November 2001: letter printed in The Ecologist below with update 1st April 2006

Dear Sir/Madam

 
Your October issue on ‘Mobile phones - the problem’s getting bigger’ was good at exposing their risks to our health. However it failed to even mention the nightmare impact they are having on the health of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Mobile phones contain coltan, a mineral more profitable than gold. The massive increase in mobile phones has led to warring rebel groups in the DRC, many funded and supplied by Rwanda and Uganda, exploiting coltan to help finance a three year bloody civil war.

Seven nations are involved and it has been called Africa's first World War.  Since the outbreak over 2.5 million people have died, more than two million are internally displaced and more than 16 million face ‘critical food needs’.

The mining is also causing environmental destruction. Endangered gorilla populations are being slaughtered as coltan is illegally plundered from Congo's protected national parks.

The UN says that companies trading minerals are the ‘engine of the conflict’. The link between the bloodshed and coltan has caused alarm among some high-tech manufacturers. Copying the protests over diamonds from war zones in Angola and Sierra Leone, trade associations have launched a campaign to stop buyers from purchasing their coltan from Congolese sources. People are urged to steer clear of "blood coltan". However it seems doomed to failure as it is almost impossible to know the original source of the metal.

The DRC remains a forgotten emergency. The humanitarian crisis in the DRC has been described as one of the worst in the world. The fighting has led to appalling levels of hunger, disease, and death, and to countless abuses of human rights.

The international community must give more support to the peace process, more humanitarian aid  and make more effort to tighten up arms export procedures to ensure that shipments of weapons do not further fuel the war.

Philip Booth

Update: 1st April 2006: 80% of known coltan reserves are in Congo and sadly coltan still plays a significant role in the bloodshed. However some progress has been made in discouraging coltan purshases for ethical reasons from the Congo. However there have also been economic circumstances at play in this reduction.

Also very worrying is the British Government's refusal to investigate UN Security Council allegations that 18 British companies helped to perpetuate the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo which has killed more than 3 million people. Read The Guardian last year on this:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,1406705,00.html