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Why did the FDLR say they were working with the Mai Mai but the Mai Mai denied that?

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Why did the FDLR say they were working with the Mai Mai but the Mai Mai denied that?

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Are the communities in the so called "bush" actually safer?

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The newest technology relies on the most primitive methods/collections of minerals. Without the mines in Africa, phones, computers, and even jewelry would not be produced.

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Still a sense of community among the Congolese

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Still a sense of community among the Congolese

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General said he couldn't harm the two FDLR prisoners because they were Congo's future army

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The leader of the militia who was interviewed stated that the UN does not help with any conflict in the Congo, but instead just stays where they are and collects pay checks.

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From the mine seen in the VICE documentary, it seemed like children and women don't have to work anymore and that there are no armed rebels to oversee. However they only saw one mine and it could have been staged this way

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What would happen if the UN and foreign investments left he country? Is that what the militias want?

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What would happen if the UN and foreign investments left he country? Is that what the militias want?

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While visiting a militia whose objective is to end outsider corruption in the Congo, it is brought forth that the group has a relationship with the violent FDLR

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At a young age, children were forced to work in the mines for about $1 per day

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No one really seems to fully understand what is happening in the Congo. Everyone is just looking out for their own interests at the expense of the Congolese people.

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The forces of the government are unable to stop the conflict in their country as it is too huge and the mines too spread out, according to the rebels in the VICE documentary the UN is not doing much to help

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Congolese people weren't welcoming to Vice reporters because they believe all whites are destroying their country by taking all their minerals. 

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Congolese people weren't welcoming to Vice reporters because they believe all whites are destroying their country by taking all their minerals. 

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Conflict minerals create corruption and chaos among the Congolese people, but without it they would be even less poor than they are today.

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Removing Conflict Minerals From Western Electronics could:
- Dissolve the Rebel Groups and make Congo safer
- Remove the only source of wealth from an already poor country

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Goma is the center of conflict

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Conflict Minerals: not a blessing, more of a curse 

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Conflict Minerals: not a blessing, more of a curse 

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Vice Documentary

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Increasing the demand for minerals leads to more war in the Congo. Without totally boycotting the country and ruining their economy, how can we avoid the use of conflict minerals?

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Increasing the demand for minerals leads to more war in the Congo. Without totally boycotting the country and ruining their economy, how can we avoid the use of conflict minerals?

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Conflict Minerals continue to be a conflict

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Conflict Minerals continue to be a conflict

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Due to internal African clashes between FDLR, Mai Mai, other militias, and Congolese government

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The rebels do not like the UN. What would happen if they took a different approach? The Congo appears to need help so who is speaking up on their behalf?

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The rebels do not like the UN. What would happen if they took a different approach? The Congo appears to need help so who is speaking up on their behalf?

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Companies using conflict minerals must register with the SEC and let them know where the minerals are from. 

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Companies using conflict minerals must register with the SEC and let them know where the minerals are from. 

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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-27782829

This is more incentive to use conflict free minerals.

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Minerals are used to make or buy more weapons to be able to fight more wars to be able to get more minerals

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Should the government or the locals have more control over the conflict minerals?

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While Dodd-Frank is working now, the possibility remains that demand increases and conflict minerals become lucrative once again. 

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While Dodd-Frank is working now, the possibility remains that demand increases and conflict minerals become lucrative once again. 

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http://www.enoughproject.org/special-topics/progress-and-challenges-conflict-minerals-facts-dodd-frank-1502

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Eastern Congo’s artisanal gold production should benefit Congolese people and the state rather than armed men and predatory companies.

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Eastern Congo’s artisanal gold production should benefit Congolese people and the state rather than armed men and predatory companies.

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For this to happen:
- Companies operating illegally in the Congo should be investigated, and if there is any evidence of wrongdoing, they should be prosecuted.
- Companies that fail to meet international supply chain due diligence standards laid out by the OECD must be held to account.
- Artisanal miners in eastern Congo must be properly supported by the Congolese government.

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An estimated $28 billion worth of gold lies under the soil in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (hereafter Congo).[i] But the country's gold wealth, the majority of which is artisanally mined, has long been ill-used. Preyed upon by armed groups, bandits and corrupt elites the revenues generated by eastern Congo's artisanal gold sector have all too often funded corruption or fuelled abuses and violent conflict rather than helping to relieve the region's poverty.

Global Witness' investigation into a recent gold rush along the Ulindi River in Shabunda territory in eastern Congo reveals the extent of the problems that beset the region's artisanal gold sector. The Ulindi boom generated more than a tonne of gold per year, worth around $38 million,[ii] whose beneficiaries included armed groups and a predatory Chinese-owned company, Kun Hou Mining, rather than the local population.

Global Witness research reveals that Kun Hou Mining paid Raia Mutumboki armed groups operating along the banks of the Ulindi $4,000 and gave them two AK-47 assault rifles in order to secure access to rich gold deposits on the river bed. Kun Hou Mining ran four semi-industrial river dredging machines along the Ulindi in the boom. Members of the same armed groups also earned up to $25,000 per month by regularly taxing the workers on locally-made dredgers who were doing the dangerous job of manually sucking up gold from the river bed.[iii] Up to 150 of these manually operated dredgers worked along the river at the height of the rush. South Kivu officials charged with oversight of the province's artisanal gold sector appeared to defend Kun Hou Mining rather than enforce Congolese law and hold the company accountable for its illegal activity.

In some cases, the same authorities worked hand-in-hand with armed men and women from Raia Mutumboki armed groups to illegally tax artisanal gold diggers, in violation of Congolese law. Mining authorities in Bukavu, the regional capital, falsified declarations of origin for the small quantities of Shabunda's artisanal gold that were officially exported in order to obscure its origins, which are considered "high risk" by international standards.

Global Witness has seen documents that show that at least 12kg of Ulindi gold that had benefited armed groups was exported by a South Kivu gold trading house to its sister company in Dubai.[iv] But the majority of the boom's gold - and taxes levied on it - have disappeared, almost certainly smuggled out of the country. South Kivu's provincial accounts for 2014 and 2015 show no evidence of a gold rush. The gold boom left Shabunda town almost as it found it: a deprived enclave with no roads, running water or electricity and its people suffering grinding poverty.

Gold booms are not uncommon in Congo and Shabunda is not an isolated case: four-fifths of eastern Congo's artisanal miners work in the gold sector.[v] Semi-industrial dredging companies, often Chinese-owned, have been accused by Congolese provincial officials and others of not paying taxes and smuggling gold out of the country in other parts of eastern Congo.[vi] Hundreds of millions of dollars of artisanally produced gold from the country's east - which may have fuelled human rights abuses and violence - end up on global markets each year, often passing through transit countries such as Uganda, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Switzerland.[vii] Ultimately the gold ends up in products like jewellery and electronic circuit boards sold around the world.

Shabunda's gold rush could have played out very differently. Since 2010 companies all along gold supply chains have had access to international guidance developed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations (UN). This guidance helps them source and trade gold from high-risk areas like Shabunda in a responsible way. Companies operating in Congo's gold sector have been legally required under Congolese law to implement the OECD guidance since 2012. Recent Chinese industry due diligence guidelines for responsible mineral supply chains,[viii] based on the OECD guidance, provide directions and advice for companies like Kun Hou Mining to help ensure that their operations are not linked to abuses. Guidelines introduced in the UAE in 2012 make clear that all Dubai Multi Commodities Centre members and non-members should manage their supply chains according to the OECD principles. In order for these reforms to translate into meaningful changes in conflict-affected and high risk areas like Shabunda, governments must hold companies and public officials involved in abuses to account.

Companies either producing or internationally trading Shabunda's gold did not implement these supply chain due diligence standards. Those companies operating in Congo acted in direct contravention of Congolese supply chain due diligence laws, which Congolese authorities failed to enforce. As a consequence, gold that benefitted armed men and a company operating illegally was left unchecked and traded internationally. Meanwhile the boom and its accompanying huge influx of gold diggers put pressure on already scarce resources in Shabunda town, pushing up food prices and leaving many local people unable to make ends meet. At the same time, mining authorities in Shabunda town ran an illegal taxation racket and, where gold was officially taxed, failed to deposit revenues with the Provincial government. This money is badly needed: in 2014 the town's only hospital recorded 535 cases of malnutrition.[ix]

Eastern Congo's artisanal gold production should benefit Congolese people and the state rather than armed men and predatory companies. For this to happen:

The Congolese government must hold provincial officials to account where they neglect their duties related to the artisanal gold sector or operate illegally. Companies operating illegally in Congo, such as Kun Hou Mining, should be investigated, and where evidence of wrongdoing is found, prosecuted.

Companies at all stages along global gold supply chains must implement the OECD due diligence guidance on responsible mineral supply chains. This includes publishing an annual report detailing the risks found in their supply chain and the measures taken to reduce these.

States have an obligation under international law to ensure companies respect human rights.[x] As such, they must legally require companies under their jurisdiction to undertake OECD standard supply chain due diligence, and must effectively monitor its implementation.[xi] Companies that fail to meet international supply chain due diligence standards laid out by the OECD must be held to account.

Artisanal miners operating in eastern Congo must be properly supported by the Congolese government. SAESSCAM, the Congolese state agency charged with oversight of the artisanal sector, must be urgently reformed or else disbanded.

