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Thirst For Coltan Fueling African Conflict
MetaPhyzx writes "According to an article put forth by the Toward Freedom website, the metallic ore known as columbite-tantalite or coltan for short is fueling conflict in central Africa. The relevance to us who read news for geeks: Coltan is in quite a few consumer electronics; the article references the Sony Playstation series." As reader fahrvergnugen points out in the comments below, there's reason to more than doubt the currency of the claims in the above-linked article, as outlined in a post at Joystiq.
Anything and everything fuels conflict in Africa. At most, this is throwing a match into a raging fire.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Coltan!
Coltrane was a good musician, but I could never see myself killing over him.
When I first read "tantalite" I was thinking, woooOOOOoooo! But then after I looked it up I found it is anything but. Ugh.
For petty despots in Africa...it's actually MY bad.
...That John Connor has something to do with this.
Don't support Conflict Consoles! Poor Africans are being exploited daily as they toil away unearthing PlayStation 3's. How many more children need to die before the PS3 is finally put to rest? Sony is merely stockpiling these conflict consoles in an effort drive up demand!!!!!!!!!! Stop the Madness!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I would just like to take this opportuntiy on a really slow Friday to let you know I am first.
Or, I failed it. :(
We'll see...
I knew it! It's the Terminators! I... I'm sorry... I've distracted myself by thinking of Summer Glau.
Tantalum capacitors are used in a lot of electronics. While they are used in Playstations, that doesn't mean Sony (as much as I dislike them) are at the majority of fault. And now Sony doesn't use coltan from that region, so as not to support conflict. They just threw the playstation name around for publicity, I think they could have done better.
Watch out! Skynet must have set its sights on Africa! Coltan is a primary component of terminators!
Thirst for oil is fueling middle east conflict. News at 11.
Their webserver is gone! Another one killed by slashdot!
I can't call that English
The exploitation of coltan was one of the main plot points for John LeCarre's excellent book "The Mission Song". The book is at least a couple of years old, so this has obviously been known for a while.
I'm a huge LeCarre fan and he always manages to stay relevant and current, while it seems like the majority of spy novelists floundered after the end of the cold war until the "war on terror" gave them another easy boogeyman.
Tantalum is used in small quantities to make high-performance and compact electrolytic capacitors.
Typically a tantalum cap will have lower leakage current and be about 1/4 the size of a aluminum electrolytic, at about twice the cost.
As an electronics repair guy, I just *love* tantalum caps, as they quite often short out given an opportunity. Most repair places won't even try to do component-level repairs anymore, so that leaves lots of nice equipments for me to fix.
Sony is responsible for all of the troubles in Africa. Should've known.
Boycott Sony!
Joystiq has posted an excellent refutation of this tempest in a tea-pot.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
In the rugged volcanic mountains of the Congo the conflict known as Africa's World War continues to smolder after ten grueling years. The conflict earned its name because at the height of the war eight African nations and over 25 militias were in the combatant mix. But more recently the conflict was given another name: The PlayStation War. The name came about because of a black metallic ore called coltan. Extensive evidence shows that during the war hundreds of millions of dollars worth of coltan was stolen from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The UN and several NGOs claim some of the most active thieves were the Rwandan military, several militias supported by the Rwandan government, and also a number of western-based mining companies, metal brokers, and metal processors that had allegedly partnered with these Rwandan factions. After it is refined, coltan becomes a bluish-gray powder called tantalum, which is defined as a transition metal. For the most part, tantalum has one significant use: to satisfy the West's insatiable appetite for personal technology. Tantalum is used to make cell phones, laptops and other electronics made, for example, by SONY, a multi-billion dollar multinational based in Japan that manufactures the iconic PlayStation, a video game console. And while allegations of plundering coltan from a nation in desperate need of revenue seem bad enough, the UN also discovered that Rwandan troops and rebels were using prisoners-of-war and children to mine for the "black gold." "Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms," said British politician Oona King, who was a Member of Parliament from 1997 to 2005. Most of the fighting from Africa's World War ended in 2003 following a peace accord. But reports of troop tension, instability and rampant sexual violence against women continue to emerge from where the war was at its most intense: the eastern portion of the DRC, near the city of Goma and in the DRC province of North Kivu. This is a region where millions of Congolese live among active volcanoes and endangered Mountain Gorillas. But even if many have put down their guns, a London-based non-government office called Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID) continues to fight its own battle against scores of Western-based mining companies that continued to work in the DRC, or purchase minerals and metals allegedly stolen from the DRC, as the war raged on. These companies, such as Eagle Wings Resources International of Ohio, Cabot Corporation of Boston, Mass., and Chemie Pharmacie Holland of the Netherlands, were charged with having stolen millions of dollars worth of resources out of the DRC, or made millions processing stolen resources from the DRC, namely coltan. When the war started in 1998, the UN and others believed that one area of the conflict was the product of tribal and ethnic rivalries. The Rwandan government, for instance, told the world they invaded the DRC, their neighbor to the West, to go after those who committed atrocities during the 1994 genocide that killed over 800,000 people. Yet, according to the UN, the Rwandans were shedding blood for something far cheaper; they were shooting it out for the mines that pockmarked the volcanic mountains of DRC's eastern regions. These mines contained deposits of cobalt, uranium, gold and, of course, coltan. A UN Panel of Experts investigation would expose the resource war in 2001, releasing several reports entitled "The Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the DRC". The reports made disturbing charges against scores of multinational mining companies, like Eagle Wings Resources International and Chemie Pharmacie Holland. The UN alleged the mining companies directly and indirectly fueled the war, paralyzing the DRC government, and using the conflict to keep the coltan flowing cheaply out of the Congo. Some companies were also accused by the UN of aligning with elements of the warring parties. Fast forward to 2008,
I submitted this article too, but apparently I need l2/. cause I suck at it.
