attempting to purify tantalum is the source of its name: The pure metal was "tantalizing" to the eyes but always out of reach. Once purified, tantalum is a hard, gray metal that can easily be drawn into wire or deformed without breaking.

Australian mines provide 41 percent of global tantalum supplies, mostly from the firm Sons of Gwalia. Brazil follows Australia, with 21 percent of production. Worldwide, 4 million pounds of tantalum are consumed annually in the form of metal powder, wire, fabricated forms, compounds and alloys. The market is strained to the limit, and tantalum extracted from the large mines is sold in contracts with processors before it is even out of the ground. Sons of Gwalia recently opened a new mine, but predictions suggest that the global market will absorb all extra production by 2010.

When the 2000 price spike caused a "coltan rush" in eastern Congo, legions of coltan miners tore apart alluvial deposits, river beds, and soft rock with picks and shovels. Coltan is heavy, so swirling stones and soil in a pan works to separate out the coltan just as it does with gold. In the process, river banks and streams are transformed into mud, and erosion commonly leads to landslides. The landscape is further degraded as mining camps chop down trees for firewood and building materials, devastating swaths of the lowland portion of the Virunga World Heritage National Park.

In addition, hunters harvest "bush meat" to feed the workers in mining camps. In just a few years, lowland Grauer's gorilla populations in Kahuzi-Biega National Park in eastern Congo near the Rwandan border dropped from 8,000 to less than 1,000. Some mountain gorillas (with only 700 left in the world) have recently been killed and butchered for food. Ian Redmond, chief consultant for the U.N. Great Apes Survival Project, points out: "Every time we buy a high-tech gadget, we may be pushing the great apes closer to extinction...there isn't a global conspiracy to wipe out the great apes. They are disappearing because of global negligence." Similarly, conservationists can no longer find any forest elephants in Kahuzi-Biega, a population that numbered 3,600 just a decade ago, and the local hippopotamus herds have diminished from 22,000 in 1998 to only 900. Chimpanzees and antelope are nowhere to be seen.

A thousand years ago, indigenous Congo pygmies first welcomed Bantu-speaking tribesmen from the south searching for copper. Five hundred years ago, Arab traders from the east and Portuguese merchants from the west entered the Congo shopping for ivory and slaves. In the 1870s, Belgium's King Leopold II laid claim to the Congo as though it were his personal estate. With the assistance of Anglo-American adventurer Henry Stanley, of "Mr. Livingstone, I presume" fame, he negotiated trade rights for a range of goods, including diamonds, gold and rubber. It is believed that Joseph Conrad's Kurtz was modeled on Stanley.

The colony was maintained by Belgium until independence was declared in the late-1950s, when nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba came into power. In 1960, the Congolese army mutinied and declared Katanga, the large mineral-rich southeastern province, to be independent. Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union for help to reunify the country, but 30-year-old Colonel Mobutu Sese Seko soon led a coup with the alleged backing of Western intelligence agencies. Mobutu renamed the Congo "Zaire" and for 30 years enriched himself in a manner similar to King Leopold.

There were more than enough riches to go around, but Lumumba supporter Laurent Kabila helped organize a secessionist Marxist state in eastern Congo. Educated in France and Tanzania, Kabila was for a short time in 1968 assisted by Che Guevara, who planned a Cuban-style revolution for the Congo, but Guevara politely dismissed Kabila as "not the man of the hour." Two years later, Kabila found the support of the People's Republic of China and launched himself into an era of collective agriculture and mineral smuggling. Kabila's proto-state came to an end in 1988, and he was widely believed to be dead.

