Don’t Want Your Cell Phone to Fuel War in Congo? Tell Obama!

As a result of historic legislation in the U.S., a window for a solution to the deadly conflict minerals trade in Congo has just opened: African heads of state are putting senior level backing behind an initiative not unlike that which helped to end the blood diamond trade in West Africa a decade ago. They are creating a certification plan to weed out conflict minerals but need the support of consumers, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and multinational companies.

Four minerals currently fuel the conflict in eastern Congo, and these “3 Ts” of tantalum, tin, tungsten, as well as gold, are used in our cell phones, laptops, and jewelry. They allow armed groups to reap hundreds of millions of dollars every year, contributing to the deaths of five million Congolese people.

Led by six heads of state from Congo to Zambia to Tanzania, the central African group known as the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR) adopted a six-part plan to audit and certify minerals originating from the region as being conflict-free. This is an important step from a region where countries on all sides of Congo’s conflict were involved in the systematic looting of its natural resources. Last fall, Congo’s President Joseph Kabila suspended mining in the war-torn east, and several other presidents added their backing to the regional certification process.

But central Africa’s certification plan is still a plan more real on paper than in practice, in a region rampant with corruption. As the Enough Project uncovered this week in the report Why a Certification Process for Conflict Minerals is Urgent, powerful army and militia commanders are still trading in minerals despite President Kabila’s ban. Moreover, borders are still rife with smuggling, companies are not involved in the certification plan, and its audit system has not been set up or budgeted for.

For real change on conflict minerals to take root in this complex region, two injections will be needed. First, Secretary Clinton, who traveled to eastern Congo in 2009, should establish a high-level partnership with Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi on certification. This partnership should be rooted in a new U.S. special envoy to the Great Lakes of Africa. Given the cross-border and cross-continental aspects of the mineral trade, such an envoy would complement and supplement the work of the ambassadors in the region. End-users of the minerals from electronics to jewelry companies have told us that they would see a U.S.-Great Lakes partnership on certification as a “train that’s leaving the station” and would join in such an action-oriented effort.

Equally crucially, certification needs to be backed by strong conflict minerals regulations from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Legislation signed into law as part of the Wall Street Reform bill last July has a chance to act as the critical leverage point in cutting off global market access to armed commanders on the ground in Congo, because it requires companies to trace and audit whether their minerals are sourced from conflict mines.

Whether this happens or not is up to the SEC, which is responsible for writing the regulations for the law. The SEC has two critical choices to make by April: First, the law will only be effective if the SEC includes all of the companies that use the minerals in their products. Right now, retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target are trying to argue that they should not be included in the legislation, because they only put their labels on products that use the minerals; yet in reality they help design these products. If these companies are not included, the SEC will have created an enormous loophole for conflict minerals to slip into our cell phones and computers.

Second, the SEC must specify steps for companies to take to prove to consumers that they are not sourcing from conflict zones. Without specific reporting requirements on due diligence, companies will take the easy way out and simply ask suppliers whether they use conflict minerals without verifying or auditing. That would make the legislation toothless, with little to no effect on Congo. The United Nations and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have already adopted due diligence guidance in consultation with companies, so building on these recommendations would be a straightforward task.

We as consumers of cell phones, laptops, and jewelry now have the opportunity to have our voices heard by the SEC. Enough has organized a petition that we will deliver to the commission later this month, and which you can sign here. Now is the moment for the Obama administration to seize on the region’s momentum and create strong regulations and a certification process. The cost of allowing this historic moment to pass – continued war and pillaging fueled by our consumer purchases – without putting forth real leadership is unacceptable.

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Photo: The ENOUGH Project