And it wants its story back.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0DE1D7113CF931A2575BC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Warning, cape does not enable user to fly
Consumer electronics my ass - it's being stockpiled for Terminator endoskeletons
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Thirst for Coltrane Fueling African Conflict?
See there is a place for Jazz in the world... But liked him before he got clean man... No junk... No soul...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Somebody set up us the ./
All your Coltan are belong to us.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
It seems to me that just about any natural resource available in Africa lends way to some terrible conflict. (You only need to watch "Shake Hands with the Devil" to realize just how unstable things are over there.)
This article makes it seem as if Sony is fueling African conflict in a similar fashion to the less reputable diamond dealers. However, coltan is used in so many electronic products that you can't really nail it down to one company like TFA appears to be trying to do. But then again: SONY IS EVIL AND IS KILLING INNOCENT AFRICANS
Don't you get it, SKYNET has begun building it's Terminator army.
Let me get naked and go back in time to fix that for you...
Shade grown, hand-picked 'fair trade' and 'ethical' electronics components for sale.
Don't buy blood-silicon!
Playstation 2, its got what Congolians crave!
Whouldn't our attention and opprobrium be better focused on the incredibly evil and greedy men who are driving those poor Africans out at gunpoint to mine Coltan (or diamonds or chocolate or whatever the cause of the day might be), instead of the consumer electronics where the stuff allegedly ends up?
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
is fueling the ____________ and ___________ conflicts.
Have a weekend,
K. Trout
This isn't news. The NYTimes Magazine had a piece on this over FIVE years ago.
They just threw the playstation name around for publicity, I think they could have done better.
I have a feeling it's because a character in The Mission Song by John le Carre mentioned it as a use of Coltan.
The book is fiction, and concerns (peripherally) mining of Coltan and other ores.
Please help metamoderate.
On sale? Those are some pretty high standards. You clearly don't belong here =p
This was already ancient news when a nearly identical story came my way nine months ago.
Here is Nokia's statement from 2006 (one of many companies to establish a policy regarding tantalum sourcing as a result of the Congo conflict), sitting in plain sight on their website:
http://www.nokia.com/A4230065
"Our position: Tantalum / Coltan
"Nokia is not buying tantalum or other raw materials but processed components and assemblies from suppliers around the world. Suppliers' activities account for a substantial part of the life-cycle environmental impact of Nokia products. Nokia has a comprehensive set of global Nokia Supplier Requirements. These requirements also include environmental requirements. It is an integral part of Nokia's supply chain management to ensure that the suppliers comply with the requirements. To ensure compliance, trained Nokia personnel conduct regular assessments as part of normal supplier assessment.
"Nokia does not use any endangered species for any business purpose and furthermore requests that its suppliers avoid raw material procurement from an origin where there are clear human or animal rights abuse, or the method of procurement or distribution is illegal. In marketing and other company activities, Nokia will depict animals in a dignified manner.
"Nokia has sent a notification of the Congo situation to its suppliers using Tantalum asking them to follow the situation, and to avoid purchasing tantalum from Congo. Nokia is also reducing the use of tantalum in its products."
811.29.3.2
Here's one way to do it.