Finally, donor governments should support diplomatic and development initiatives to promote responsible sourcing and support the Congolese government in establishing sustainable livelihoods for communities in areas where natural resources are extracted. Nascent and still localised efforts to formalise and manage artisanal gold supply chains should be supported and encouraged by governments and the private sector.[xii]
Methodology
Global Witness engages with companies, governments and other partners around the world to tackle the issue of natural resource-funded conflict. For the past 15 years we have reported on the links between the trade in minerals and armed conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, working with Congolese civil society, policy-makers and business leaders to develop practical solutions.

Global Witness undertook research in Shabunda town, the eponymous hub of South Kivu's Shabunda territory, on two occasions in 2015 and conducted further interviews in Bukavu, South Kivu's provincial capital, on three separate occasions in 2014 and 2015. In total we interviewed over 80 people involved in the gold boom that erupted along Shabunda's Ulindi River in 2013. Interviewees included gold divers, dredge workers, traders and businesspeople brought to Shabunda town by the gold rush as well as local residents, authorities and civil society. We also spoke to a whistle-blower from Kun Hou Mining.

An excellent August 2015 publication by the Great Lakes civil society platform COSOC-GL (the Coalition of Civil Society Organisations in the Great Lakes Region) raised several important and unanswered questions about the Ulindi gold boom and has proved a comprehensive resource. [xiii]

[i] OSISA, 2013, "The High Cost of Congolese Gold", http://www.osisa.org/sites/default/files/high_cost_of_congolese_gold_final.pdf, p.16. Using an international gold price of US$38.5/g the estimated 26 million ounces (737, 087kg) would be worth $28,377,849,500.

[ii] Global Witness calculations for the volumes of artisanal gold produced during the gold boom along the Ulindi River are based on documents collected and interviews during fieldwork in Shabunda town in January and March 2015 and in Bukavu in 2014 and 2015 and documents provided by South Kivu's mining agency SAESSCAM and Mining Division, as well as estimations provided by an industry expert familiar with Kun Hou's operations along the Ulindi River. We estimate that the four semi-industrial dredging machines owned by Kun Hou Mining produced around 460kg of alluvial gold per year and over 150 locally-made artisanal dredging machines produced between 550kg and 720kg for the same period. In total we estimate that the two types of machines produced 1,010kg to 1,180kg. To calculate the value of this gold we used a gold price of $38.5/gram, which is an average for the international gold price spanning the period of the gold boom (exact range for calculations is between $38.89 million and $45.43 million). Gold traders interviewed by Global Witness in Shabunda town were selling their gold at the international market price, a phenomenon that is not uncommon at artisanal gold sites in eastern Congo See endnote 3 on calculations for artisanal gold production and taxes by Raia Mutumboki armed groups and endnote 43 on Kun Hou Mining calculations.

[iii] Global Witness estimates that 150 locally-made artisanal dredging machines produced between 550kg and 720kg per year during the gold boom. This estimation was made on the basis of three separate sources including interviews with dredge workers on the Ulindi River and other documents from Shabunda and Bukavu. From these we identified a range of average weekly gold production for artisanal dredgers between 77g and 100g. (The first is partial data from SAESSCAM South Kivu breaking down artisanal dredge production on the Ulindi over a three week period by dredger that shows an average of 77g of gold produced per artisanal dredge per week. The second is from statistics from a gold trading house based in Shabunda town that owns dredgers operating on the Ulindi, which show an average production of 99g per dredge per week. The third data point comes from interviews with dredge workers active along the Ulindi River from which we take an estimated weekly production of around 100g.) Dredge production varies from week-to-week and depending on deposits along the river, as well as other factors including weather and mechanical breakdowns. Also, due to the clandestine way in which the Ulindi's gold has been managed and traded only general estimates are possible. Global Witness estimates assume gold production along the Ulindi based on 150 dredgers working for 48 weeks per year thereby setting aside one month per year for breakdowns and other production stoppages. (Exact calculations are: 77g per week produced by 150 dredgers working 48 weeks a year equals 554.4kg and 100g per week produced by 150 dredgers working 48 weeks a year equals 720kg.) Several sources estimate that 50 of the 150 dredgers on the Ulindi were operating in an upstream portion of the river under control of Raia Mutumboki armed groups. Dredge workers on the Ulindi River told Global Witness in March 2015 that Raia Mutumboki groups on each side of the river taxed dredgers in areas they control 5g of gold per group twice per month - this amounts to almost $20,000 per month for the groups. Added to these payments, each dredge worker operating in areas controlled by armed groups must pay them 1000 Congolese Francs per week. Dredge workers showed Global Witness receipts ('jetons') for these payments. Finally, dredges regularly have to contribute 'rations' to armed groups of up to 80,000 Congolese Francs per month. Taken together this amounts to up to $25,000 per month earnings for the armed groups. (Exact calculations: 5g collected twice per month from 50 dredgers equals 500g per month, using a price of $38.5/g is the equivalent of $19,250. For 'jetons', 50 dredgers each with 10 workers paying 1000 Congolese Francs each week equals 2,000,000 Congolese Francs per month. Rations of 80,000 Congolese Francs per dredge for 50 dredgers per month equals 4,000,000 Congolese Francs. At an exchange rate of 960 Francs to 1 US dollars, this combined 6,000,000 Congolese Francs is worth $6,250. The $19,250 taxed in gold plus the $6,250 taxes on dredge workers and 'rations' equals $25,500 per month.) These calculations do not include other taxes by armed groups including a mooring payment of $500 per dredge. Other groups operating under the name "Raia Mutumboki" may also have imposed taxes during the same period but are not included in these calculations. See also COSOC-GL (Coalition of Civil Society Organisations in the Great Lakes Region), 2015,"Etude sur les pratiques de dragues à Shabunda: La ruée vers l'or à Shabunda", http://cosoc-gl.org/2015/la-ruee-vers-lor-a-shabunda/, Section 4; Tages Anzeiger, December 2015, Goldrausch im wilden Osten, http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/wirtschaft/goldrausch-im-wilden-osten/story/20233121

[iv] Publicly available annual export reports complied by the provincial Mining Division in Bukavu show that all of Alfa Gold DRC's legal gold exports from South Kivu in 2014 and 2015 were exported to Alfa Gold Dubai.

[v] IPIS, 2014, "Analysis of the Interactive Map of Artisanal Mining Areas in Eastern DRC: May 2014 update", http://ipisresearch.be/publication/analysis-interactive-map-artisanal-mining-areas-eastern-drc-may-2014-update/, p.11

[vi] Global Witness has seen official documents from the provincial Ministry of Mines in (former) Orientale Province, dated February 2015, which detail illegal activities and environmental damaged by semi-industrial dredges along the River Ituri and River Aruwimi, Ituri; see also research conducted by PAX, 2015, "Exploiter (dans) le désordre Cartographie sécuritaire du secteur aurifère à Mambasa occidental" http://www.paxchristi.net/news-media/resources-pax-christi-member-organisations ; and Southern Africa Resource Watch (SARW), 2014, "Congo's Golden Web: The people, companies and countries that profit from the illegal trade in Congolese gold" http://www.sarwatch.org/sites/sarwatch.org/files/Publications_docs/congogold3web.pdf p.38

[vii] See for example: Stop-Pillage, 2013, TRIAL, 2013, "TRIAL files a criminal denunciation to the Swiss Federal Prosecutor against a Swiss refinery company suspected of laundering looted gold from the Democratic Republic of the Congo"

[viii] Global Witness, 2015, Global Witness welcomes progressive new Chinese Mineral Supply Chain Guidelines, https://www.globalwitness.org/en-gb/press-releases/global-witness-welcomes-progressive-new-chinese-mineral-supply-chain-guidelines/

[ix] Global Witness interview, Shabunda town, March 2015.

[x] For example Congo has ratified all eight of the ILO fundamental conventions, which are legally binding international treaties http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:11200:0::NO:11200:P11200_COUNTRY_ID:102981

[xi] See also Civil Society Statement at the 10th Forum on Responsible Mineral Supply Chains https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/conflict-minerals/civil-society-statement-10th-forum-responsible-mineral-supply-chains-paris-10-12-may-2016/

[xii] Partnership Africa Canada (PAC), 2015, "Just Gold", http://www.pacweb.org/en/just-gold

[xiii] COSOC-GL, 2015

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An estimated $28 billion worth of gold lies under the soil in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (hereafter Congo).[i] But the country's gold wealth, the majority of which is artisanally mined, has long been ill-used.

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more specifically, the use of child soldiers and violence against women

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Advancement in technology = increase in demand

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Advancement in technology = increase in demand

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The "dot com boom" in 2000 caused the price of tantalum to increase 10 times its initial value

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Colin Kinniburgh &squarf; Spring 2014

January 6, 2014. It's the opening night of the Consumer Electronics Show, and it seems as if the whole of Silicon Valley has descended on the Las Vegas Convention Center and Venetian hotel to peddle its wares. On the show floor, a company called Sensoria introduces a "smart bra" designed to accommodate fitness tracking technology, while rivals brandish other "wearables." A startup called Parrot introduces its Jumping Sumo toy drone. Tractive unveils a dog remote. Tech gurus and A-list celebs celebrate the rise of the Internet of Things, with its data-crunching onesies and bottle warmers. As the night wears on, T-Mobile CEO John Legere, wearing a bright pink company T-shirt, crashes a swanky AT&T party, only to be kicked out fifteen minutes later. "I just wanted to hear Macklemore," he tells a reporter.

