Stopping the carnage in central Africa
During a recent weekend, I re-watched the movie Blood Diamonds (2007), an advocacy-entertainment movie trying to raise awareness about the problem of natural resources being used to finance horrific African wars. As illustrated in Blood, conflict diamonds were used to finance a civil war in Sierra Leone. While the movie is heavy flawed, the message is still important: the mining and exploitation of natural resources is creating havoc throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
An important issue for uber-technologists, transhumanists, technoprogressives, and futurists should be the mining and smuggling of other minerals like gold, cassiterite (tin), wolframite (tungsten), and coltan (tantalum). The latter is a hard, gray, corrosion-resistant mineral used in electronics. And eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo, formerly Zaire) produces 20 to 50 percent of the world's supply.
In 2009, 60 Minutes did an expose on the illegal gold mining activities in eastern Congo. (Gold is used in the circuits of cell phones and computers.) The workers—including children--toil in dangerous conditions and can earn as little as a few dollars a day. According to CBS reporter Scott Pelley, once sediment is extracted, mercury is mixed in. The mercury binds the gold together. "Then they simply burn the mercury away. No one worries much about the toxic fumes; the neurological damage from mercury may not show up for years." The gold is then smuggled east through Uganda, and then onto the Middle East.
The eastern Congo has been lawless for some time with warlords, military, and foreign troops trying to gain control of the various lucrative mining activities. . These conflicts have had all the ugly features of other African wars, including: child soldiers, rape, and women forced into sex slavery. It has been estimated that the recent conflicts in eastern Congo have resulted in over 5 million deaths. For an explanation of the many causes and facets of the conflict, read Jason Stearns' Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (2012).
Jeffrey Gettleman, writing for National Geographic (October 2013), states that the ongoing wars are "like giving an ATM card to a drugged-out kid with a gun. The rebels fund their brutality with diamonds, gold, tin and tantalum."
According to the NG photographer, "When I first went to the Congo, I realized that a hundred years after Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, nothing had changed. People were still being exploited, only now it was multinational corporations sucking up all the resources." For a heart wrenching, but comprehensive, history of the Congo under colonial rule, read Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1999).
Unfortunately, not only are humans being killed, brutally maimed, and horribly exploited, but so is the Congo's unique wildlife. Mountain gorillas, okapis, and bonobos are just three of the species suffering. These animals are not only losing their habitat, but are also being wantonly killed, for god knows what reason.
For example, on June 24, 2012, MaiMai Simba rebels, led by an elephant poacher known as Morgan, attacked the headquarters of the Okapi Wildlife Reserve in Epulu, Congo (located near the borders of both Uganda and Sudan). Among the dead were 6 people—2 wildlife rangers, the wife of one the rangers, an immigration worker, and 2 residents of Epulu—and 13 okapi, a threatened species related to the giraffe. Plus, there was extensive damage to the physical facilities at the reserve.
There is some positive news. The Kimberly Process was established in 2003 in an attempt to prevent conflict diamonds from entering the mainstream diamond market. It was set up "to ensure that diamond purchases were not financing violence by rebel movements and their allies seeking to undermine legitimate governments." Unfortunately, its effectiveness has been questioned by organizations like Global Watch, which recently pulled out of the scheme, claiming it has failed in its stated purpose.
On a different front, President Obama recently signed the Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill, which among other things includes a special section on conflict minerals. The law calls for publicly listed American companies to disclose whether any of their products included minerals from mines controlled by armed groups in the Congo and nine adjoining nations: Angola, Burundi, Central African Republic, Congo Republic (a different nation from the DRC or Congo), Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. There is now a push to have similar legislation enacted by the European Union.
Even before the U.S. legislation was passed, several major electronics companies had begun tracking the minerals in their products. According to Chuck Mulloy of Intel, these regulations will eat into profits, but "we don't want to support people who are raping, pillaging, and killing." One concern with Dodd-Frank is that it might discourage electronics companies from importing minerals from the Congo, which would inadvertently damage the already fragile livelihoods of the local miners.
Another concern with Dodd-Frank is the high cost of implementation. Tim Worstall, in Forbes (October 24, 2013), somewhat cynically writes: "I agree that we want to prevent starving children being worked to death in producing metals that we use. But why do we have to do it in this vastly expensive and bureaucratic manner? Why can't we just do it using a method that works and is also cheap? You never know, some of the money saved might end up being used to feed starving children: or possibly even, in a manner that I sometimes think desirable, in shooting those who exploit and starve them."
I spend all my vacation time (and then some) volunteering in Uganda, a country that is being overrun with refugees (it shares its western border with the Congo, its southern border with Rwanda, and its northern border with Sudan). Uganda is my second home. The issue of conflict minerals is not a joking matter for me. More needs to now be done.
Those of us with an optimistic picture of the future, and particularly those interested in technology, should be concerned about how our future is being constructed. We need to insist that more be done to protect the innocent victims in eastern Congo and beyond. The trading in conflict minerals must stop.
R. Dennis Hansen is currently employed as a planner for a federal resource management agency in Utah. He enjoys traveling and has lived in and/or visited and/or worked in over 40 countries on five continents. Hansen is a member of the Mormon Transhumanist Association and Engineers without Borders.
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