Stop selling weapons to Africa. Join the ICC to put those in jail who do sell weapons to Africa. Help them become self sufficient instead of just sending them cash. The US Economy alone could cut it's war budget by 10% and feed the whole continent. (I factor in nuclear research, the Dept of Homeland Security, and all other actually war related expenses for a total of one trillion dollars per year.)
The reality is that we don't want to help Africans because we don't care about Africans. Rwanda? Darfur? Give our leaders a call when you can find some better natural resources to exploit, and then our march of freedom will spread southward. Otherwise we'll keep people like Nelson Mandela on our terrorist watch lists along with anyone else who dares to oppose pro-American governments.
Aka stop buying the things they're fighting over. If no one cared about their oil, their diamonds, their minerals or whatever there'd be nothing to kill each other over except food, water and liberty. If they don't have money from us to buy guns they'll have significantly less problems. But Western nations aren't willing to stop buying these things (yet).
horizon? I was thinking carbon nanotube ultracaps given that the response time and storage capacity in similar packaging should be at least comparable.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I love me some Jonathan Colton
honestly, anything and EVERYTHING starts a war in Africa. This is really nothing new.
The article is unreachable, so I can't see what it says.
Should we be boycotting niobium products now (niobium == columbium, which got its name from being the key element in columbite)? I see it's used in prosthetics, jet engines and superconducting wires [so it's probably used in MRI imaging]). Expecting people to avoid all these products looks impossible.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
These left wing, anti-capitalist groups claim some tenuous link between a metal and African violence, or oil and terrorism. But a much more direct link is between the violent terror group FARC and the illegal drug trade.
But any reference to there being a moral imperative to obey drug laws sees to be missing from the Toward Freedom Website.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Is that what you are saying? Never mind the huge amount of arms in the region, purchased with oil revenues. Yeah, it is all on Israel, they are the only ones causing the conflict. And we invaded Iraq because Israel told us to. Right. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of Israel, but they didn't invade Iraq. And all that Saudi oil money has nothing to do with conflict in the region.
This made it to here?
Seriously?
Do the people even read what they post on here anymore?
Yet another website desperate for attention by blaming X for a war, nothing to see here.
Phew, I'm glad Coltan is Still Alive!
how is babby formed?
Eh? I'm a little out of date on the hardware side now, but my recollection was that the reason for using tantalums was their lower ESR than other capacitor types at higher capacitance values. This made them superior in high frequency applications.
So, assuming the laws of physics haven't been revoked, I'd be curious what makes these "newish ceramic caps" so delicious.
There is no economic value in producing a weapon.
Sure there is, it makes defense contractors lots of money. But it is a drain on the economy, there's the opportunity cost, money that could have been used more wisely.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
First off, the jag-off who wrote this story is an unabashed NIMBY liberal, who in order to make an argument, abandons all semblance of common sense. Second, this story takes place in Africa. In the Congo. They are Black people who live there. This species of hominid is incapable of reason, civility, social grace, cognitive recognition, abstract thought, independent governance, among numerous other shortcomings as a race of people. Please do not assume that these people are capable of establishing and maintaining and Western norms of Jurisprudence. They are not Homo sapiens Caucasus but homo Negroid that are as far away from whites as chimpanzees are from baboons. Now before all you slashdotters get your panties in a bunch, you need to illustrate an example in the world where blacks have met or exceeded western white social ideals. Stop holding them up to ideals to which they are incapable of meeting.
i'm pretty sure the guns are for shooting people.
Now if you had said police officers, the "defensive-gun" concept could stand up a little better. A little.
-- arstchnca
--
It's a shame you got modded flamebait! I thought your hilarious post was definitely +funny!
-- arstchnca
--
I think that so long as our country is going to be going on militadventures under the banner of "improving conditions," people could at least adopt some sympathy.
That would be something I agree on. The way I see it there is only two ways the world could solve Africa's problems, with force or ignore it.
A third way is to stop supporting bad actors.
Next solution would be to basically wall off Africa, noting and nobody goes in or out. Cut them off from the rest of the world. Famine, war, and plague will pretty much take care of the rest.
Yea right. Not much can be done about the Sudan, the Chinese supports them because of the oil.
Yes, it's heartless and pretty fucking sick but its the best I can think of. We've poured hundreds of billions of dollars of aid in to Africa over the last 60 years and all it has done is make it worse.
