The Democratic Republic of the Congo: a
region marked by violent conflict since 1996 in which torture, mass
rape, forced displacement, and mass murder have been going on for years
without much relief. It is a region in which armed groups are able to
propagate the violence through the sale of the Congo’s mineral
resources.
According to the Enough Project’s Raise Hope for Congo Campaign,
“Armed
groups earn hundreds of millions of dollars per year by trading four
main minerals: the ores that produce tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold.
This money enables the militias to purchase large numbers of weapons and
continue their campaign of brutal violence against civilians, with some
of the worst abuses occurring in mining areas.”
Most
of these “conflict minerals” are used in the production of electronic
devices in a process involving supply chains marked by a disturbing lack
of transparency, so that by the time products such as cell phones or
laptops end up in the hands of consumers, there is no way to know
whether the purchase of those products contributed to the income of
armed groups in the Congo.
The goals
of many concerned activists are to find a way to ensure transparency in
companies’ supply chains and to pressure companies found to be using
conflict minerals to discontinue purchasing those minerals. The market
for conflict minerals then, ideally, would be limited in terms of
profit, reducing resources available to the armed groups, and thus
pushing the armed groups toward peaceful resolution of the conflict
which could open the region to other reforms.
There
have been arguments that the initial attempts toward conflict-free
policies have actually been detrimental to the Congo, by driving
companies to search for minerals elsewhere, therefore crippling the
economy and reducing the income of the general population. However, the
UN Group of Experts recently issued a report stating that a
conflict-free resolution proves to be an “important catalyst for
traceability and certification initiatives and due diligence
implementation in the minerals sector regionally and internationally,”
and serves to reduce “the level of conflict financing provided by these
minerals” in regions that have begun to comply to the due diligence
guidelines. So, it seems that passing and implementing conflict-free
resolutions are the first steps toward true reform and peace in the
Congo.
Why not focus the fight for
conflict-free reform on college campuses, which house a “particularly
coveted demographic of electronics companies,” namely, students?
The
Enough Project’s Raise Hope for Congo Campaign and STAND, a Student
Anti-Genocide Coalition, have created the Conflict-Free Campus
Initiative, a “nation-wide campaign to build the consumer voice for
conflict-free electronics, such as cell phones, laptops, and other
devices that will not finance war in eastern Congo.” By focusing on
college campuses, the initiative “draws on the power of student
leadership and activism to encourage university officials and
stakeholders, both of whom are large purchasers of electronics and
powerful spokespersons, to commit to measures that pressure electronics
companies to take responsibility for the minerals in their supply
chains.”
Organizing the student voice
at the university level not only expresses the collective desire of
individuals to ensure that they and their university do not participate
in the perpetuation of the conflict in the Congo, but it also sends a
powerful message to both political and corporate entities that consumers
care about policies of those entities that may support the conflict.
The Conflict-Free Campus Initiative explains:
“Universities
are also a large client for most electronics companies and represent a
large section of the buyers’ market for consumer electronics. By raising
our collective voice as consumers, we can actually bring about a shift
in corporate and government policy and help bring peace to Congo.”
Eight
universities have issued conflict-free resolutions, including Stanford
University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Duke University; more
than sixty other colleges and universities throughout the United States
and Canada have begun campaigns to do the same (including Yale
University, Harvard University, Dartmouth College, Brown University, UC
Davis, UCLA, UCSB, UCSC, Notre Dame, and Georgetown University).
The
activism geared toward passing these conflict-free initiatives on
college campuses has been successful in inspiring activity at the
government level. California passed a bill prohibiting “state agencies
from signing contracts with companies that fail to comply with federal
regulations aimed at deterring business with armed groups in eastern
Congo,” the first state bill to be passed regarding conflict minerals.
Massachusetts is now also considering a conflict-free bill. Two cities,
Pittsburgh, PA and St. Petersburg, FL, have also passed conflict-free
resolutions.
If enough colleges,
universities, towns, cities and states take the initiative in decisively
acting to prevent the perpetuation of the conflict in the Congo by
taking steps toward becoming conflict-free, perhaps the income of the
armed groups committing mass rape and murder will be decreased
sufficiently to prompt the beginnings of an end to the conflict.
Once
the fighting ends, addressing the root causes of the conflict –
including ethnic tensions – can be addressed through effective
institutional reforms. But the fighting has to end before that can
happen, and the fighting cannot end unless the actors in the conflict
cannot afford to fight.
