SASHA LEZHNEV / ENOUGH PROJECT, CORBIS, REUTERS
60 COMMS CONFLICT METALS
blood and treasure
Key metals used in electronics are extracted from war-torn regions of
the Democratic Republic of Congo. Christine Evans-Pughe finds
out what is being done to stop this evil trade.
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‘The tin industry cannot
certify mines as conflictfree, and the UN does not
have the capacity either.
Most people believe that
certification should be down
to the DRC government.’
How is it that i might legally
own pieces of the Congo?
Under UK law, any bit of Congosourced tin or tantalum inside
my cell phone or computer
belongs to me, which seems fair
enough. on the other hand, at
what point did i get the legal
right to own something illegally
extracted from another country?
this uncomfortable question
is posed by Professor Leif wenar
of King’s College London, who
has written extensively about
the global trade in natural
resources, including ‘conflict
minerals’ from the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (DRC).
the Enough Project’s recent
spoof of Apple’s ‘Get a Mac’ ad
campaign illustrates the issues
more graphically by showing the
Mac and PC characters with
trouser pockets bulging with tin,
tantalum, tungsten, and gold
ores. the video explains that
violent armed militias in the
DRC make hundreds of millions
of dollars from selling these
metals to electronics companies.
“A lot of this stuff comes all
the way from the Congo,” says
PC at one point, “where it’s been
fuelling the deadliest conflict in
the world since the second
world war. Five million killed in
the past 10 years, hundreds of
thousands of women and girls
raped. Horrible stuff.”
there’s been plenty of hand
wringing in the electronics
industry and beyond about
DRC-sourced metals for years,
but little progress towards
better lives for the Congolese.
things are changing, though.
America’s Dodd-Frank Act, the
bill prompted by the global
economic crisis, became law in
July and includes a provision
against ‘conflict metals’. the
Act now requires any wall
street-listed firm whose
products contain metals
obtained from cassiterite
(tin ore), coltan (tantalum ore),
wolframite (tungsten ore), gold
or their derivatives to tell the
securities and Exchange
Commission whether they are
sourcing these minerals from
the DRC or adjoining countries.
Companies must now submit
audited reports on the measures
they have taken to avoid
sourcing the minerals from
mines controlled by armed
groups that may be guilty of
massacres and other atrocities.
the first practical trial to
track minerals from individual
mines in DRC began in June at
the Nyabibwe site in south Kivu.
it was set up by the international
tin Research institute (itRi),
the industry’s representative
body, with $600,000 support from
tin trading companies, smelters,
the tantalum industry and
downstream users including
Apple, Dell, Hewlett Packard,
iBM, intel, Nokia, Philips, RiM
and sony. it is hoped a similar
sum of money will extend the
project for another six months,
at sites to be selected from the
four relevant provinces of DRC:
North and south Kivu, Maniema
and Katanga.
BAGGED AND TAGGED
the scheme involves project
staff allocating a series of tags
to the mine, each marked with a
unique serial number. the tags
are fixed to the bags of ore as
they leave the mine and
additional tags are added as the
ore goes through various
middlemen and processing
steps. information about the
bags’ weight, the date, price and
to whom the ore is being sold is
recorded in a duplicate-paged
logbook at each link in the
supply chain. the idea is to match
up information from the tags
with records in the logbooks, in
order to be able to cross-check
and verify the source of the ore.
Around 17t of cassiterite is
now being tagged in this way
each week at the Nyabibwe site,
by a team consisting of project
staff and local sAEssCAM
(Service d’Assistance et
d’Encadrement du Small-Scale
Mining) and Division of Mine
agents. Data collected so far
suggests this site can produce
around 800t of minerals annually.
implementing the tagging
scheme is difficult, because
mining areas often lack
electricity and internet access
so the written data has to be
input and checked on an on-line
database after the event. At Bisie
in North Kivu, the most important cassiterite mining area in E
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62 COMMS CONFLICT
THE CONFLICT METALS JOURNEY
Extraction
The first step is
extracting the basic
minerals from open
mines in the eastern
part of the DRC. This
work, done by miners
as young as 11 working
for subsistence wages,
is often overseen by
the local militias.
Transport
Once the ores have been
extracted they need to
be transported, often
using manual labour, for
processing. Militias take
the opportunity to ‘tax’
the convoys. Once the
ore is processed it is
difficult to trace the
metals’ origins.
resources
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO
DRC has sizeable deposits of gold,
tantalum, tin and tungsten. In the
mid-1940s, it was the world’s
second largest producer of tin.
Today, depending on which figures
you refer to, the DRC supplies
anything from 10 to 20 per cent of
global tantalum, 3 to 6 per cent of
the world’s tin, and 2 to 4 per cent
of our tungsten. Its share of gold
production is less than 1 per cent,
but gold remains one of the most
significant single earners for the
fighting rebel groups.
These assorted warring militia,
which include the Hutu rebels of
the Democratic Forces for the
Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), are
in charge of more than half the
mines in eastern Congo from
which they demand ‘taxes’ (bribes)
for the minerals being extracted.
Competition between the
various armed factions for control
over minerals has been a factor in
the conflict although the root
causes are more complex,
involving inter-ethnic tension over
land, citizenship and local political
power, according to a recent policy
brief by Ruben De Koning, an
expert on DRC from the Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute.
eastern DRC and next in line
for tags, setting up the scheme
will be particularly tough. Bisie
is at the heart of the conflict
zone and can only be reached by
walking for two days through
jungle. According to Kay
Nimmo, ITRI’s manager of
sustainability and regulatory
affairs, the army presence and
who controls each particular
mining site need to be factored
into any improvement plan.
Addressing these issues will be a
long-term process.