That's because the aid was the wrong type of aid. Much of the aid was based on the Washington Consensus, it's predecessors, and followers like neoliberalism. One part of this was to get most of the population to move into cities then let large scale farms grow food, when the west didn't export food. So, many small hold farmers were basically driven off farms, the same thing happened in Central America. The "Wilson Quarterly" had a pretty good article on how small farms are increasing in numbers and are producing more food than large operations, "The Coming Revolution in Africa". Though not the same, Zimbabwe used to be the breadbasket of southern Africa. They used to produce enough food to feed everyone yet still had plenty of food left to export, food was Zimbabwe's major export earner. But now it's a basketcase and needs food aid.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
That's the United States of Africa! Only when certain basic democratic institutions and infrastructure are taken continent wide will real prosperity and the means of prosperity have a chance to take hold. It's a vicious cycle. How do we encourage prosperity and investment in areas that are not secure? How do we secure a continent that does not really have the wealth to pay for proper security and peace-keeping missions? ;-) (Please, let's have NOOOOOOO more 'bringing democracy' to countries -- for pity's sake!)
Sadly, while I hope and pray that the USA will eventually form, it seems that we might be forced to wait until multinationals 'buy' African countries and become the meta-nationals of Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" trilogy.
Unless of course America decides to 'bring peace and democracy' to Africa?
They hack each other to death. And one machete can kill and keep killing for quite a long time.
I'm not sure what really can be done.
The main thing is the rich countries have other priorities.
1) The rich countries with farmers, subsidize their farmers (go confirm it yourself). So guess what happens to farmers in countries too poor to subsidize their farmers - they can't compete. Any farming will be just for growing food for themselves - farming won't drag them out of poverty. Or giving up and getting food from "foreign aid". Think about it - how can a farmer get significant $$$ if almost everyone around them is a subsistence farmer, and if you're not a farmer why buy food from a local farmer who can't sell you food cheaper than "foreign aid" or cheaper food from subsidized farmers in other countries? Yes I know this is a simplification.
2) The hypocritical rich countries keep making the poor countries play by different rules (don't subsidize your farmers, open your markets), or encourage them to do stupid stuff like sell their reserves to pay back loans. Read between the lines here: http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/malawi.htm and note this is a PR release by the IMF, go look for a less charitable view on what happened). Yeah maybe the IMF didn't tell them to sell everything, but with "help" like this guess why Africa is having such big problems. It's like telling some farmer you _know_ has had a track record for being _stupid_ and who owes you money: "pay back now!", then when he sells all his grain to pay you back, and his family is starving, you say "Oh it's not my fault, nobody told him to sell all his grain". Right, they're such a great help to Africa aren't they?
Sometimes I wonder if China is really doing such a bad thing by "colonizing" Africa (that's what the Westerners like to call it anyway). The Europeans have had their turn, the Africans themselves have also had their turn (some have done the "kick all the whiteys out" thing and it didn't work that well eh?) and neither have done a good job.
As far as I see the Chinese want the raw materials fast, plentiful and cheap. Wars and riots don't help with that. So maybe they might figure something out. Some parts of Africa may start looking like some parts of China - practically no government involvement - just factories/mines with a few independent entrepreneurs selling phones, snacks etc. There'll probably be a fair bit of killing of people who "aren't good for business" by the military (sponsored by the Chinese). BUT, hopefully not as much random killing, or as many mobs slashing each other with machetes.
It's not good, but is there anyone else willing and able to do something better?
Bill, you would like us to buy MS's box instead?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The reason Zimbabwe is failing is the same reason South Africa went from being a peaceful place to being a shithole of rape and murder that it is now. Mugabe took all the farm land owned by white farmers, told them to GTFO of his country, and handed it all over to uneducated blacks. Within a single year the country went from being the breadbasket to starving.
That's part of it, while Mugabe forced white farmers off the farms, he gave those farms to his cronies who knew nothing about farming. Zimbabwe had blacks who could have farmed almost if not as well as the white farmers. If nothing else Mugabe could have tried to keep those able to farm on the farms and had them train new farmers. Perhaps they could have been made the general manager of the farm, which was then incorporated with all the working hands receiving stocks in the corporation.
Mugabe liberated Zimbabwe then became a tyrant himself.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Were you listening when they told you that was for the situation where your gun jams, is lost or runs out of ammo?
Martial arts or hand to hand combat isn't just for what you listed here. We were also trained to use it it urban combat and other instances where small arms isn't practical. While a person could use a .45 APC in close combat trying to use an M16 is not practical when you can feel your opponent's breath. However the only grunts, infantry, that are issued .45s other than maybe officers were mortar men, those who fired mortars. Though I was trained to clean .45s I never fired one, and most guys in the companies I was in didn't train to clean them even.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?