The 1994 genocide of 800,000 Rwandan Tutsi, as dramatized in the film Hotel Rwanda, spilled political instability across the border into Congo, and in 1997 Kabila was resurrected as a national leader and marched triumphantly into the capital city of Kinshasa, overthrowing an ailing Mobutu. Within two years, his Rwandan friends turned on him, and he was assassinated by one of his own staff. Since then, the country has been ruled by Kabila's son, Joseph. Trained at the National Defense University in Beijing, Joseph Kabila has attempted to remove foreign troops while establishing himself as a "democratically elected" leader of a country roughly the size of Mexico with over 60 million inhabitants. Since the mid-1990s, two massive wars have devastated Congo, leaving 4 million dead, more than any military conflict since World War II. And all during that time, the illegal extraction of natural resources in the country has only increased. While Kabila's army has reduced the number of troops from neighboring countries such as the Sudan, Uganda, Angola and Tanzania, Rwandan Hutu forces called the "Interahamwe" and Congolese militias, known collectively as the "Mai-Mai," occupy the most violently disputed areas of the eastern DRC, concentrating their activities primarily in locations where mining of gold, diamonds and coltan takes place.

"Militias from Rwanda and Uganda may justify invasions on the grounds that they are defending their people against rebels, but they earn billions from the tantalum they collect and smuggle across borders during these raids," writes John Perkins in The Secret History of the American Empire (Dutton Books, 2007).

In 1999, Congo and neighboring countries signed the United Nations-sponsored Lusaka Accord, ending the first Congo war, and formed MONUC, a French acronym for the United Nations Observer Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which brought U.N. troops into the country in an effort to stabilize the region. In 2001, the U.N. issued a report titled "Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo." Unfortunately, exploitation of resources and the war continued with horrific effects on the civilian population. There have been chronic food shortages and contaminated water supplies, with children being at the greatest risk of starving or succumbing to disease. Families are torn apart, and children are easily recruited or kidnapped into the service of the militias. Females of all ages pay the most terrible price of all, as armed men and boys kidnap and rape mothers, daughters and grandmothers without consequence. Although Joseph Kabila, the country's erstwhile leader, is attempting to limit the warfare, documented atrocities against human beings, animals and the environment continue.

The math makes it easy to follow the money. Coltan miners earn $50 per week when the average Congolese worker can expect $10 per month. In the DRC, a team of miners can extract a kilo of coltan per day. In 1998 the price of coltan was $40 per kilo, but then it spiked up to $400 in 2000 and has hovered around $100 ever since, with demand only increasing. According to IndymediaUK journalist Jason Perkinson, 80 percent of Congo's coltan arrives at the Sons of Gwalia in Australia for processing. Then the tantalum is sold primarily to Germany's Bayer subsidiary H.C. Starck and the American company Cabot, which in turn make capacitors for customers such as Alcatel, Compaq, Dell, IBM, Ericson, Nokia and Siemens. The yearly market in tantalum is worth over $6 billion, half of which is used in the annual manufacture of nearly 1 billion cell phones.

Western businesses profiting from resources extracted in politically unstable climates is nothing new. Then- Secretary General Kofi Annan said in addressing the U.N. in 2003: "The economic dimensions of armed conflict are often overlooked, but they should never be underestimated. The role of business, in particular, can be crucial, for good and for ill. Private companies operate in many conflict zones or conflict-prone countries...and private enterprises and individuals are involved in the exploitation of, and trade in, lucrative natural resources, such as oil, diamonds, narcotics, timber and coltan, a crucial ingredient in many high-tech electronics. Governments and rebel groups alike have financed and sustained military campaigns in this way. In many situations, the chaos of conflict has enabled resources to be exploited illegally or with little regard for equity or the environment."

In 2004, the Friends of the Earth and a U.K.-based group, Rights and Accountability in Development, filed a complaint with the U.S. State Department against Cabot and other Western corporations, claiming they had violated the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's "Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises." In a follow-up letter to the OECD, Adotei Akwei, senior Africa advocacy director for Amnesty International, wrote: "Given the gravity of all the allegations contained in the U.N. Panel report, it is unclear why governments have felt no need to launch their own fact-finding investigations.... We urge you to follow the Security Council's recommendations by launching immediate, thorough investigations into the conduct of the American companies concerned."

Born of warfare, coltan is also used to fight wars. Journalist Alex Shoumatoff identifies the Carlisle Group as a large consumer of tantalum. The global equity investment firm was fronted by former president George H.W. Bush until 2003, and Shoumatoff notes: "Carlisle's biggest customer is the American military. A whole lot of coltan was used in the attack on Iraq."