But at his keynote in the Palazzo Auditorium, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich strikes a more serious tone, leaving behind the Internet of Things to remind the audience of the things that power the Internet. "In sub-Saharan Africa," a video behind him announces, "there is war that feeds off of global demand for electronics. The place is the DRC-the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The region is ground zero for conflict minerals." Grim statistics flash across the screen. But Intel offers a solution: a "conflict-free" microprocessor, which Krzanich promises will contain no minerals whose extractionfunds rebel militias in the eastern DRC. The audience responds with tepid applause.

It's no secret by now that the supply chain feeding our smartphones and laptops is not pretty. Thanks to a flurry of media coverage of Foxconn and other Chinese manufacturers, we know about the dismal conditions at the factories that churn out iPhones. Less is known about what happens to our phones and computers and those clunky old monitors when we throw them away. Many of them are shipped to places like Guiyu, China, or to the slums surrounding cities like Delhi and Accra, where men, women, and children make a living dismantling them with hammers and blowtorches. The metals stripped out of old circuit boards become fodder for new circuit boards, and the cycle continues.

Most of the minerals that go into circuit boards aren't recycled, however. In fact, a significant portion of the bewildering mix of elements that go into any single smartphone-from exotic-sounding dysprosium and gadolinium to the more mundane-sounding tin-is mined from a select few sites around the world. Of these minerals, a handful-most notably the "three Ts" (tin, tantalum, and tungsten) and gold-have in recent years achieved notoriety as "conflict minerals."
The Great Congo Wars
That's because many of these minerals originate in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the nation at the center of Africa that, for the past decade and a half, has been home to the deadliest conflict since the Second World War. Since 1996 a series of wars there are estimated to have killed upward of 5 million Congolese people, with over 90 percent of these deaths due not directly to violence but to war-exacerbated disease and starvation. In the areas worst affected by the conflict-the provinces of North and South Kivu and the district of Ituri (Orientale province), which border with Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi-over 80 percent of the population reports having been displaced at least once, and hundreds of thousands still live in squalid camps. Nearly fifty women are raped every hour across the country, according to a 2011 study, earning the DRC its reputation as the worst place on earth to be a woman.

The litany of atrocities quickly becomes numbing, and the list of rebel factions involved-from the Hutu-extremist FDLR ( Forces démocratiques pour la libération du Rwanda) to the Ugandan Islamists of the ADF-NALU to the assortment of Mai-Mai "self-defense" militias scattered across the country-can be dizzying. Little wonder, then, that for the better part of the eighteen years since a Rwandan-led invasion sparked the First Congo War, the world has looked the other way.

The story of the Congo wars begins with the 1994 Rwandan genocide. As massacres within Rwanda led to the deaths of some 800,000 people in 100 days, still vaster numbers of both Hutu and Tutsi fled across the border into neighboring Zaire (as the Congo was then known). Among the refugees were Hutu génocidaires-belonging to both the erstwhile Rwandan army and extremist militias-who had been defeated in the conflict by the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). With the Ugandan- and U.S.-trained Paul Kagame at its helm, the RPF seized power in July 1994. The new government's first priority was to wipe out the génocidaires who, having regrouped in the refugee camps of eastern Zaire, sought to carry on their war against the RPF from across the border.
Blood Tantalum?
By this point, Zaire's once-mighty dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, was losing his grip on power and could do little to contain the chaos unfolding along the country's eastern border. Moreover, his longtime support for the Hutu génocidaires put him in the crosshairs of the new Rwandan regime. In mid-1996 the Rwandan government convened Zaire's four principal opposition leaders in Kigali with the intent of catalyzing Mobutu's overthrow. The RPF then used the Zairian rebels as a cover for its U.S.-approved invasion of the DRC in October of that year. Atrocities mounted until, in May 1997, the ailing Mobutu was overthrown and replaced by the rebels' political leader, Laurent Kabila, marking the end of the First Congo War.

Within a year, however, Kabila fell out with his Rwandan backers, who mounted a second invasion in July 1998. Over the course of the following year, a half-dozen regional powers were drawn into the conflict. Rebel factions splintered, leaning alternately toward Rwanda and Uganda for support, even as uniformed troops from both countries continued their own offensives on Congolese soil. Neither an official ceasefire between the six countries involved in the conflict in July 1999 nor the formation of a United Nations peacekeeping mission in November of the same year did much to slow the fighting, and the Second Congo War dragged on into the new millennium.

It was in this context that the Congo's mining sector came back to life and the phenomenon of "conflict minerals" emerged. A close look at the entry of Congolese coltan into the global electronics supply chain is indicative of the broader patterns that shaped the trade.

Coltan, short for columbite-tantalite, is an unrefined mixture of two metallic ores from which tantalum is extracted. Tantalum is an excellent conductor of electricity whose primary use is in the tiny capacitors that keep our increasingly miniaturized electronic devices running. Roughly a quarter of the tantalum ore mined in the first decade of the twenty-first century came from the Congo, but coltan itself is a phenomenon specific to the Congo. Most of it sits near surface level in forested areas (including two national parks designated world heritage sites by UNESCO) in and around North Kivu province, which borders with Rwanda and Uganda. Coltan is extracted both legally and illegally by mostly migrant "artisanal" miners who dig it out of the ground with picks, shovels, and their bare hands.

Thanks to economic networks established during the first years of the Congo War, at least three-quarters of the coltan leaving the eastern Congo around the time the price spiked in 2000 directly enriched Rwandan military and political elites.

Around the middle of the Second Congo War (which ended in 2003), speculation in international markets caused a spike in the price of tantalum, which shot up nearly ten times over the course of the year 2000 before dropping back to its initial price by late 2001. These were the heady days of the dot-com boom, and two of the world's largest tantalum processors-Cabot and H.C. Starck-had set up long-term contracts with their suppliers in an effort to corner the market in gadget-bound tantalum. Other processors frantically sought new sources and found them in the vast untapped coltan reserves of the war-torn DRC. "Thanks to economic networks that had been established in 1998 and 1999 during the first years of the Congo War," writes Michael Nest in his meticulous study Coltan, "minerals traders and military officials were perfectly placed to funnel it out of the country."
Business as Usual
The primary beneficiary was Rwanda, which was the main transit point for both legal and illegal coltan from the DRC. By some estimates, half of the coltan Rwanda claimed to be producing actually originated from across the border. A 2002 UN Panel of Experts report alleged that as much as 70 percent of the coltan exported from eastern Congo at the time was being mined "under the direct surveillance of RPA [Rwandan army] mining détachés and evacuated by aircraft from airstrips near mining sites directly to Kigali or Cyangugu." Another 15 to 25 percent was being exported through local comptoirs (trade posts) owned by Rwandan army officers or closely linked to the Rwandan government. At least three-quarters (and as much as 95 percent) of the coltan leaving the eastern Congo around the time the price spiked in 2000 directly enriched Rwandan military and political elites.

The Ugandan military establishment fared similarly well, but from the gold trade. In a 2005 report, Human Rights Watch established that in 2003, "an estimated $60 million worth of Congolese gold was exported from Uganda, much of it destined for Switzerland." Some of this gold ultimately went into gadgets, but much of it also went into jewelry, treasuries, and speculative markets; tech companies were hardly alone in profiting from the plundering of Congolese resources by regional powers and their proxies.

The case of gold mining in the DRC's Ituri district, bordering Uganda, illuminates the transition to the next chapter in the conflict minerals story. By 2003 all foreign armies-including Uganda and Rwanda's-had officially withdrawn from the DRC, but both countries supported proxy militias that, among other functions, continued to supply them with minerals. Major foreign corporations entered the equation by collaborating with the armed groups.

In Ituri, competition over land and resources as well as deep ethnic divisions prompted some of the conflict's grisliest fighting between 1999 and 2007, with the FNI (Nationalist and Integrationist Front, backed by Uganda) on one side and the UPC (Union of Congolese Patriots, backed by Rwanda) on the other. Ugandan, Congolese, and UN peacekeeping troops also entered the fray, and in 2003 so did AngloGold Ashanti, one of the largest gold producers in the world.

After a World Bank-backed revision of the DRC's mining code led a rash of state-owned mines to be privatized, AngloGold began exploration in Mongbwalu, a remote area near the Ugandan border. The company had no illusions about what it was getting itself into and, far from trying to insulate its operations from the conflict, dove in headfirst. As Human Rights Watch reported in 2005:

Following earlier attempts to make contact with the UPC armed group, AngloGold Ashanti representatives established relations with the FNI, . . . who controlled the Mongbwalu area. In return for FNI assurances of security for its operations and staff, AngloGold Ashanti provided logistical and financial support-that in turn resulted in political benefits-to the armed group and its leaders.

Between 2002 and 2004, battles between the UPC and FNI killed at least 2,000 civilians in the Mongbwalu area alone and led to the displacement of tens of thousands more, many of whom ultimately perished.

AngloGold Ashanti was just one of many corporations implicated in atrocities at the peak of violence in the DRC conflict. The UN Panel of Experts had in 2002 already named eighty-five foreign companies-ranging from Cabot and H.C. Starck to De Beers (the world's largest diamond company) and Barclays-whose operations in the Congo violated international norms. Tech companies were far enough down the supply chain to avoid being cited in the report, but the smelters that supplied them were not so lucky.

