NEW YORK — Does that smart phone in your pocket contribute to rape and murder in the depths of Africa? Soon, you’ll know: A new U.S. law requires companies to certify whether their products contain minerals from rebel-controlled mines in Congo and surrounding countries.
The move is aimed at starving the rebels of funds and encouraging them to lay down their arms.
But experts doubt the law will stop the fighting. Furthermore, they say, it could deprive hundreds of thousands of desperately poor Congolese of their incomes and disrupt the economy of an area that is struggling for stability after more than a decade of war.
“For many, many people, it’s the only livelihood they have,” said Sara Geenen, a researcher at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, who just returned from a trip to the Kivu provinces in eastern Congo.
At issue are three industrial metals — tin, tantalum and tungsten — and gold. Tin is used in the solder that joins electronic components together. Tantalum’s main use is in capacitors, a vital component in electronics. Tungsten has many uses, including light-bulb filaments and the heavy, compact mass that makes cellphones vibrate.
Exports of these metals from eastern Congo have been the subject of a campaign by nonprofit advocacy groups for a few years, one that has borne fruit with the addition of a “Conflict Minerals” provision to the financial-regulation legislation that President Barack Obama signed into law Wednesday.
Although Congo has vast reserves, poverty and war mean most of the mining and processing is done by hand, so production is slow. The country produced 5 percent of the world’s tin supply in 2008, according to tin research institute ITRI. The figure for tantalum ore, a rarer mineral, is higher, but the main sources for world supply are in Brazil and Australia.
Even though Congo’s production is small by world standards, the minerals constitute much of the economic activity in eastern Congo.
Advocacy groups, the United Nations and academic researchers such as Geenen agree that the mines fund rebel groups, homegrown militias and rogue elements of the Congolese army.
But the academics say the advocacy groups have been overselling the link between the mines and violence.
“The fight is not a fight over the minerals,” said Laura Seay, an assistant professor of political science at Morehouse College in Atlanta who studies and visits Congo. “The minerals are used to fund some of the fighting, but it’s not a fight for control of the mines.”
The U.S. law doesn’t ban the minerals trade with the area, something the United Nations has avoided doing as well. Instead, it forces companies to report annually whether their products contain any of the four “conflict minerals” from Congo.
The nine surrounding countries are included in the legislation as well, out of concern that minerals might be smuggled out of the Congo to obfuscate their origin.
Congo’s misery
5 percent Amount of the world’s tin supply produced by Congo in 2008, according to tin research institute ITRI
5 million People, mostly civilians, who have died in on-and-off fighting in Congo since 1994