The Bush administration has made no issue of the extraction of coltan from Congo, but then again George Jr. recruited Cabot CEO Samuel Bodman to serve as his secretary of energy. By far the richest member of Bush's cabinet, Bodman is no friend to the environment. In the 1990s he used his connections with then-Gov. Bush to exploit a loophole in state law that allowed Cabot to release 60,000 tons of toxic emissions into the atmosphere each year, making it the most prolific polluter in Texas.

Journalist Jason Leopold writes in Z Magazine: "The State Department is the agency in charge of deciding whether U.S. companies breach the OECD guidelines. Despite the allegations included in the U.N. report and the complaint filed by the two actiist groups, the State Department has refused to launch an independent investigation into whether Cabot, under Bodman's leadership, and the other U.S. companies might have contributed to the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Cabot is the world's largest coltan refiner....Under Bodman's leadership an unknown amount of the coltan Cabot was purchasing could have originated from the DRC."

It is not surprising then that the 2003 meeting between Bush Jr. and Kabila Jr. was blandly reported by White House spokesman Scott McClellan, "The president had a good and positive discussion with President Kabila. The president reaffirmed our commitment to continue providing humanitarian assistance to relieve human suffering in the Democratic Republic of Congo."

Preoccupied with Iraq, the United States has not been willing to get involved militarily, and to date there is not a single American serving among the 17,000 MONUC forces. With so much finger pointing, bringing attention to the human suffering and environmental degradation in the DRC has been slow. A range of nongovernmental organizations has brought much- needed aid to Congo, but they are dependent on the security forces of the United Nations. Mercy Corps, the international relief agency, has been meeting recently with Congolese organizations and U.N. agencies there. Needs assessment research is continuing this summer as Mercy Corps investigates gaps in response, security concerns and funding support.

"Rather than implement a short-term project and then pull out of the country, we need to evaluate if we can support a long-term project before deciding on intervening," says Laura Miller, a Mercy Corps program officer for West and Southern Africa.

Meanwhile, all the major companies that profit from tantalum have attempted to distance themselves from what continues to happen in the Congo. In November 2006, Nokia published a statement declaring its stance on tantalum and coltan: "Nokia is not buying tantalum or other raw materials but processed compo-nents and assemblies from suppliers around the world.... Nokia does not use any endangered species for any business purposes and furthermore requests that its suppliers avoid raw materials from an origin where there are clear human- or animal-rights abuse.... Nokia has sent a notification of the Congo situation to its suppliers using tantalum asking them to follow the situation, and to avoid purchasing tantalum from Congo. Nokia is also reducing the use of tantalum in its products."

"I'm not in favor of killing gorillas," says Dick Rosen, CEO of AVX, a tantalum capacitor maker in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and one of Nokia's main suppliers. "[But] we don't have any idea where [the metal] comes from. There's no way to tell. I don't know how to control it."

For its part, Intel has begun to review the source of the tantalum it uses. "We'd like to be able to know the answer," says spokesman Chuck Mulloy.

Compaq has issued a statement saying it "condemns the reported activities of illegal miners in the Kahuzi- Biega National Park and the Okapi Wildlife Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo." But, as Compaq spokesman Arch Currid concedes, "most of the components that we get [come] from third-party providers, so where they get their raw goods is hard to determine."

One bright note is that a coalition of 57 North American zoos has initiated a cell-phone recycling program coordinated through the company Eco-Cell. "It actually enables you to do a very simple action to help participate in the conservation effort," says Eric Ronay, Eco-Cell's president. The company pays zoos and other organizations up to $15 per phone donated.

"Zoos represent a tremendous donor base," Ronay points out. "About 134 million people went to zoos in North America last year, more than major league baseball, football and basketball combined." In addition, he says that "zoos have a huge volunteer force that's willing to go out and help raise money" through programs such as cell-phone recycling. Eco-Cell is on target to collect 40,000 to 50,000 cell phones this year, with plenty of room for growth. There are 150 million cell phones in use in the United States today, with an estimated life of 18 months per unit.

While corporations are in denial and governments paralyzed, the humanitarian and environmental tragedy of the Congo continues to be fueled by wealth extraction. As homes and offices fill up with electronic equipment, as the world and cell phones alike become smaller, we cannot translate the weight of those pinhead tantalum capacitors into human and animal suffering beyond Col. Kurtz's final breath: the horror.

