MONTREAL — Jewish teens who live by their cellphones are being mobilized to call on the phone manufacturers to ensure that revenues from the sale of a key microchip component called coltan go where they belong: to the people of the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Poster for the Human Promise’s cellphone campaign
About 80 per cent of the metallic ore coltan is mined in the DRC for world export.
The lobbying effort is an initiative of the Human Promise, an advocacy group founded by Montreal Jewish teens to help the people of another war-torn African region, Darfur, in Sudan
Co-president Shawn Greenstone, who works at the Human Promise office located at the Quebec Jewish Congress, said in an interview that his members launched an online petition and letter-writing campaign at the end of last month, to get cellphone manufacturers to make sure profits from coltan sales don’t go toward financing one of the deadliest rebel wars in Africa.
A colourful poster being used as part of the campaign depicts a large cellphone. On the screen is an image of a grief-stricken Congolese woman.
The message at the top reads: “Answer the call of Congolese rape victims.”
They are sending the information to teens across Canada.
“We don’t want to boycott cellphones. That’s not the point,” Greenstone said. “The issue is not the sale of coltan or making profits. It’s where the money is going.”
“Kids are really getting behind this,” said Adam Eliesen, Human Promise’s other co-president. “It’s an extremely important cause.”
An article by Liberal MP Irwin Cotler that appeared this year in Global Currents says “six million people have died in the Congo since 1996 – half of them children five years or younger – in this most ignored of tragedies.”
A Human Promise letter being sent out by an estimated 1,000 Jewish teens to Canadian cellphone manufacturers states that the high demand for coltan “has made people very greedy, and that greed has taken a very negative toll on the people of [the DRC].
“You are undoubtedly aware,” the letter says, “that the DRC has the vastest quantity of coltan available, which is great for their economy.”
However, “revenues from the mining of these resources appear to be financing the continued war, as well as tearing apart what should be a flourishing economy.”
The revenues, the letter continues, “are contributing to the displacement [and] murder of far too many Congolese over the past five years.
“As Canadian teens concerned by human rights, we believe that every Canadian corporation that directly benefits from the natural wealth of Third World countries has the moral responsibility to ensure that the people are the major beneficiaries of money brought in through Canadian sources.”
A Human Promise press release issued July 29 cited a recent report by London-based Global Witness – an international NGO that researches links between natural resources exploitation and human rights abuses – saying the cellphone industry “is directly contributing to the coffers of those who are committing unmentionable atrocities against the Congolese.”
As “major consumers of cellphones,” Greenstone said in the same press release, “we are bringing the plight of the Congolese, and the role of the cellphone market, to the attention of our peers around the world.”
Greenstone told The CJN the letter-writing campaign and petition are only a “starting point” for continued action.
Cotler, whom Greenstone said is supporting the group’s petition, wrote in his 2009 article that “the people of this country have endured years of killing fields, war, poverty, disease and displacement…
“Now, the vulnerable in the Congo are not only suffering, yet again, mass displacement, widespread starvation and murder, but also what one African correspondent has called ‘without doubt the most horrific and persistent abuse of women in the world’ – an ‘epidemic of rape’ that includes sexual enslavement, public gang rape and brutalized assault.”
