Taking Aim At Congo's Conflict Minerals

Photo: Mark Craemer; Captions by David Sullivan at The Enough Project.
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U.S. Financial Reform Bill Also Targets 'Conflict Minerals' From Congo -- Washington Post

The financial regulation bill that President Obama will sign into law on Wednesday is supposed to clean up Wall Street. But an obscure passage buried deep in the 2,300-page legislation aims to transform a very different place -- eastern Congo, labeled the "rape capital of the world."

The passage, tucked into the bill's "Miscellaneous Provisions," will require thousands of U.S. companies to disclose what steps they are taking to ensure that their products, including laptops, cellphones and medical devices, don't contain "conflict minerals" from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The sale of such minerals has fueled a nearly 15-year war that has been marked by a horrific epidemic of sexual violence.

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My Comment: U.S. efforts will be ineffectual. Mineral dependent countries like China, India, etc .... the priority for them is to have access to these minerals .... "conflict minerals" of not. To then know if the laptop that is being manufactured in a Chinese factory has a part whose metal composition has a percentage of it from the Congo .... I completely fail to see how U.S. oversight will prevent this .... short of having scores of U.S. personnel in China at every step of the manufacturing process .... an unlikely possibility.