by JOHN LASKER
A debate is currently raging among personal consumer electronics companies, Congolese activists, and NGOs over whether an American law can finally bring peace to a mining sector in Africa that has sacrificed so much for wealthier countries in the global north.
Two volcanoes shadow the rugged eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which is abundant in rare minerals, such as gold, tin, tungsten and, perhaps the most controversial, tantalum.
The importance of tantalum cannot be overstated. The shiny and silvery mineral helped build the personal electronics revolution of the 1990s and beyond. Tantalum is highly conductive of heat and electricity, and necessary for the manufacture of cell phones, video games consoles, lap tops, and just about any hand-held communication or gaming device. Though the DRC and its mining sector in the eastern Congo does not have the largest reserves of tantalum, the US Geological Society earlier this year reported the DRC is the world’s second leading exporter of the mineral.
But while the global north was experiencing its digital and handheld revolution in the 1990s and early 2000s, the eastern Congo was a chaotic mess of militias, instability and wars. The commonly held belief is that the neighboring Rwandan genocide of 1994 and its exodus of refugees into the eastern Congo gave regional militias and neighboring rival militaries a surreptitious invitation to invade the region and plunder its minerals, such as tantalum, which were subsequently sold onto world markets and into the supply chains of Apple, Intel, Sony and numerous others.
These so-called “conflict mineral” wars in the eastern Congo either directly or indirectly caused six million Congolese to lose their life, according to the Catholic relief effort Caritas Internationalis and the International Rescue Committee, which have called these wars the deadliest since the Second World War.
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