“You have to make contact
with the people in charge of a
certain mine or mining area,
and put in a tracing system and
then explain why they may be
required to change some of their
informal practices of taxation
etc,” she said. “If they carry on,
they need to understand that
they will no longer be supplied
with the tags that allow them to
sell minerals from that area.”
Such efforts are admirable
but raise many questions.
“Realistically, the tin industry
cannot take it on itself to certify
mines as conflict-free and the
UN does not have the capacity to
do this either,” says Wenar.
“Most people believe that certification should be down to the
DRC government. However, one
of the government’s primary
concerns is to maintain its
armed forces, including keeping
former rebels integrated into
the army. In practice this means
allowing people wearing
Congolese uniforms to control
some mines directly or
indirectly, and to ‘tax’ the
minerals while committing
human rights abuses.”
How exactly does a certification scheme reduce conflict?
LESS WAR?
While competition between
armed factions for control over
minerals is a factor in the DRC
civil war, the root causes of the
war include regional and ethnic
issues.
“The collapse of the state in
the eastern region has left a
power vacuum, which has
allowed these groups to proliferate,” says Harrison Mitchell,
director of the consultancy
Resource Consulting Services,
which has worked with the UK
Department for International
Development to understand how
to improve governance of
natural resources in DRC. “The
key issue here is the collapse of
power rather than the economic
incentives of one group or
another. Certification does a lot
of good things, but it doesn’t
necessarily stop rebels with
AK47s taxing a trade route.”
In fact, there is little evidence
to suggest that certification
helps stop conflict. The
Kimberley Process for diamond
certification is often presented
as a positive example, but it was
only put into effect in 2003 once
the diamond-fuelled wars in
Sierra Leone and Angola had
ended.
More worrying is that the
Dodd-Frank Act may disproportionately affect the Congolese
artisanal miners, who are
perhaps the most vulnerable of
stakeholders. Artisanal miners
scratch out a subsistence living
using hand tools, because most
other ways of making a living in
eastern DRC have been
destroyed by the war. When
militias march across your
farmland and steal your cows
every few months, there is not
much incentive to plant crops.
Artisanal miners can at least
pack up and move on in a few
hours if necessary. However,
this kind of mining is the most
difficult to certify. The easiest
option for electronics companies
is to remove conflict areas from
the supply chain entirely, and
source from industrial mining
operations in more peaceful
regions.
As Kay Nimmo from ITRI
points out, such actions will stop
any legal trade but may do
nothing to prevent the trade that
is funding arms.
“The percentage of tin
coming from DRC is just 3 per
cent of global production, which
could make it quite difficult to
fully trace if smuggled out,” she
says. A report published last
year by the UN Group of Experts
on the DRC estimated that 40t, or
$1.24bn, of gold is smuggled out
of DRC each year. On that basis,
armed groups may derive several
million dollars of revenues each
year from the gold trade.
Mitchell poses a more blunt
question: “Once the NGOs have
moved on to the next crisis,
where’s the plan to improve the
livelihoods of the 100,000 or so
people scratching a living in the
dirt? There is a reluctance to
engage with artisanal miners
because it’s time-consuming and
costly. If the NGOs can mobilise
the electronics companies and
donors to engage with these
vulnerable communities that
live and die in poverty that
would be very useful.”
CLEANER TRADE?
In the long term, these issues
may strengthen the case for
efforts such as Leif Wenar’s
Clean Trade initiative, an
attempt to change how we trade
all natural resources. Wenar,
who is a visiting professor at
Stanford and Princeton this
year, will be leading round-table
discussions with representatives
from the UK and US governments,
the extraction industries, NGOs
and academics, to try and draft
new legislation.
The Clean Trade initiative
starts from the premise that
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Consumption
Ultimately, conflict
metals make it into the
supply chain and to
market through a myriad
of channels. An end to
the trade still seems a
long way off.
Protest
Activists put pressure on
companies with
expensively cultivated
reputations, such
as Apple, in a bid
to force them to ensure
they are not unwittingly
supporting conflict.
most importing states have
signed human-rights treaties
that say the citizens of a country
should ultimately control their
country’s resources. Yet if we
own bits of the Congo in our
phones and laptops, our
country’s laws must be violating
these commitments somehow.
“Importing states decide who
to give the legal right to sell them
oil, gas and minerals. Today,
governments decide to grant
that right to armed groups and
extremely authoritarian regimes
in exporting countries,” says
Wenar. “Governments need to
take responsibility for who they
put their consumers into business
with, and make sure that the
citizens of exporting countries
have some control over who is
selling off their national assets.”
The campaign group Global
Witness has been testing these
ideas in the courts, most recently
with an application to review why
the British government has not
applied sanctions to companies
listed in a 2009 report by the UN
Group of Experts on the DRC as
sourcing ‘conflict minerals’
from armed militia.
Whether an extra layer of
illegality is going to help much
is impossible to tell at this stage,
but as Harrison Mitchell says:
“If there is an economic imperative that is strong enough, the
stuff will get through.”
Improving the DRC situation
is another matter. “Fighting
insecurity with interventions in
the economic domain is a difficult fit, ”says Mitchell. “First,
the Congolese government, with
the help of international
partners, needs to establish
security and stop the crimes of
violent actors, including their
own security forces. Concurrently,
the mineral trade should
continue to reform and work to
become a good corporate actor in
the DRC, which should include
engaging with artisanal miners
to improve their livelihoods.”
Meanwhile, the instability
and violence continues. At the
time of going to press, DRC’s
President Kabila has suspended
all mining in eastern DRC areas,
following reports of mass rapes
by militia groups in the area in
early August. ITRI has put its
tagging project on hold. L
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