The war economy has set the standard for working conditions in mines throughout the DRC. Children as young as six years old still make up an estimated 40 percent of the mining workforce.

With foreign armies officially out of the picture in 2003, these corporations worked alongside the increasingly sophisticated military and commercial networks that came to dominate the mineral trade. The UN Panel of Experts reported that these networks, still overseen by top military and political chiefs in Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, as well as in the DRC government, had continued to extract mineral revenue through a combination of methods, including "embezzlement, tax fraud, extortion, the use of stock options as kickbacks and the diversion of state funds." Rebel militias were among several contingents funneling profits from tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold to their foreign patrons. Rogue brigades of the FARDC (the Congolese army), meanwhile, secured their own mines, whose revenues provided troops with a supplement to their otherwise paltry income-many were not paid at all-and provided at least modest insurance against their defection to the other side.

The war economy has set the standard for working conditions in mines throughout the DRC. Over the past few years, media reports have drawn attention to places like Bisie, a massive tin mine in North Kivu where miners scratch ore out of the mud with their fingers, picks, and shovels. Some highly skilled miners lug sacks of ore to the surface through tunnels hundreds of feet deep, only to hand over the majority of their earnings to local toughs. When grim reports started surfacing from Bisie in 2008, the mine was controlled by a renegade battalion of the FARDC. "We provide security for the miners," said the colonel in charge.

Control of Bisie has changed several times since, and conditions are now said to be improving. But across the Congo, children, some as young as six years old, still make up an estimated 40 percent of the mining workforce. Like the other miners, many of them are exposed to mercury, uranium, and other heavy metals; all of them lift heavy loads, breathe in toxic dust, and wade in murky water, leaving them vulnerable to a predictable assortment of health problems. Protective equipment and medical services are scarce.

Even conservative estimates suggest that the DRC was supplying some 20 to 30 percent of the world's tantalum in the first decade of the twenty-first century-up to a third at the beginning of the decade-and analysts like Michael Nest affirm that conflict coltan has played a key role in keeping global tantalum prices down. Meanwhile, writes Nest, tantalum has been "partly responsible for the miniaturization of electronic devices and for the growth of markets for these products." It follows that the increasing sophistication and profitability of the gadgets we buy has depended in part on the brutal regime of accumulation prevailing in the Congo.

If this labor exploitation has failed to put a damper on Silicon Valley's proclamations about propelling the world economy into the cloud, it has nevertheless attracted a remarkable number of conscientious consumers in the Global North. From the Netherlands and Australia to the United Kingdom and the United States, campaigns linking our cell phones to atrocities in the DRC have drawn an unprecedented amount of attention to the conflict, producing all kinds of laws, industry initiatives, and liberal guilt around conflict minerals.

In their successes, however, these campaigns have unleashed a Pandora's box of unintended consequences that many Congolese activists argue have only exacerbated the country's woes. The increasingly enthusiastic participation of major tech companies has done little to address the deeper causes of the conflict. Even if it outdoes the hollow "solutionism" that Silicon Valley has prescribed for all manner of social ills, the consumer- and corporate-driven approach to conflict minerals has so far fallen short as a strategy for peace in the Congo.

Take the dominant U.S. campaign against conflict minerals, led by the Enough Project. Founded in 2007 as part of the Center for American Progress, the Enough Project is a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group that seeks to "end genocide and crimes against humanity" in Africa. Its reports, publicity, and lobbying efforts around conflict minerals in the DRC have drawn consumers, legislators, and celebrities to the cause-including dozens of A-list "upstanders" highlighted on the Enough website-and created a platform that resonates with tech companies that fear being associated, however indirectly, with warlords, child soldiers, and mass rapes. Now the Enough Project has added to its list of achievements Intel's "conflict-free" microprocessors, which it claims will pave the way for similar initiatives across the industry.

Along the way, Enough helped shape a seemingly obscure provision in the Dodd-Frank Act that has drastically affected the economy of eastern Congo. Signed into law in July 2010, Section 1502 of the sweeping financial reform bill requires any company registered on the U.S. stock exchange to disclose whether its products might contain conflict minerals from the DRC. The provision, and the 2012 SEC rule meant to enforce it, stop short of banning the use of such minerals, but U.S. companies got the message quickly. The most obvious solution was to stop sourcing minerals from the region altogether.

The backlash against la loi Obama-Obama's law, as it is known to many in the Congo-has been fierce. " How Congress Devastated Congo," read David Aronson's August 2011 column in the New York Times, alleging that the law had placed a "de facto embargo" on the DRC's minerals and cost thousands, if not millions, of artisanal miners their already paltry livelihoods. Fears quickly arose that some of these miners would join militias out of desperation. It didn't help that Congolese president Joseph Kabila promptly one-upped U.S. legislators by imposing an embargo on minerals from North and South Kivu, in the form of a moratorium that lasted from September 2010 to March 2011.

This did not prevent continued mineral extraction and smuggling, as Enough noted on its blog; on the contrary, critics allege, it allowed the FARDC to expand its control of mines in the area. In December 2010-when the moratorium was in full force-Sara Geenen, a policy researcher at the University of Antwerp, observed at the Kamituga gold mine in South Kivu that FARDC and police units had installed themselves at a previously peaceful site under the premise of "securing the implementation of the president's decision." They allowed diggers to continue their work after paying a hefty "entrance fee," in flagrant violation of the law. Some skilled miners refused to pay and instead attempted to mine clandestinely at night; one was shot and killed, prompting riots and further repression.

Kabila's widely despised moratorium didn't last, but the charges leveled against Dodd-Frank's conflict minerals provision persist. Opponents of the bill have consistently complained that Congolese voices played no role in its drafting, and that it was the product of a top-down lobbying effort divorced from the interests of the people it was intended to help. Still, several Congolese organizations have come out in its favor-Enough marshaled over forty Congolese women's and human rights groups in support-suggesting that it has provoked a real debate on the ground. For their part, critics like Aronson and his Congolese counterparts, in their insistence on the "bad jobs are better than no jobs" status quo, have found themselves aligned with U.S. business interests represented by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Business Roundtable, who are fighting the Dodd-Frank rule in court. (You know things are bad when a representative from a respected peace group, speaking on a panel convened by a leading Congolese-American human rights organization, finds himself lamenting that children who used to work in the mines on their vacations are no longer able to.)

There is no question that much needs to change in the "artisanal" mines. But so far, the schemes being pushed by outside groups seem to have done more harm than good. Some of the most damning evidence against the boycott, in fact, has come from its key advocates. In an August 2012 report detailing its achievements, the Enough Project cited a 65 percent drop in armed groups' profits from the trade in the "three Ts" over two years. But as researchers at the Goma, North Kivu-based Pole Institute have pointed out, Enough's own figures point to an increase in the proportion of profits going to armed groups over this period. Mining profits are down overall, but legal miners have been worst affected. Those who have lost their jobs have probably found little comfort in Enough's proposals to "empower miners" through U.S.-, EU-, and World Bank-sponsored development of construction and agriculture.

Perhaps most discouraging, though, is a May 2013 report by the UK-based organization Global Witness, another key advocate of the conflict minerals boycott. Under the mundane title "Putting Principles into Practice," the report documents a situation that ought to give pause to even the most impassioned advocates of current supply chain certification efforts: an ongoing military smuggling racket at the Kalimbi mine in Nyabibwe, one of the "conflict-free" mines heralded by the Enough Project and U.S. media outlets as an exemplar of progress in the industry. According to the report,

Colonel Shaka, an FARDC commander (101st sector) stationed in Nyabibwe, is siphoning off a portion of minerals produced at Kalimbi before they enter the mineral tagging system. . . . Usually twice a month at night, the untagged cassiterite is smuggled out of the mine site and transported by military vehicles to Goma, where it is sold on for the Colonel's profit. In December 2012, two tonnes of tin ore from Kalimbi was shipped [sic] to Goma via this network.

Neither the Enough Project nor the Conflict-Free Tin Initiative have addressed these allegations publicly, even though the Kalimbi mine, certified by the Conflict-Free Tin Initiative as part of a pilot "closed-pipe" supply chain, is among those that might supply the tin for Intel's new microchips. If true, these reports would signal that the conflict minerals campaign has failed to achieve its most elemental goal-cutting off the flow of mineral revenue to armed groups- at one of its flagship mines. What does that say about its broader prospects for building peace?

For all its flaws, the conflict minerals approach has undeniably struck a nerve in a country whose history has exemplified the "resource curse." Using this framework, groups like the Enough Project have done an impressive job of rallying international attention to the conflict. And the spotlight they have cast on labor exploitation in the electronics supply chain should be heartening to all who consider themselves progressives. Indeed, wages are said to have doubled at pilot "closed pipe" mines like Kalimbi, despite ongoing smuggling.

By painting foreign investors as the good guys in an otherwise bleak landscape of warlords and corrupt officials, even the most well-intentioned NGOs risk exacerbating rather than solving these problems.

Not Enough
The problem, according to Maurice Carney, executive director of Friends of the Congo, is that narrow advocacy around conflict minerals has promoted a convoluted and largely ineffective approach to peace and elided the deeper causes of the country's misery. "It's not a conflict-free Congo that this is about," says Carney. "This is about a free Congo, a free and liberated Congo. The overwhelming majority of the country is not part of the conflict. But the whole country is impoverished and dependent."

