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Campaign

Guns, Money and Mobile Phones

An ore called Columbite-tantalite - coltan for short – is one of the world's most sought-after materials. Refine coltan and you get a highly heat-resistant metal powder called tantalum. It sells for $100 a pound, and it's becoming increasingly vital to modern life. For the high-tech industry, tantalum is magic dust, a key component in everything from mobile phones, to computer chips.

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Coltan

Selling coltan is not illegal. Most of the worldwide tantalum supply - valued at as much as $6 billion a year - comes from legitimate mining operations in Australia, Canada and Brazil. But as demand for tantalum took off with the boom of high-tech products in recent years, a new, more sinister market began flourishing in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There, warring rebel groups - many funded and supplied by neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda - are exploiting coltan mining to help finance a bloody civil war now in its third year.

The slaughter and misery in the Congo has not abated since the country's president, Laurent Kabila, was assassinated. (Kabila's son, Joseph, was quickly appointed the new head of state.) Human Rights Watch researchers, working with monitors in the Congo, estimate that at least 10,000 civilians have been killed and 200,000 people have been displaced in north-eastern Congo since June 1999. Rebels have driven farmers off their coltan-rich land and attacked villages in a civil war raging, in part, over control of strategic mining areas. The Ugandan and Rwandan rebels are just helping themselves. The mining by the rebels is also causing environmental destruction. In particular, endangered gorilla populations are being massacred or driven out of their natural habitat as the miners illegally plunder the ore-rich lands of the Congo's protected national parks.

The link between the bloodshed and coltan is causing alarm among high-tech manufacturers. Slowly they are beginning to grapple with the possibility that their products may contain the tainted fruits of civil war. A similar controversy, after all, wracked the diamond industry in the late 1990s, when global demand for the gems helped finance civil wars in Sierra Leone, Angola and Liberia. Since then, the international community has clamped down on the diamond trade, imposing tougher import and export regulations.

We would urge you to write to your phone’s manufacturer to express your concern over the sourcing of coltan from conflict zones, especially north-eastern DR Congo, and press for openness and assurances that they will never source raw materials from areas like this. We want to see coltan sourced from here treated in the same way as ‘Blood Diamonds’.

More info at: http://www.friendsofthecongo.org/resource-center/coltan.html

HTC Europe Co. Ltd

Salamanca

Wellington Street

Slough, Berkshire

SL1 1YP http://www.htc.com/www/contact/

Nokia

2-6 Boundary Row

London

SE1 8HP http://www.nokia.co.uk/gb-en/support/contact/

Apple Inc

1 Infinite Loop,