Every cell phone contains a mineral called coltan, a substance that makes the phone vibrate.  This ore is indirectly responsible for murders, rape, and child slavery that have resulted in nearly 6 million deaths in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1996.

Minerals like coltan, diamonds, gold, and tin, known as conflict minerals, make Congo potentially the richest country on the planet.  But these minerals are being plundered by Congo’s army and by renegade militias from neighboring countries.  The money from selling these minerals is used to buy weapons, and the cycle continues:  mining, money, and mayhem.

This is the deadliest conflict since World War II, yet most Americans have never heard of it.  The land is being ruined through deforestation, endangered species are hunted for meat to feed starving people, and toxic chemicals are entering the water and the air through their use in the mining of gold.

Perhaps most staggering is the violence against women. Rape is used as a weapon of war. Armed groups on all sides use rape to terrorize and control families and communities.  A recent report in the American Journal of Public Health estimates that nearly two million women have been raped in Congo, victimized at a rate of nearly one every minute.

The Enough Project has launched a campaign called the Conflict-Free Campus Initiative.  This program, endorsed by 68 colleges and universities throughout the country, urges electronics buyers to purchase from companies like Motorola, Apple, IBM, Dell, etc. only if those companies are getting minerals that are ‘conflict-free.’  To learn more, visit www.enoughproject.org.   Take action at your school or university, place of worship or business, or as an individual consumer.  We can all make a difference.

Click here to see a list of leading electronics companies and how they score in their efforts to source minerals that are ‘conflict-free.’