The Reality Check

There's a mineral called Coltan that is in abundance in the Democratic Republic of Congo and it's being called the new blood diamond. It is a highly valued mineral that is fueling the civil conflicts in Eastern Congo. 2.7 million people have died so far and an estimated 45,000 people die each month. This is not to mention the frequent rape of women by all sides of the conflict in Eastern Congo. I would say it's probably under-reported and lives in the shadow of Darfur, which has had far less deaths than the Congo conflicts.

Coltan is being widely used in many electronic devices, especially cell phones. The odds are good that you have a blood diamond in your cell phone. And just like the blood diamond issue of a few years ago in Sierra Leone civil wars, there is an international effort to try to keep these new blood diamonds off the market. This may be a much more complicated thing to do than with diamonds. First of all, diamonds are rare and it was easy to maintain a ban on a single country. In Eastern Congo, there is a mix of legitimate Coltan mines and 'blood diamond' mines, which make it difficult to isolate the ban in a single region. The blood diamond certification program in Sierra Leone didn't directly help the whole issue either. Blood diamonds were still smuggled out with great frequency and it's not what ended the bloody conflicts. So what did? That's the subject of my next post Solutions to the New Blood Diamond Problem.