The Geography of Coltan

Congo's riches fuel its war - Christian Science Monitor

Coltan - the article mentions several valuable resources available in The Congo: timber, gold, diamonds, cobalt, copper, tin, and coltan. What the heck is coltan, anyway? Sounds like a cross between a jazz musician and an anime robot.

Reading up on coltan using Wikipedia, I learned that coltan is what I thought it was: Tantalum. I figured it had to be tantalum because I knew that The Congo was a good source of tantalum, and since tantalum was not listed as "tantalum," I assumed by its absence, tantalum was present, just called coltan. And I was right.

Coltan was once called "columbium." Take the "col" part + "tan" from tantalum and we have coltan.

If you have a Playstation 2 at home, like I used to, or probably a PS3, or a Wii, or an XBox 360, or a home computer, or a laptop, or a cell phone - jeez, everyone in the world has a cell phone - then your life is affected by tantalum. Specifically, it is used in capacitors. And capacitors are found everywhere. Thusly, you affect and are affected by people's lives in The Congo. Bet you didn't know that, huh?

But look at the list again. Gold? Diamonds? Copper? The article says that "...the Congo should be one of the richest countries on earth..." My question is this: why haven't we invaded this country yet? The government is weak, the countryside is overrun with warlords, the inhabitants have primitive technology. The Congo sounds like the Southwest Asia version of Afghanistan.

Oh, wait, no oil ... Well, there you go. Jeez, if they just had oil. After completing the necessary paperwork, The Congo would be a good candidate for regime change. Kinda like a sex change, only everyone gets it, it costs a lot more, the doctors have to move in with you to make sure the change takes, and not everyone is sure the result will be an improvement, and that eventually the body may revert back to the original gender.

And by the way, we are taking about The Democratic Republic of the Congo, the largest state/country in Africa. The DROC is almost landlocked, with lots of militant groups running around the countryside, all either upset at the DROC government or at the government of an adjacent country.

To make things complicated, right next door is a completely other country, called "Congo." To keep the two countries separate, we call the smaller one, "Congo" and the bigger one, "The Congo." Must be an ego-thing, like Ohio State University changing their name to "THE Ohio State University," because as far as they are concerned, there are no other schools in Ohio. The rest are pretenders. <-joke

DROC Fighting Continues

While most of the world has been distracted by events in Iraq and Afghanistan, Africa has been challenged by forces within and without.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo, the largest state in southern Africa, is the site of the deadliest conflict in the world, surpassing even the Iraq War and Afghanistan, combined.

Since 1998, nearly 4 million people have died within the DROC as a result of this conflict, either through direct armed conflict or due to starvation and disease. The number dead is about 8% of the 62 million people that live in the DROC. Women, and girls have been victimized, raped, killed, tortured by roving bands of militia. Boys have been taken and are being trained as militia members. These boys are kidnapped then trained how to kill.

The major warring factions involve the Congolese army versus the militants of a renegade general Laurent Nkunda, the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP). The fighting that continues today reflects hostilities leftover from the Second Congo War, also called Africa's Second War, and the Great War of Africa. 8 countries and 25 different groups fought during the five years of the formally recognized conflict.

In looking at multiple sources of information, Wikipedia, Human Rights Watch, BBC News, CIA World Factbook, I cannot really find the source or cause of the fighting. I ran across a reference to Nkunda being upset over the treatment of Tutsis, leading him to form an anti-Kabila militia. His support for Tutsis in Africa does not seem to justify his guerilla war or atrocities committed by people under him. He was indicted for war crimes in 2005.

The DROC has the potential of being one of the most economically successful countries in Africa. This potential may be the source of conflict. The DROC is the largest producer of cobalt, major producer of copper and industrial diamonds, and one of the most important metals involved in technology, tantalum.

I write about this now, as fighting as increased in the last couple of days, forcing many to leave their homes. According to The World yesterday, nearly 50,000 have been forced out of there homes because of the conflict. We, sitting in our comfortable chairs in the US, have been mostly oblivious to the conflict in the DROC.