More than 5 million people have died as a result of the war in Eastern Congo that is being fought over the region's mineral resources. As a U.N. report noted a year ago, armed groups are profiting from the mining of gold and minerals such as tin, tantalum and tungsten "that are used principally in the global electronics trade." Enough Project, the anti-genocide initiative of the Center for American Progress, is trying to create consumer demand for "conflict free" electronics, including cameras, computers and cell phones. John Prendergast, co-founder of Enough Project, talked to PDN about the campaign.

PDN: If a consumer who is concerned about violence in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo is about to buy a new cell phone or digital camera, what would you like them to do?
John Prendergast: Once you learn that your purchase is helping to fuel some of the worst violence in the world, you could react in a way that is guilt-ridden or overwhelmed. What we're challenging people to do is take that emotional energy and invest it in a strategy of helping to change the situation. We're just now asking people to call, write or email their cell phone company, digital camera manufacturer or computer manufacturer, telling them they would like to reserve a purchase of [conflict-free devices] that would not be underwriting the horrific violence that plagues the Congo today. We want to help consumers create a market-driven demand for change by reducing demand for minerals [that are] extracted in a way that is destroying communities there.

Buy a digital camera if you need it. The real potent message that can be sent to manufacturers is if you call and say, "If you make a conflict-free digital camera, I will switch from whatever camera I have now and buy yours." What industry will not react to that demand if it's large enough?

PDN: What difficulties face manufacturers who want to trace the source of the minerals in their products?
JP: It's a very, very murky supply chain with many points of transfer. The mineral starts as ore that's mined—often by children, often under duress—in the eastern part of the Congo. It gets taxed, or the mine itself is controlled by one of these armed groups. Armed groups or a company affiliated with them smuggle [the ore] to Rwanda, Uganda or Burundi. Then it is bought by an international trader of minerals, and sold to smelters mostly in Asia. It's thrown together with minerals from all over the world, refined and sent off to [electronics] manufacturers. It's a heck of a chain of custody, but as our research has shown and as companies themselves have found, there are ways to ascertain where this stuff is coming from.

We're not calling for a boycott [of Eastern Congo], because of the considerable potential for negative impact on mining family income. But if all the warlords and predators who control the mineral trade now in a Mafia-like way realize they can't sell any more, they will have to de-link the trade from the violence if they want to make any money. I think that's the best way we're going influence change in the Congo, not by sending more peacekeepers.

PDN: Enough Project supports passage of the Congo Conflicts Mineral Act of 2009 in the U.S Senate. If that bill became law, would it help manufacturers trace their mineral supply chains?
JP: It's a start. Our objective is to create a trace/audit/certify process. Tracing finds out whether the minerals come from conflict-free mines. Then you audit the assertions made by companies to see if they're accurate. After you've shown to have complied with a conflict-free chain of custody, your products could be certified, [with] some kind of logo attached to the product saying that the minerals were removed from the ground in a way that didn't fuel violence.

The Senate bill deals only with the tracing. There [would be] SEC reporting requirements for the importation of those minerals to know where they came from, down to the mine of origin.



PDN: Why are you targeting electronics makers, not the makers of munitions, cat food cans, toothpaste tubes or other users of tin?
JP: People have relationships with their iPod and their Game Boys and particularly with their cell phones and laptops. People don't have a relationship with their cat food can. It's a question of what can evoke the strongest consumer response. Also I believe the majority of these minerals are going to electronics, [that's] the fastest growing arena, and that's where we're going to get the biggest chance for success.

PDN: You seem to be modeling this effort on the "blood diamond" campaign that lead to the diamond industry instituting the Kimberley Process for certifying "conflict free" diamonds. But by many accounts, the diamond trade is rife with smuggling and cheating. Why would this work for minerals smelted far from Congo?
JP: I think the assumption behind that question is that perfection is the enemy of the very good. Blood diamonds fueled conflicts in Angola, Liberia and Sierra Leone less than ten years ago. With the Kimberley Process, the incentive for violent extraction of this precious resource has been removed. Indeed, there is still corruption and cheating in the diamond industry. . .but generally [the Kimberly Process] had a massive positive effect on overall peacekeeping and stabilization efforts in three of the deadliest wars in the world in the earlier part of this decade. The primary object here is to take the incentive out of the violent extraction of these minerals.

PDN: By "violent extraction," you mean miners are made to work at the barrel of a gun?
JP: I mean that the armed groups are in charge, whether they're government army, rebels or militias. They use rape as a tool of social control, they use violence to expropriate land, burning out villages and displacing everyone so they can control the locality. Once a group is in control, you have attacks against civilians to punish them for being perceived as supporting the previous group. That's where we see the primary context for all the rapes that occur. The women are often punished to make an example to the community.

PDN: Is legitimizing the mineral trade enough to stop the conflict in Congo?
JP: The gasoline that absolutely fires that war is the extraction of minerals by the armed groups who are fighting. Until we deal with that, we can't get at the issues of ethnicity, land, [and] power distribution. I go back to these three shining examples, Angola, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, which people thought were largely hopeless places. Because there was an effort to deal with the principal fuel [ie, diamonds] for the conflict in each of those cases, it helped to establish the conditions that allowed for diplomacy, limited military force or expanded judicial efforts, all the things that were part and parcel of the dramatic turnarounds in those three countries. I think that's where we are in Congo.

PDN: What response have you had from electronics manufacturers so far?
JP: Most of the people are still saying, "Wait, what is this?" [or] "If this becomes the next 'blood diamond,' this could be a problem for us. If there's a way we can avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying fees and [bad] press, let's do it." We want to engage with these companies and say, "Here is a way that you can do this, let's work together."

If enough people say, "Make a conflict free product and we'll buy it," that's a powerful statement to these companies. I think it's a pretty great opportunity for these companies to get ahead of this issue.

We're having really good discussions with some companies and some companies are stiff-arming us. For a little bit longer, we're going to keep these conversations confidential, but [eventually] we're going to create a ranking system for companies and how responsive they are to this issue. But we're going to give them a chance. I prefer to hand them a shovel and say, "What do you want to do with it?"