As Carney points out, conflict minerals only go so far toward explaining why a country that is arguably the world's richest in terms of natural resources, holding an estimated $24 trillion in untapped mineral reserves, is instead the poorest: the IMF estimates that the average Congolese person makes about a dollar a day. A comprehensive approach to peace and justice in the Congo, for Carney, would require combating the structures that prevent the Congolese people from controlling their own affairs, including the foreign powers that have played the most consistent role in perpetuating the violence-starting with the military elites of Rwanda and Uganda and their international backers. Such an approach would also need to place more emphasis on building stronger Congolese social and political institutions from the grassroots up, rather than foregrounding the benevolence of a select few international actors.

If the criteria for "conflict-free" mines is merely that their profits not go to armed groups, then this framework sets the bar for accountability not too high-as critics on the right have argued-but far too low. "Conflict-free" does not mean free of child labor, which is ubiquitous throughout the country, including in the copper belt to the south. It certainly doesn't mean free of health hazards, environmental damage, and poverty wages. Nor does not it mean free of corrupt privatization deals and land grabs, like the one that granted Arizona-based copper and gold giant Freeport-McMoRan an extremely generous concession to the massive Tenke Fungurume mine-a site twice the size of Kinshasa-in the copper-rich province of Katanga in the early 2000s.

By painting foreign investors as the good guys in an otherwise bleak landscape of warlords and corrupt officials, even the most well-intentioned NGOs risk exacerbating rather than solving these problems. The Enough Project is eager to work with corporations seeking to increase their stake in the Congo, provided they insulate themselves from the conflict and forego the worst abuses of some of their predecessors in the area. Enough's senior policy analyst, Sasha Lezhnev, touts that Congolese minerals are still the cheapest around even if you "check every box in terms of due diligence," and he would like to see more investors seize the opportunity.

One of the group's main corporate partners is Banro, a Canadian firm with four major mining concessions in South Kivu that has no doubt been diligent about checking all the boxes. The company's 2012 Corporate Sustainability Report portrays its signature project, the Twangiza industrial gold mine, as a resounding triumph for the local community, providing not only jobs but also new schools, health care services, and roads, thanks to the Banro Foundation. A closer read of the report suggests that less than half of the 3,000 jobs the project generated were permanent, and few of the permanent positions, although most went to Congolese citizens, benefited the local population. Meanwhile, the company is struggling to push back some 3,000 artisanal miners who continue to dig on the perimeter of the concession.

Still more illuminating than Banro's 2012 brochure is its 2009 Feasibility Study of the Twangiza project, which conceded that the mine's profitability hinges on a ten-year tax holiday and exemption from import duty, granted when Banro acquired the concession in 1997. (Banro's entry into the region at this stage, like AngloGold Ashanti's a few years later, landed it on the UN Panel of Experts' list of companies violating OECD guidelines. Neither company has faced sanctions for its wartime abuses.) In addition, Banro has the uncommon advantage of owning the Twangiza mine outright, while most other foreign miners continue to cede at least a nominal ownership stake to one of the DRC's three major state-owned mining companies.

Maurice Carney is not impressed with Banro's-and Enough's-promises for the Congo. Even if the conflict minerals campaign does not simply provide "a cover for U.S. allies and Western mining interests" in the DRC, as he and his colleagues have argued, Enough's corporate partnerships underscore the neoliberal assumptions that undergird the campaign. Echoing Silicon Valley's "companies over countries" ethos, Enough prioritizes corporate-driven reform schemes at the expense of the kinds of systemic change that the DRC needs. As the Pole Institute's Dominic Johnson notes, industry-led supply chain transparency initiatives inadvertently provide a way for the Congolese state to further deflect responsibility for the protection of its people. With the Kabila regime already relying on what the International Crisis Group has called "governance by substitution" -wherein UN peacekeepers prop up the army, Western NGOs provide social services, and corporations, along with the Chinese, build infrastructure-this is the last thing the DRC needs.

With neither a labor movement to guide them nor a responsible government to keep them in check, industry-led reform schemes risk providing an even greater foothold for corporate interests in what remains a crisis zone. If the current trend continues, tech companies like Intel and Motorola will continue to reap the good press from supply chain reform, while the less visible players-mining corporations, politicians, and the savviest of the smugglers and military elites-will take home the lion's share of the profits. Armed groups, if they are not thwarted by political or military means, will turn to other sources of funding. And the vast majority of Congolese people will once again get left behind.

There's a long way to go before phrases like "resource sovereignty," championed by advocates like Carney, will have any substance for Congolese miners. Decent models of mineral extraction exist-for example, "fairmining," modeled on Fair Trade, which seeks to foster cooperatives of artisanal miners and train them in sustainable practices rather than replacing them with mechanized strip mines-but it is easy to understand why they have fallen low on the DRC's list of priorities. By virtually all accounts, strengthening legitimate government institutions is the most fundamental first step toward any measure of justice in the DRC.

That might sound daunting. And with Kabila set to remain in power until 2016 after his fraudulent reelection in 2011, few Congolese are holding their breath. But a few clear demands would go a long way toward setting the country-from the halls of power in Kinshasa to the artisanal mines of North Kivu-on the right track.

The first step toward justice is peace, which, for the first time in several years, seems within reach-not because of advocacy around conflict minerals but because of tougher UN peacekeeping and new diplomatic pressure on Rwanda from the Global North. The suspension of U.S. military aid to the Kagame regime as of 2012 has been central to this, but it has not reversed two decades of impunity. If young people in the Global North hope to help sustain the fragile peace in the DRC, says Kambale Musavuli, a student organizer with Friends of the Congo, they would be better off using their cell phones to call their representatives and demand further sanctions on Rwanda than fretting about the minerals inside them.

With peace on the horizon, it's also time to revive the topic of reparations for the DRC, a proposal that has been floated periodically by international authorities and the Kabila government but has as yet amounted to nothing. A comprehensive reparations program would implicate not only Rwanda, Uganda, and other regional powers but the corporations that have taken advantage of Congolese resources throughout the conflict. It might start with those who have allegedly racked up some $3.7 billion in unpaid taxes and fines over the past five years for their operations in the province of Katanga alone.

The sums owed to the Congolese government by both foreign and national elites-not to mention the funds siphoned off by its own power brokers-make the $1 billion loan granted by the World Bank last May look paltry. Even without tackling all corruption, a renewed push for reparations could help steer Congolese development away from reliance on foreign capital-whether in the form of loans or private investment-and toward collective self-determination. Carney points to Latin America for examples of successful resistance to privatization and efforts at collective resource management that could provide a model for the DRC.

Ultimately, though, the momentum for such a transformation can only come from the Congolese people themselves. "Congo is in dire need of a civil rights movement," says Musavuli. And here, again, technology has a role to play. Perhaps the crowning irony of "conflict minerals" is that, in a country that supplies the materials to keep so many of us connected, less than 2 percent of the population has access to the Internet. Through new community and tech centers across the country, Congolese youth groups are seeking to change this and foster the kinds of awareness, communication, and solidarity that social movements demand. Could they help spark the kind of radical change that the DRC needs? As long as they don't forget the miners, they just might.

Colin Kinniburgh is an editor at Dissent.

* The number of supply chain monitoring initiatives alone-from the OECD's Due Diligence Guidelines to the Ger-man BGR's Certified Trading Chains to USAID's Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade to the electronics industry-based EICC/GeSI Conflict-Free Smelter Scheme to the ICGLR's Regional Certification Mechanism to Motorola's Solutions for Hope-has become almost as dizzying as the list of armed groups involved in the conflict.

Correction: An earlier version of this piece attributed the phrase "governance by substitution" to a blog post by the International Rescue Committee, when the post was in fact published by the International Crisis Group.

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Beyond "Conflict Minerals": The Congo's Resource Curse Lives On | Dissent Magazine

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"In sub-Saharan Africa," a video at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show announces, "there is war that feeds off of global demand for electronics. The place is the DRC-the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The region is ground zero for conflict minerals."

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The state lost out on in the easter Congo gold bloom, while armed groups, foreign miners and provincial authorities pocketed millions. 

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The state lost out on in the easter Congo gold bloom, while armed groups, foreign miners and provincial authorities pocketed millions. 

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An estimated $28 billion worth of gold lies under the soil in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (hereafter Congo).[i] But the country's gold wealth, the majority of which is artisanally mined, has long been ill-used. Preyed upon by armed groups, bandits and corrupt elites the revenues generated by eastern Congo's artisanal gold sector have all too often funded corruption or fuelled abuses and violent conflict rather than helping to relieve the region's poverty.

Global Witness' investigation into a recent gold rush along the Ulindi River in Shabunda territory in eastern Congo reveals the extent of the problems that beset the region's artisanal gold sector. The Ulindi boom generated more than a tonne of gold per year, worth around $38 million,[ii] whose beneficiaries included armed groups and a predatory Chinese-owned company, Kun Hou Mining, rather than the local population.

Global Witness research reveals that Kun Hou Mining paid Raia Mutumboki armed groups operating along the banks of the Ulindi $4,000 and gave them two AK-47 assault rifles in order to secure access to rich gold deposits on the river bed. Kun Hou Mining ran four semi-industrial river dredging machines along the Ulindi in the boom. Members of the same armed groups also earned up to $25,000 per month by regularly taxing the workers on locally-made dredgers who were doing the dangerous job of manually sucking up gold from the river bed.[iii] Up to 150 of these manually operated dredgers worked along the river at the height of the rush. South Kivu officials charged with oversight of the province's artisanal gold sector appeared to defend Kun Hou Mining rather than enforce Congolese law and hold the company accountable for its illegal activity.

