Republicans
are currently trying to roll back the Dodd-Frank law as a whole, which
would repeal the rule on conflict minerals. The move would fit with
President Trump’s focus on cutting regulations for business.
A section of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection
Act passed under President Barack Obama in 2010 requires U.S. companies
to disclose whether any of the minerals used in their products come from
Democratic Republic of Congo.
Eastern Congo, the main
battleground in Africa’s deadliest war between 1998 and 2003, has huge
deposits of coltan, a metallic ore that is widely used in smartphones,
laptops and other electronic devices.
Up to 2 million slaves in
Congo engage in artisanal mining, the largest workforce in the world,
but the country’s natural wealth has not translated into development.
Congo was ranked 176 out of 188 countries in the 2016 U.N. Human
Development Index; millions of people remain displaced by past and
current conflicts; and the country suffers from a crippling lack of
infrastructure.
The mining of conflict minerals helped to finance
the Second Congo War, a bloody and complicated conflict that broke out
in 1998 and involved a large number of rebel groups—allegedly backed by
Rwanda and Uganda—trying to topple the government in Kinshasa, Congo’s
capital. As a result of the war and its aftermath, more than 5 million
people are thought to have died, and the conflict has been dubbed
Africa’s World War.
Conflict is currently wracking the Kasai
region in central Congo, after a tribal leader, Kamuina Nsapu, was
killed by security forces in 2016. Almost 1.3 million people have been
displaced by the conflict and at least 400 people have been killed. Two
U.N. experts, including an American, were killed after disappearing in
the region in March.
U.S. conflict minerals regulation meant that
“the activity of other armed groups in the mining sites had decreased
substantially as well as their capacity for violence.”
A
man sifts through rocks at the Kalimbi cassiterite artisanal mining
site north of Bukavu, in Democratic Republic of Congo, on March 30. The
mining of valuable minerals has fueled conflict in Congo for years. GRIFF TAPPER/AFP/Getty
