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The Human Cost of Cheap Cell Phones

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31 Friends of the Earth, “Groups File Complaint with State Department against Three American Companies Named in UN Report,” August 4, 2004, www.foe.org/new/releases/84drccomplaint.html.  See also paragraphs 22-64 of the UN Panel of Experts’ October 16, 2002 report which covers the Congolese and Zimbabwean government networks in the illegal resource exploitation from Congo. Interesting, the report from the 2005 Annual Meeting of National Contact Points noted, under a section entitled “Follow-up by NCPs,” that “Finnish and US NCPs have been exchanging views on a US-based company and its Finnish subsidiary with reference to the deletion of the companies from the Final Report of the UN Panel.” The fact that the report does not mention the OM Group by name contributes to the impression that the role of the NCPs involves protecting corporations. “OECD Guidelines of Multinational Enterprises: 2005 Annual Meeting of the National Contact Points,” www.oecd.org/dataoecd/20/13/35387363.pdf. FoE and RAID also brought up OM Group’s environmental records as cited in a World Bank report. The report questioned whether the measures in place at OM Group’s plant in Lubumbashi were sufficient to prevent radioactive contamination of the Congolese workforce and whether the local population was exposed to an unacceptably high level of pollution from operation of the plant. 

32 Colleen Freeman, phone and email interviews, December 2005-Janury 2006. Freeman worked with Friends of the Earth prior to taking a job with RAID. See also the report Five Years On: A Review of the OECD Guidelines and National Contact Points, September 22, 2005, www.oecdwatch.org/docs/OECD_Watch_5_Years_On.pdf. I contacted the US companies mentioned in the third UN report. Two of them, Cabot and Kemet, supplied links to web pages responding to charges that they had profited form illegally obtain coltan. Cabot’s page ha a link to a PDF file stating, “Cabot will no purchase any tantalum supplies from any unlawful source in any part of the world.” However, the 2001 UN Panel of Experts reports noted, “In fact, no coltan exits from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo without benefiting either the rebel group[s] or foreign armies.” During the period covered by the report, 60-70% of the coltan in eastern Congo was mined under the surveillance of the Rwandan military, using the forced labor of prisoners. George W. Bush’s Secretary of Energy (appointed in 2005), Samuel Bodman, was CEO and chair of Cabot Corp. in 1997-2001, when large quantities of illicit coltan from Congo hit the market and Cabot allegedly acquired them.

33 RAID, “Unanswered Questions” report, April 2004. Human Rights Watch echoes RAID’s final suggestion in the report, writing, “The international community may want to consider a permanent roster of experts who can investigate these issues throughout the world, rather than ad hoc panels.” Arvind Ganesan and Alex Vines, “Engine of War: Resources, Greed and the Predatory State,” www.hrw.org/wr2k4/14.htm.

34 For more on this point, see www.raid-uk.org/news.htm

35 Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib scandals in the American media, cited CPT as a source in his May 5, 2004, New Yorker article “Chain of Command.” After the kidnapping of four CPTers in Baghdad, Hersh told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman that the work of CPT was “cutting edge.” www.DemocracyNow.org/article.pl?sid=05//11/30/153252.