In some cases, the same authorities worked hand-in-hand with armed men and women from Raia Mutumboki armed groups to illegally tax artisanal gold diggers, in violation of Congolese law. Mining authorities in Bukavu, the regional capital, falsified declarations of origin for the small quantities of Shabunda's artisanal gold that were officially exported in order to obscure its origins, which are considered "high risk" by international standards.

Global Witness has seen documents that show that at least 12kg of Ulindi gold that had benefited armed groups was exported by a South Kivu gold trading house to its sister company in Dubai.[iv] But the majority of the boom's gold - and taxes levied on it - have disappeared, almost certainly smuggled out of the country. South Kivu's provincial accounts for 2014 and 2015 show no evidence of a gold rush. The gold boom left Shabunda town almost as it found it: a deprived enclave with no roads, running water or electricity and its people suffering grinding poverty.

Gold booms are not uncommon in Congo and Shabunda is not an isolated case: four-fifths of eastern Congo's artisanal miners work in the gold sector.[v] Semi-industrial dredging companies, often Chinese-owned, have been accused by Congolese provincial officials and others of not paying taxes and smuggling gold out of the country in other parts of eastern Congo.[vi] Hundreds of millions of dollars of artisanally produced gold from the country's east - which may have fuelled human rights abuses and violence - end up on global markets each year, often passing through transit countries such as Uganda, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Switzerland.[vii] Ultimately the gold ends up in products like jewellery and electronic circuit boards sold around the world.

Shabunda's gold rush could have played out very differently. Since 2010 companies all along gold supply chains have had access to international guidance developed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations (UN). This guidance helps them source and trade gold from high-risk areas like Shabunda in a responsible way. Companies operating in Congo's gold sector have been legally required under Congolese law to implement the OECD guidance since 2012. Recent Chinese industry due diligence guidelines for responsible mineral supply chains,[viii] based on the OECD guidance, provide directions and advice for companies like Kun Hou Mining to help ensure that their operations are not linked to abuses. Guidelines introduced in the UAE in 2012 make clear that all Dubai Multi Commodities Centre members and non-members should manage their supply chains according to the OECD principles. In order for these reforms to translate into meaningful changes in conflict-affected and high risk areas like Shabunda, governments must hold companies and public officials involved in abuses to account.

Companies either producing or internationally trading Shabunda's gold did not implement these supply chain due diligence standards. Those companies operating in Congo acted in direct contravention of Congolese supply chain due diligence laws, which Congolese authorities failed to enforce. As a consequence, gold that benefitted armed men and a company operating illegally was left unchecked and traded internationally. Meanwhile the boom and its accompanying huge influx of gold diggers put pressure on already scarce resources in Shabunda town, pushing up food prices and leaving many local people unable to make ends meet. At the same time, mining authorities in Shabunda town ran an illegal taxation racket and, where gold was officially taxed, failed to deposit revenues with the Provincial government. This money is badly needed: in 2014 the town's only hospital recorded 535 cases of malnutrition.[ix]

Eastern Congo's artisanal gold production should benefit Congolese people and the state rather than armed men and predatory companies. For this to happen:

The Congolese government must hold provincial officials to account where they neglect their duties related to the artisanal gold sector or operate illegally. Companies operating illegally in Congo, such as Kun Hou Mining, should be investigated, and where evidence of wrongdoing is found, prosecuted.

Companies at all stages along global gold supply chains must implement the OECD due diligence guidance on responsible mineral supply chains. This includes publishing an annual report detailing the risks found in their supply chain and the measures taken to reduce these.

States have an obligation under international law to ensure companies respect human rights.[x] As such, they must legally require companies under their jurisdiction to undertake OECD standard supply chain due diligence, and must effectively monitor its implementation.[xi] Companies that fail to meet international supply chain due diligence standards laid out by the OECD must be held to account.

Artisanal miners operating in eastern Congo must be properly supported by the Congolese government. SAESSCAM, the Congolese state agency charged with oversight of the artisanal sector, must be urgently reformed or else disbanded.

Finally, donor governments should support diplomatic and development initiatives to promote responsible sourcing and support the Congolese government in establishing sustainable livelihoods for communities in areas where natural resources are extracted. Nascent and still localised efforts to formalise and manage artisanal gold supply chains should be supported and encouraged by governments and the private sector.[xii]
Methodology
Global Witness engages with companies, governments and other partners around the world to tackle the issue of natural resource-funded conflict. For the past 15 years we have reported on the links between the trade in minerals and armed conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, working with Congolese civil society, policy-makers and business leaders to develop practical solutions.

Global Witness undertook research in Shabunda town, the eponymous hub of South Kivu's Shabunda territory, on two occasions in 2015 and conducted further interviews in Bukavu, South Kivu's provincial capital, on three separate occasions in 2014 and 2015. In total we interviewed over 80 people involved in the gold boom that erupted along Shabunda's Ulindi River in 2013. Interviewees included gold divers, dredge workers, traders and businesspeople brought to Shabunda town by the gold rush as well as local residents, authorities and civil society. We also spoke to a whistle-blower from Kun Hou Mining.

An excellent August 2015 publication by the Great Lakes civil society platform COSOC-GL (the Coalition of Civil Society Organisations in the Great Lakes Region) raised several important and unanswered questions about the Ulindi gold boom and has proved a comprehensive resource. [xiii]

[i] OSISA, 2013, "The High Cost of Congolese Gold", http://www.osisa.org/sites/default/files/high_cost_of_congolese_gold_final.pdf, p.16. Using an international gold price of US$38.5/g the estimated 26 million ounces (737, 087kg) would be worth $28,377,849,500.

[ii] Global Witness calculations for the volumes of artisanal gold produced during the gold boom along the Ulindi River are based on documents collected and interviews during fieldwork in Shabunda town in January and March 2015 and in Bukavu in 2014 and 2015 and documents provided by South Kivu's mining agency SAESSCAM and Mining Division, as well as estimations provided by an industry expert familiar with Kun Hou's operations along the Ulindi River. We estimate that the four semi-industrial dredging machines owned by Kun Hou Mining produced around 460kg of alluvial gold per year and over 150 locally-made artisanal dredging machines produced between 550kg and 720kg for the same period. In total we estimate that the two types of machines produced 1,010kg to 1,180kg. To calculate the value of this gold we used a gold price of $38.5/gram, which is an average for the international gold price spanning the period of the gold boom (exact range for calculations is between $38.89 million and $45.43 million). Gold traders interviewed by Global Witness in Shabunda town were selling their gold at the international market price, a phenomenon that is not uncommon at artisanal gold sites in eastern Congo See endnote 3 on calculations for artisanal gold production and taxes by Raia Mutumboki armed groups and endnote 43 on Kun Hou Mining calculations.

[iii] Global Witness estimates that 150 locally-made artisanal dredging machines produced between 550kg and 720kg per year during the gold boom. This estimation was made on the basis of three separate sources including interviews with dredge workers on the Ulindi River and other documents from Shabunda and Bukavu. From these we identified a range of average weekly gold production for artisanal dredgers between 77g and 100g. (The first is partial data from SAESSCAM South Kivu breaking down artisanal dredge production on the Ulindi over a three week period by dredger that shows an average of 77g of gold produced per artisanal dredge per week. The second is from statistics from a gold trading house based in Shabunda town that owns dredgers operating on the Ulindi, which show an average production of 99g per dredge per week. The third data point comes from interviews with dredge workers active along the Ulindi River from which we take an estimated weekly production of around 100g.) Dredge production varies from week-to-week and depending on deposits along the river, as well as other factors including weather and mechanical breakdowns. Also, due to the clandestine way in which the Ulindi's gold has been managed and traded only general estimates are possible. Global Witness estimates assume gold production along the Ulindi based on 150 dredgers working for 48 weeks per year thereby setting aside one month per year for breakdowns and other production stoppages. (Exact calculations are: 77g per week produced by 150 dredgers working 48 weeks a year equals 554.4kg and 100g per week produced by 150 dredgers working 48 weeks a year equals 720kg.) Several sources estimate that 50 of the 150 dredgers on the Ulindi were operating in an upstream portion of the river under control of Raia Mutumboki armed groups. Dredge workers on the Ulindi River told Global Witness in March 2015 that Raia Mutumboki groups on each side of the river taxed dredgers in areas they control 5g of gold per group twice per month - this amounts to almost $20,000 per month for the groups. Added to these payments, each dredge worker operating in areas controlled by armed groups must pay them 1000 Congolese Francs per week. Dredge workers showed Global Witness receipts ('jetons') for these payments. Finally, dredges regularly have to contribute 'rations' to armed groups of up to 80,000 Congolese Francs per month. Taken together this amounts to up to $25,000 per month earnings for the armed groups. (Exact calculations: 5g collected twice per month from 50 dredgers equals 500g per month, using a price of $38.5/g is the equivalent of $19,250. For 'jetons', 50 dredgers each with 10 workers paying 1000 Congolese Francs each week equals 2,000,000 Congolese Francs per month. Rations of 80,000 Congolese Francs per dredge for 50 dredgers per month equals 4,000,000 Congolese Francs. At an exchange rate of 960 Francs to 1 US dollars, this combined 6,000,000 Congolese Francs is worth $6,250. The $19,250 taxed in gold plus the $6,250 taxes on dredge workers and 'rations' equals $25,500 per month.) These calculations do not include other taxes by armed groups including a mooring payment of $500 per dredge. Other groups operating under the name "Raia Mutumboki" may also have imposed taxes during the same period but are not included in these calculations. See also COSOC-GL (Coalition of Civil Society Organisations in the Great Lakes Region), 2015,"Etude sur les pratiques de dragues à Shabunda: La ruée vers l'or à Shabunda", http://cosoc-gl.org/2015/la-ruee-vers-lor-a-shabunda/, Section 4; Tages Anzeiger, December 2015, Goldrausch im wilden Osten, http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/wirtschaft/goldrausch-im-wilden-osten/story/20233121

[iv] Publicly available annual export reports complied by the provincial Mining Division in Bukavu show that all of Alfa Gold DRC's legal gold exports from South Kivu in 2014 and 2015 were exported to Alfa Gold Dubai.

