Under pressure from these laws and guidelines, international industry ramped up efforts to create supply chain oversight systems. law, it draws from OECD due diligence guidelines for companies, which have been continuously developed since 2010. Still, the European Union followed suit with its own legislation, finally adopted this year. Congo’s miners-who refer to the legislation as Obama’s law-suffered under the ban on their livelihoods. In the United States, a draft law against conflict minerals was recycled into the 2010 Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, better known as Dodd-Frank its Section 1502 obliged U.S.-listed companies to report conflict minerals in their supply chains, pressuring Congo’s then-President Joseph Kabila to declare a six-month ban on artisanal mining (mining done on a small scale outside the supervision of a mining company).
While armed conflicts had taken hold of the region in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, violent extraction briefly became the lynchpin of the wars around 2000.Īctivist groups painted the Democratic Republic of the Congo as home to a brutal resource war and spotlighted the children and women who suffered exploitation, sexual violence, and death in what one former senior UN official called the “ rape capital of the world.” In response to conflict mineral campaigns, governments and international organizations enacted regulations to satisfy consumer demand for gadgets that were produced, supposedly, without sexual violence and war crimes. The conflict minerals paradigm emerged during an unprecedented rise in the global demand for tantalum around the turn of the millennium, which pushed east Congolese workers and transnational traders to mine for coltan (the mineral from which tantalum is extracted). NGO and UN investigations suggested that these “digital minerals,” used in high-end tech products, were driving violent conflict. In the early 2000s, activists began to campaign against the extraction of “conflict minerals”-a catchall term for gold and the “three Ts” (tin, tantalum, and tungsten) originating from war zones in eastern Congo.
(Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post via Getty Images) Josaphat Musamba and Christoph Vogel ▪ October 21, 2021Ī creuseur, or digger, descends into a copper and cobalt mine in Kawama, Democratic Republic of Congo on June 8, 2016. In the early 2000s, activists began to campaign against the extraction of “conflict minerals.” Today, violence continues unabated in eastern Congo, underscoring the misguided frameworks governing transnational intervention.
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