Joshua Seeds is an environmental scientist and writer. Casey Bush is a senior editor at The Bear Deluxe. He reviews and writes poetry from his home. Both writers live in Portland, Oregon.

This article first appeared in The Bear Deluxe Magazine's Summer-Fall 2007 issue.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/19/8389


[hr]http://images.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/20080424/293.wentz.pete.042408.jpg

Pete Wentz from Fall Out Boy

He also gets major kudos for donating a ton of money to “Vote No For Prop 8“.

The Beginning of Hope or the End of It

by Eve Ensler

I spent the last month in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), much of my time in Goma. There, I was privileged to be part of the first public testimonies where women survivors of rape and sexual torture came forward in front hundreds to bravely break the silence on the terrible atrocities done to their bodies and souls during the twelve-year conflict that has embroiled the DRC. The conflict, a virtual proxy war fought between the Congolese government, former Hutu Genocidaires from Rwanda, and ethnic Tutsis is the largest the world has seen since WWII. I heard stories that ranged from young women being raped by fifty men in one day to women being forced to eat dead babies. These women represented hundreds of thousands of survivors of similar crimes. These public testimonies, and other surrounding activities, are part of a fragile but burgeoning grassroots peace movement in the DRC--a movement that exists to stop the violence and restore individual and national autonomy.

The weeks I spent in Goma reflected the insane duality that is the Congo. I met activists, doctors, nurses, NGO workers, leaders, filled with determination and hope, working non-stop, to save lives, heal trauma and provide the most basic resources. At the same time, despair lingered around the borders as rebel leader Laurent Nkunda's troops pillaged, killed, and raped, 16 kilometers away.

Now that I have returned to the US, and there is full scale war with Nkunda's troops threatening to take Goma, I receive emails and calls by the minute from people on the ground who have been rendered speechless and thrown into despair. Where is the world? they ask me. Why is no one coming to defend us? I wonder: What stops the world from intervening on behalf of the people of the Congo?

12 years later, 5.4 million are dead, over 300,000 raped. What about this conflict doesn't move the world to action? Is it that the Congolese people no longer exist in our imagination, since they were decimated by the colonialism and brutality of King Leopold of Belgium? Is it that the vast resources of the Congo--coltan for our cell phones, for example--are all that the West is paying attention to? Is it simply racism--that unless white people are involved in the conflict the world does not intervene? Or, is it because so much of this war is being waged on the bodies, genitals and reproductive organs of women and that the world still does not give a damn about women?

Right now, in America, we are living in the center of a potential paradigm shift. A definite, burgeoning movement. A time of Hope. With the upcoming elections, we could redefine America's standing in the world by enacting foreign policy that is based on the universal understanding that we are all interconnected. That the rape of an eight-year-old-girl in Congo is akin to the rape of an eight-year-old girl in Chicago or Phoenix. We use the words and slogans "Never again" and "Not on our watch", but right now thousands are being displaced, raped, murdered in Eastern DRC.

"The Responsibility to Protect" requires that we, as the international community, particularly America, intervene where governments cannot protect their own people, demand that more UN peacekeeping troops are deployed and seriously focused on the mission of protection. Where the world sees to it that leaders are brought to the negotiating table to find solutions to the conflict so that the people of Congo are no longer pawns in this economic and ethnic battle. Where the world delivers plentiful resources to Congolese women and girls, who have survived the unthinkable.

The Congo is the heart of Africa and Africa is the heart of the world. Right now Eastern Congo is about to spin out of control and tumble into full-scale war. Let the DRC be the place where the paradigm actually shifts. Where we usher in a time of Hope. We have to do more than we have ever done before. The time to act is now.


Eve Ensler is playwright of The Vagina Monologues and the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eve-ensler/the-beginning-of-hope-or_b_139423.html

http://www.greenoptimistic.com

http://www.greenoptimistic.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/uganda_poor_people.jpg

If memory serves, it was the "Plastic Surgery Disasters" album.

Great record btw.

Words fail me...

:hug: