A rchive Date
[ 25-03-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Africa ]
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[http://metronews.ca/news_feature_detail.asp?id=525
Africa’s bloody war for cellphones
The growing demand for cellular phones and other high-tech devices in recent years has led a British group to accuse industrialized countries of failing to punish companies that exploited a war that killed millions.
The Rights and Accountability in Development group last week issued a report that said the world’s 30 richest countries failed to investigate what companies in their countries did in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where an estimated 4.7 million people died in the last five years in a brutal war involving armies and guerrillas from seven countries.
At the centre of the charges is tantalum - a rare, highly conductive and heat-resistant metal used in electronic components and found in many mobile electronics, including cellphones. According the Brussels-based Tantalum-Niobium International Study Center (TIC) - an industry group that represents over 70 members in 20 countries - tantalum demand has increased by 8-to-12 per cent a year since 1995, paralleling demand for cellphones.
The raw ore the metal comes from - columbite-tantalite or "coltan" - at one point hit a market price as high as $400 US a kilogram. Some 80 per cent of the world’s known coltan deposits are said to be in Africa. About 80 per cent of those deposits - 64 per cent of the world’s - is in the DRC.
Similar to the diamond industry, coltan has been identified as a driving factor in the continuation of the war, which ended last year.
In April 2001, a United Nations report outlined the illegal exploitation of DRC’s natural resources including coltan, naming companies, governments and individuals who exploited the war for personal gain. The report valued exploited resources at upwards of $5 billion US.
Since 2001, the TIC has called upon its members not to trade in coltan from DRC, but disputes the widely-reported figures for the ore.
"I have tracked this statement about ‘80 per cent of the world’s coltan’ back to November 1999 or so, but could not find the real source," TIC secretary-general J. A. Wickens said in an e-mail interview, adding that a maximum 10 per cent of the world’s coltan is African.
Whatever the numbers, cellphone makers take the issue seriously.
"Although we don’t use any tantalum directly ourselves, we have very aggressively followed back upstream with some of our component suppliers that do put tantalum in some of the components we use, to ensure they’re bringing the material in from legitimate mines," said Frank Maw, president of Motorola Canada.
Saleem Khan/Metro Toronto
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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