[v] IPIS, 2014, "Analysis of the Interactive Map of Artisanal Mining Areas in Eastern DRC: May 2014 update", http://ipisresearch.be/publication/analysis-interactive-map-artisanal-mining-areas-eastern-drc-may-2014-update/, p.11

[vi] Global Witness has seen official documents from the provincial Ministry of Mines in (former) Orientale Province, dated February 2015, which detail illegal activities and environmental damaged by semi-industrial dredges along the River Ituri and River Aruwimi, Ituri; see also research conducted by PAX, 2015, "Exploiter (dans) le désordre Cartographie sécuritaire du secteur aurifère à Mambasa occidental" http://www.paxchristi.net/news-media/resources-pax-christi-member-organisations ; and Southern Africa Resource Watch (SARW), 2014, "Congo's Golden Web: The people, companies and countries that profit from the illegal trade in Congolese gold" http://www.sarwatch.org/sites/sarwatch.org/files/Publications_docs/congogold3web.pdf p.38

[vii] See for example: Stop-Pillage, 2013, TRIAL, 2013, "TRIAL files a criminal denunciation to the Swiss Federal Prosecutor against a Swiss refinery company suspected of laundering looted gold from the Democratic Republic of the Congo"

[viii] Global Witness, 2015, Global Witness welcomes progressive new Chinese Mineral Supply Chain Guidelines, https://www.globalwitness.org/en-gb/press-releases/global-witness-welcomes-progressive-new-chinese-mineral-supply-chain-guidelines/

[ix] Global Witness interview, Shabunda town, March 2015.

[x] For example Congo has ratified all eight of the ILO fundamental conventions, which are legally binding international treaties http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:11200:0::NO:11200:P11200_COUNTRY_ID:102981

[xi] See also Civil Society Statement at the 10th Forum on Responsible Mineral Supply Chains https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/conflict-minerals/civil-society-statement-10th-forum-responsible-mineral-supply-chains-paris-10-12-may-2016/

[xii] Partnership Africa Canada (PAC), 2015, "Just Gold", http://www.pacweb.org/en/just-gold

[xiii] COSOC-GL, 2015

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An estimated $28 billion worth of gold lies under the soil in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (hereafter Congo).[i] But the country's gold wealth, the majority of which is artisanally mined, has long been ill-used.

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The country’s gold wealth is preyed upon by armed groups, bandits, and corrupt elites

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The country’s gold wealth is preyed upon by armed groups, bandits, and corrupt elites

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An estimated $28 billion worth of gold lies under the soil in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (hereafter Congo).[i] But the country's gold wealth, the majority of which is artisanally mined, has long been ill-used. Preyed upon by armed groups, bandits and corrupt elites the revenues generated by eastern Congo's artisanal gold sector have all too often funded corruption or fuelled abuses and violent conflict rather than helping to relieve the region's poverty.

Global Witness' investigation into a recent gold rush along the Ulindi River in Shabunda territory in eastern Congo reveals the extent of the problems that beset the region's artisanal gold sector. The Ulindi boom generated more than a tonne of gold per year, worth around $38 million,[ii] whose beneficiaries included armed groups and a predatory Chinese-owned company, Kun Hou Mining, rather than the local population.

Global Witness research reveals that Kun Hou Mining paid Raia Mutumboki armed groups operating along the banks of the Ulindi $4,000 and gave them two AK-47 assault rifles in order to secure access to rich gold deposits on the river bed. Kun Hou Mining ran four semi-industrial river dredging machines along the Ulindi in the boom. Members of the same armed groups also earned up to $25,000 per month by regularly taxing the workers on locally-made dredgers who were doing the dangerous job of manually sucking up gold from the river bed.[iii] Up to 150 of these manually operated dredgers worked along the river at the height of the rush. South Kivu officials charged with oversight of the province's artisanal gold sector appeared to defend Kun Hou Mining rather than enforce Congolese law and hold the company accountable for its illegal activity.

In some cases, the same authorities worked hand-in-hand with armed men and women from Raia Mutumboki armed groups to illegally tax artisanal gold diggers, in violation of Congolese law. Mining authorities in Bukavu, the regional capital, falsified declarations of origin for the small quantities of Shabunda's artisanal gold that were officially exported in order to obscure its origins, which are considered "high risk" by international standards.

Global Witness has seen documents that show that at least 12kg of Ulindi gold that had benefited armed groups was exported by a South Kivu gold trading house to its sister company in Dubai.[iv] But the majority of the boom's gold - and taxes levied on it - have disappeared, almost certainly smuggled out of the country. South Kivu's provincial accounts for 2014 and 2015 show no evidence of a gold rush. The gold boom left Shabunda town almost as it found it: a deprived enclave with no roads, running water or electricity and its people suffering grinding poverty.

Gold booms are not uncommon in Congo and Shabunda is not an isolated case: four-fifths of eastern Congo's artisanal miners work in the gold sector.[v] Semi-industrial dredging companies, often Chinese-owned, have been accused by Congolese provincial officials and others of not paying taxes and smuggling gold out of the country in other parts of eastern Congo.[vi] Hundreds of millions of dollars of artisanally produced gold from the country's east - which may have fuelled human rights abuses and violence - end up on global markets each year, often passing through transit countries such as Uganda, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Switzerland.[vii] Ultimately the gold ends up in products like jewellery and electronic circuit boards sold around the world.

Shabunda's gold rush could have played out very differently. Since 2010 companies all along gold supply chains have had access to international guidance developed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations (UN). This guidance helps them source and trade gold from high-risk areas like Shabunda in a responsible way. Companies operating in Congo's gold sector have been legally required under Congolese law to implement the OECD guidance since 2012. Recent Chinese industry due diligence guidelines for responsible mineral supply chains,[viii] based on the OECD guidance, provide directions and advice for companies like Kun Hou Mining to help ensure that their operations are not linked to abuses. Guidelines introduced in the UAE in 2012 make clear that all Dubai Multi Commodities Centre members and non-members should manage their supply chains according to the OECD principles. In order for these reforms to translate into meaningful changes in conflict-affected and high risk areas like Shabunda, governments must hold companies and public officials involved in abuses to account.

Companies either producing or internationally trading Shabunda's gold did not implement these supply chain due diligence standards. Those companies operating in Congo acted in direct contravention of Congolese supply chain due diligence laws, which Congolese authorities failed to enforce. As a consequence, gold that benefitted armed men and a company operating illegally was left unchecked and traded internationally. Meanwhile the boom and its accompanying huge influx of gold diggers put pressure on already scarce resources in Shabunda town, pushing up food prices and leaving many local people unable to make ends meet. At the same time, mining authorities in Shabunda town ran an illegal taxation racket and, where gold was officially taxed, failed to deposit revenues with the Provincial government. This money is badly needed: in 2014 the town's only hospital recorded 535 cases of malnutrition.[ix]

Eastern Congo's artisanal gold production should benefit Congolese people and the state rather than armed men and predatory companies. For this to happen:

The Congolese government must hold provincial officials to account where they neglect their duties related to the artisanal gold sector or operate illegally. Companies operating illegally in Congo, such as Kun Hou Mining, should be investigated, and where evidence of wrongdoing is found, prosecuted.

Companies at all stages along global gold supply chains must implement the OECD due diligence guidance on responsible mineral supply chains. This includes publishing an annual report detailing the risks found in their supply chain and the measures taken to reduce these.

States have an obligation under international law to ensure companies respect human rights.[x] As such, they must legally require companies under their jurisdiction to undertake OECD standard supply chain due diligence, and must effectively monitor its implementation.[xi] Companies that fail to meet international supply chain due diligence standards laid out by the OECD must be held to account.

Artisanal miners operating in eastern Congo must be properly supported by the Congolese government. SAESSCAM, the Congolese state agency charged with oversight of the artisanal sector, must be urgently reformed or else disbanded.

Finally, donor governments should support diplomatic and development initiatives to promote responsible sourcing and support the Congolese government in establishing sustainable livelihoods for communities in areas where natural resources are extracted. Nascent and still localised efforts to formalise and manage artisanal gold supply chains should be supported and encouraged by governments and the private sector.[xii]
Methodology
Global Witness engages with companies, governments and other partners around the world to tackle the issue of natural resource-funded conflict. For the past 15 years we have reported on the links between the trade in minerals and armed conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, working with Congolese civil society, policy-makers and business leaders to develop practical solutions.

