U.S. company helps fuel Congo war, charges UN report

Both sides of Congo war get funds from sale of minerals used in mobile phones.


By Joe Lauria
GlobalPost
December 3, 2009


UNITED NATIONS — A Nevada-based company’s purchase of minerals looted from eastern Congo is helping to finance a decade-long war that has claimed the lives of millions of civilians, an unpublished United Nations report claims.

Niotan Inc., of Mound House, Nev., is the first American company to be identified as a buyer of conflict minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It is one of several companies cited in the U.N. study on how the illegal trade of the region’s vast mineral resources, including gold, has kept the war going by enriching both rebels and Congolese army units.

Many of the rare minerals are needed to make mobile phones and other consumer electronic devices.

Also benefiting from the looted minerals are businessmen in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the United Arab Emirates, as well as weapons suppliers from Sudan and North Korea, whose arms are purchased by rebels with the proceeds of the illegal mineral sales in violation of a U.N. arms embargo, the report says.

But companies far from the war zone, like Niotan in Nevada, are profiting, too, the report says. Mobile phones and gold jewelry sold in the U.S. may well have helped finance a war in which at least 200,000 women have been raped, according to U.N. statistics.

The U.N. report, which GlobalPost has obtained, says Niotan buys and sells the mineral coltan, used to make electrolytic capacitors for mobile phones and personal computers. The report details a four-step process by which the minerals move from the killing hills of eastern Congo to American electronics manufacturers.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/dipl ... -un-report