The Enough Project just released a list companies ranked according to their efforts to make their products conflict free - especially in regard to coltan. The top ranked companies are HP, Intel and Motorola, who have made the most effort to source minerals from their products while Nintendo, Canon and Sharp have done nothing.
First discovered in the nineteenth century, coltan in its raw form looks like black mud. 'Coltan' is short for 'columbite-tantalite,' an ore with two rare metals: niobium and tantalum.
Tantalum is used in capacitors to conduct electric charges in high-tech electronic equipment. The information technology boom of the late 1990s meant everyone wanted a laptop and a mobile phone, which turned coltan into the decade's hottest mineral.
In the riverbeds and vast forests of Congo, a massive belt of coltan runs from Bunia to Goma, Kindu, and Bukavu-right through Mugwagu's hometown. Unfortunately for these cities, the world's largest supply of coltan was literally beneath their feet. It attracted rebel forces like wasps. Coltan, along with other minerals such as diamond and copper, is an easy target. Any general and a small army can take control of a mine and terrorize the local population into working for them.
According to an NPR report, 'Gold, tantalum, tin and tungsten are essential parts of mobile phones, laptops and other electronic gadgets. Gold is used in wiring, tantalum stores electricity, tin is used to solder circuit boards, tungsten is used to make mobile phones vibrate.
All these minerals are found in large quantities in the mines of eastern Congo. The mines are controlled by armed groups that levy illegal taxes and extract vast profits that run into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The miners are paid meager wages and work under terrible conditions. The profits from the mining are used to buy the guns and bullets that have kept eastern Congo in a near-constant state of conflict since 1996, according to human rights campaigners.
More than 5 million people have died in eastern Congo during the years of fighting, most of them killed by disease and hunger rather than violence, according to the International Rescue Committee, a New York-based organization. Although a peace deal was signed in 2003, the fighting continues. The demand for minerals and the money they earn no longer simply fuels the conflict, but has also become the cause for it, some activists claim.
Armed groups proliferate with relentless speed as militias emerge to take control of the mines. They frequently use rape as a weapon to terrify and humiliate local populations: Tens of thousands of women and girls are raped in eastern Congo every year. When more than 300 people were raped during a three-day attack this summer, the root cause was a battle between rival armed groups over control of a nearby mine, according to the United Nations.'
Download the entire report here: http://www.enoughproject.org/publications/getting-conflict-free
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