Are hit songs and movies necessary to get us to boycott “blood minerals?”
Story by Jacob O’Gara
Illustrations by Christopher Fellows
Photos by Jordan Brandt
Joseph Conrad once wrote, “to tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire.” Hillsides throughout the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been gouged and pockmarked, and inside their quarries, men, women, and children work constantly, plucking minerals from the earth, coerced by men holding assault rifles. The ores collected by the workers are being processed into minerals like tungsten, tin, and tantalum. The worst thing about these “blood minerals” isn’t that they provide economic fuel for thug organizations; it’s that they’re necessary to first-world societies. Along with gold, the “three t’s” go into every laptop, Blackberry, and iPod.
The journey of these minerals from a piece of ore in eastern Congo to the guts of an iPhone in the Upper East Side is obscure. After mining, the minerals are smuggled into Rwanda or Uganda. They are then shipped to smelting companies in Asia— China, Malaysia, or Indonesia usually— where the ores are refined and become the actual minerals. The smelting companies receive minerals from all over the globe, and the blood minerals get mixed in with the “clean” minerals as they go on their way to becoming component parts.
“Manufacturers rely on assurances that the minerals they receive are conflict-free,” says Sadia Hameed of the Enough Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress against genocide and other crimes against humanity. “In order to convince companies to take on greater responsibility and audit the supply chain, we have to create a consumer demand for conflict-free minerals and electronics.”
In other words, what they need is a movie. When Blood Diamond was released in 2006, American moviegoers were introduced to the grotesque, hidden world of misery and bloodshed where people fought, dismembered, and killed each other for bits of precious stone. Shoppers would walk into a Zales jewelry store in their local mall and demand conflict-free diamonds because of the popularity of the movie. This wasn’t the first pop culture reference to “blood diamonds from Sierra Leone” which was mentioned in passing in Die Another Day and was the subject of a Kanye West song, but with Blood Diamond, an Oscar-nominated film that grossed over $170 million worldwide, consumers were able to see the issue that orbited around every diamond they bought.
However, no pop culture phenomenon exists for the blood minerals issue, and it’s unlikely that one ever will. According to Tamsin Smith, formerly of (RED) and Gap Inc.’s Government Affairs Department, an issue like blood minerals doesn’t lend itself to the Hollywood “message movie” treatment. “Movies paint a picture and can illustrate complexities much more significantly [than other awareness campaigns],” Smith says. However, some humanitarian crises can’t be summed up in a slogan on a bumper sticker or in a movie’s run-time.
The problem that groups like the Enough Project run into is the problem of blood minerals itself. The situation is just too complex and abstract for the average consumer. There are too many small actors involved in the process. And unlike diamonds, the minerals themselves are not the final product—they’re components that go into and help run the final products, like computers and cell phones. “Cell phones are harder to view as expendable objects, unlike diamonds,” Smith says. She also argues that writing letters to electronics companies is too simplistic because companies such as “Apple [have] not caused that war.”
Hameed recognizes that there’s no absolute solution. Because of the Congo’s turbulent political landscape, what the Enough Project hopes to accomplish with stricter mineral-trade regulation is to “open the door” for “other reform measures,” according to Hameed. On the other hand, Smith thinks that most of the action should occur locally, where the minerals are pulled from the earth.
“There’s a war going on that has challenging economic, political, and social aspects,” Smith says. For the blood minerals dilemma to even begin to get attention, that war needs to end, somehow, and then, local (Congolese) organizations need to “build up a functioning society in a post-war environment.” Now, the Congo isn’t the “heart of darkness” of Conrad’s fiction—it’s a knot: all of the issues are tangled together and you can’t deal with one without untangling the entire mess first.
Because of these complexities, consumers avoid the issue. It’s easier. Unless the problem can be explained in a pithy phrase or two and the solution is just as simple, people are hesitant to do anything about concerns beyond their scope. Social action is disruptive, and unless such disruption can “pay the consumers back with impact stories,” as Smiths puts it, people aren’t likely to agitate for change.
A century ago, the Congo was the focus of another human rights emergency, perhaps the first to receive media coverage. Then, what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo was known as the Congo Free State, the personal fiefdom of King Leopold II of Belgium. Under his control, the land was plundered of copper and rubber, and the native peoples were brutalized and mistreated to the point of extermination. When authors like Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad learned of and wrote about the situation, the ensuing public outrage was so immense that Leopold surrendered his holdings in the territory.
This historical parallel shows that reform is possible in the Congo. It shows the importance of looking at grim and sometimes baffling issues, and responding by acting. Most of all, however, it shows that if you want to spread awareness of an issue, you really need someone like Mark Twain, or better yet, Leonardo DiCaprio.
In Heart of Darkness, Conrad writes, “The conquest of the earth . . . is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” Therefore, we don’t.