Global Witness undertook research in Shabunda town, the eponymous hub of South Kivu's Shabunda territory, on two occasions in 2015 and conducted further interviews in Bukavu, South Kivu's provincial capital, on three separate occasions in 2014 and 2015. In total we interviewed over 80 people involved in the gold boom that erupted along Shabunda's Ulindi River in 2013. Interviewees included gold divers, dredge workers, traders and businesspeople brought to Shabunda town by the gold rush as well as local residents, authorities and civil society. We also spoke to a whistle-blower from Kun Hou Mining.

An excellent August 2015 publication by the Great Lakes civil society platform COSOC-GL (the Coalition of Civil Society Organisations in the Great Lakes Region) raised several important and unanswered questions about the Ulindi gold boom and has proved a comprehensive resource. [xiii]

[i] OSISA, 2013, "The High Cost of Congolese Gold", http://www.osisa.org/sites/default/files/high_cost_of_congolese_gold_final.pdf, p.16. Using an international gold price of US$38.5/g the estimated 26 million ounces (737, 087kg) would be worth $28,377,849,500.

[ii] Global Witness calculations for the volumes of artisanal gold produced during the gold boom along the Ulindi River are based on documents collected and interviews during fieldwork in Shabunda town in January and March 2015 and in Bukavu in 2014 and 2015 and documents provided by South Kivu's mining agency SAESSCAM and Mining Division, as well as estimations provided by an industry expert familiar with Kun Hou's operations along the Ulindi River. We estimate that the four semi-industrial dredging machines owned by Kun Hou Mining produced around 460kg of alluvial gold per year and over 150 locally-made artisanal dredging machines produced between 550kg and 720kg for the same period. In total we estimate that the two types of machines produced 1,010kg to 1,180kg. To calculate the value of this gold we used a gold price of $38.5/gram, which is an average for the international gold price spanning the period of the gold boom (exact range for calculations is between $38.89 million and $45.43 million). Gold traders interviewed by Global Witness in Shabunda town were selling their gold at the international market price, a phenomenon that is not uncommon at artisanal gold sites in eastern Congo See endnote 3 on calculations for artisanal gold production and taxes by Raia Mutumboki armed groups and endnote 43 on Kun Hou Mining calculations.

[iii] Global Witness estimates that 150 locally-made artisanal dredging machines produced between 550kg and 720kg per year during the gold boom. This estimation was made on the basis of three separate sources including interviews with dredge workers on the Ulindi River and other documents from Shabunda and Bukavu. From these we identified a range of average weekly gold production for artisanal dredgers between 77g and 100g. (The first is partial data from SAESSCAM South Kivu breaking down artisanal dredge production on the Ulindi over a three week period by dredger that shows an average of 77g of gold produced per artisanal dredge per week. The second is from statistics from a gold trading house based in Shabunda town that owns dredgers operating on the Ulindi, which show an average production of 99g per dredge per week. The third data point comes from interviews with dredge workers active along the Ulindi River from which we take an estimated weekly production of around 100g.) Dredge production varies from week-to-week and depending on deposits along the river, as well as other factors including weather and mechanical breakdowns. Also, due to the clandestine way in which the Ulindi's gold has been managed and traded only general estimates are possible. Global Witness estimates assume gold production along the Ulindi based on 150 dredgers working for 48 weeks per year thereby setting aside one month per year for breakdowns and other production stoppages. (Exact calculations are: 77g per week produced by 150 dredgers working 48 weeks a year equals 554.4kg and 100g per week produced by 150 dredgers working 48 weeks a year equals 720kg.) Several sources estimate that 50 of the 150 dredgers on the Ulindi were operating in an upstream portion of the river under control of Raia Mutumboki armed groups. Dredge workers on the Ulindi River told Global Witness in March 2015 that Raia Mutumboki groups on each side of the river taxed dredgers in areas they control 5g of gold per group twice per month - this amounts to almost $20,000 per month for the groups. Added to these payments, each dredge worker operating in areas controlled by armed groups must pay them 1000 Congolese Francs per week. Dredge workers showed Global Witness receipts ('jetons') for these payments. Finally, dredges regularly have to contribute 'rations' to armed groups of up to 80,000 Congolese Francs per month. Taken together this amounts to up to $25,000 per month earnings for the armed groups. (Exact calculations: 5g collected twice per month from 50 dredgers equals 500g per month, using a price of $38.5/g is the equivalent of $19,250. For 'jetons', 50 dredgers each with 10 workers paying 1000 Congolese Francs each week equals 2,000,000 Congolese Francs per month. Rations of 80,000 Congolese Francs per dredge for 50 dredgers per month equals 4,000,000 Congolese Francs. At an exchange rate of 960 Francs to 1 US dollars, this combined 6,000,000 Congolese Francs is worth $6,250. The $19,250 taxed in gold plus the $6,250 taxes on dredge workers and 'rations' equals $25,500 per month.) These calculations do not include other taxes by armed groups including a mooring payment of $500 per dredge. Other groups operating under the name "Raia Mutumboki" may also have imposed taxes during the same period but are not included in these calculations. See also COSOC-GL (Coalition of Civil Society Organisations in the Great Lakes Region), 2015,"Etude sur les pratiques de dragues à Shabunda: La ruée vers l'or à Shabunda", http://cosoc-gl.org/2015/la-ruee-vers-lor-a-shabunda/, Section 4; Tages Anzeiger, December 2015, Goldrausch im wilden Osten, http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/wirtschaft/goldrausch-im-wilden-osten/story/20233121

[iv] Publicly available annual export reports complied by the provincial Mining Division in Bukavu show that all of Alfa Gold DRC's legal gold exports from South Kivu in 2014 and 2015 were exported to Alfa Gold Dubai.

[v] IPIS, 2014, "Analysis of the Interactive Map of Artisanal Mining Areas in Eastern DRC: May 2014 update", http://ipisresearch.be/publication/analysis-interactive-map-artisanal-mining-areas-eastern-drc-may-2014-update/, p.11

[vi] Global Witness has seen official documents from the provincial Ministry of Mines in (former) Orientale Province, dated February 2015, which detail illegal activities and environmental damaged by semi-industrial dredges along the River Ituri and River Aruwimi, Ituri; see also research conducted by PAX, 2015, "Exploiter (dans) le désordre Cartographie sécuritaire du secteur aurifère à Mambasa occidental" http://www.paxchristi.net/news-media/resources-pax-christi-member-organisations ; and Southern Africa Resource Watch (SARW), 2014, "Congo's Golden Web: The people, companies and countries that profit from the illegal trade in Congolese gold" http://www.sarwatch.org/sites/sarwatch.org/files/Publications_docs/congogold3web.pdf p.38

[vii] See for example: Stop-Pillage, 2013, TRIAL, 2013, "TRIAL files a criminal denunciation to the Swiss Federal Prosecutor against a Swiss refinery company suspected of laundering looted gold from the Democratic Republic of the Congo"

[viii] Global Witness, 2015, Global Witness welcomes progressive new Chinese Mineral Supply Chain Guidelines, https://www.globalwitness.org/en-gb/press-releases/global-witness-welcomes-progressive-new-chinese-mineral-supply-chain-guidelines/

[ix] Global Witness interview, Shabunda town, March 2015.

[x] For example Congo has ratified all eight of the ILO fundamental conventions, which are legally binding international treaties http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:11200:0::NO:11200:P11200_COUNTRY_ID:102981

[xi] See also Civil Society Statement at the 10th Forum on Responsible Mineral Supply Chains https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/conflict-minerals/civil-society-statement-10th-forum-responsible-mineral-supply-chains-paris-10-12-may-2016/

[xii] Partnership Africa Canada (PAC), 2015, "Just Gold", http://www.pacweb.org/en/just-gold

[xiii] COSOC-GL, 2015

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An estimated $28 billion worth of gold lies under the soil in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (hereafter Congo).[i] But the country's gold wealth, the majority of which is artisanally mined, has long been ill-used.

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2010 - Obama signs the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, which forced American companies to disclose whether any of their products included minerals from mines controlled by armed groups in the Congo (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/10/conflict-minerals/gettleman-text)

2017 - Trump administration has proposed to rollback laws on conflict minerals from central Africa — Congolese delegation will meet Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and head of SEC in Washington, D.C. in upcoming weeks (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-20/congo-sees-trump-roll-back-of-dodd-frank-law-stoking-insecurity)

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Image of armed soldier controlling the retrieval of conflict minerals

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Image of armed soldier controlling the retrieval of conflict minerals

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The invention of new technologies that use computer chips and wires containing, tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold. These inventions are only here because of industrialization. (https://history105.libraries.wsu.edu/fall2015/2015/08/31/conflict-minerals/)

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Conflict minerals: columbite-tantalite, also known as coltan (from which tantalum is derived); cassiterite (tin); gold; wolframite (tungsten); or their derivatives; or any other mineral or its derivatives determined by the Secretary of State to be financing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or an adjoining country (https://www.sourceintelligence.com/what-are-conflict-minerals/)

3Ts + gold

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Armed groups control the trade of conflict minerals

Earn hundreds of millions of dollars each year

These groups fight one another and the government over control of mines, smuggling routes, and they murder/rape civilians

Locals in mining towns are forced to take part in this illicit mining economy

Minerals are smuggled out of the Congo through neighboring countries and are shipped around the world to be refined

Consumer products such as cellphones, laptops, and jewelry contain these minerals (http://www.raisehopeforcongo.org/content/conflict-minerals)