"Blood diamonds" have faded away

"Blood diamonds" have faded away, but we may now be carrying "blood phones." An ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some elegant symbols of modernity -- smartphones, laptops and digital cameras -- are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo.

I've never reported on a war more barbaric than Congo's, and it haunts me. In Congo, I've seen women who have been mutilated, children forced to eat their parents' flesh, girls who have been subjected to rapes that destroyed their insides.

Warlords finance their predations in part through the sale of mineral ore containing tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold. For example, tantalum from Congo is used to make electrical capacitors that go into phones, computers and gaming devices.

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Electronics manufacturers have tried to hush all this up. They want you to look at a gadget and think "sleek," not "blood."

Yet now there's a grass-roots movement pressuring companies to keep these "conflict minerals" out of high-tech supply chains. Using Facebook and You-Tube, activists are harassing companies like Apple, Intel and Research in Motion (which makes the BlackBerry) to get them to lean on their suppliers and ensure the use of, say, Australian tantalum rather than tantalum peddled by a Congolese militia.

A new video taunting Apple and PC computers alike went online last weekend on YouTube. It's a spoof on the famous "I'm a Mac"/ "I'm a PC" ad and suggests that both are sometimes built from conflict minerals. "Guess we have some things in common after all," Mac admits. oil painting
Protesters demonstrated outside the grand opening of Apple's new store in Washington, demanding that the company commit oil painting to using only clean minerals.

Activists blanketed Intel's Facebook page with calls to support tough legislation to curb trade in conflict minerals.
Partly as a result, requirements that companies report on their use of conflict minerals were accepted as an amendment to financial reform legislation.
A word of background: Eastern Congo is the site of the most lethal conflict since World War II. The war had claimed 5.4 million deaths as of April 2007, with the toll mounting by 45,000 a month, according to the International Rescue Committee. wholesale designer handbags
It's not that American tech companies are responsible for the slaughter, or that eliminating conflict minerals from Americans' phones will immediately end the war.

"There's no magic-bullet solution to peace in Congo," notes David Sullivan of the Enough Project, an anti-genocide organization that has been a leading force in the current campaign. "But this is one of the drivers of the conflict."
The economics of the war should be addressed to resolve it.
The Obama administration also should put more pressure on Rwanda to play a constructive role next door in Congo (it has, inexcusably, backed one militia and bolstered others by dealing extensively in the conflict minerals trade).

Impeding trade in conflict minerals is also a piece of the Congo puzzle, and because of public pressure, a group of companies led by Intel and Motorola is now developing a process to audit origins of tantalum in supply chains. wholesale designer handbags
Manufacturers previously settled for statements from suppliers that they do not source in eastern Congo, with no verification. Auditing the supply chains at smelters to determine whether minerals are clean or bloody would add about a penny to the price of a cellphone, according to the Enough Project.

"Apple is claiming that their products don't contain conflict minerals because their suppliers say so," said Jonathan Hut-son, of the Enough Project. "People are saying that answer is not good enough. That's why there's this grass-roots movement, so that we as consumers can choose to buy conflict free."
Some ideas about what consumers can do are at raisehopeforCongo.org -- starting with spreading the word.
Maybe we can undercut wholesale designer handbags vicious militias by making it clear that no phone or computer can be considered "cool" if it perpetuates one of the planet's most brutal wars.
Nicholas D. Kristof writes for The New York Times.