Cell Phones' Ethical Hang-Up

Hello, I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC -- Here's How I Help Fuel the World's Deadliest Conflict

From the Huffington Post.

By: Brooke Smith and John Prendergast

Hello, I'm a Mac, and I'm helping fuel the war in the Congo - currently the deadliest conflict in the world. So are PCs, cell phones, digital cameras and other consumer electronics. That's what Apple's famous "I'm a Mac ... And I'm a PC" ads don't tell you. So I (Brooke) and cinematographer Steven Lubensky, with the help of actors Joshua Malina and John Lehr, decided to create a version that does.

It is not surprising if you didn't know that your favorite Apple gadgets -- your iPhone, iPad, iPod and Mac -- are linked to the conflict engulfing the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo today and for the past dozen years. Most people don't know - which is in part why the war in Congo has gone on for so long. With more than 5 million people killed, it is the deadliest conflict since World War II.

As Nick Kristof wrote in The New York Times yesterday, "Electronics manufacturers have tried to hush all this up. They want you to look at a gadget and think 'sleek,' not 'blood.'"

Tech titans -- including Nintendo, HP, Dell, Intel, and RIM, the makers of BlackBerry -- have made millions from products that use conflict minerals and have gotten off the hook for fueling violence in the Congo, thanks to a tendency in today's culture not to question where our everyday items come from.

That's not necessarily a criticism; it's just the way the world works now, where we interact with materials from every corner of the globe on a daily basis. So we tend to think that our new iPhone came from the Mac store down the street or our new digital camera originated from an online camera store. But as you see in our video, the problem arises with all the components inside.

Essential parts of our electronic devices are made from minerals found in eastern Congo. Tin, tantalum, tungsten -- the 3Ts -- and gold serve such necessary functions as making our cell phones vibrate or helping our iPods store electricity.

The same armed groups who control most of the mines that supply these essential minerals to the world market are responsible for the epidemic of sexual violence in eastern Congo. Women and girls pay a gruesome price, and the persistent health conditions and severe trauma that linger for years after an attack are leaving communities and families in utter ruin. In addition, the labor conditions in the mines are abysmal. Indentured servitude is common practice, and children as young as 11 are used to squeeze into the tight spaces underground.

There are few conflicts in the world where the link between our consumer appetites and mass human suffering is so direct.

The lucrative mineral trade -- estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually -- perpetuates the violence because it enables militias and government soldiers to buy weapons to continue the fight for these valuable resources. All along the supply chain that winds its way through central Africa, armed groups and governments benefit immensely from the trade in conflict minerals, making it a very stubborn problem to eradicate.

This reality isn't the result of an elaborate cover-up. Until consumers started asking, electronics companies were satisfied to say that they didn't know whether their products were made with conflict minerals from Congo. The trade in minerals from eastern Congo is shockingly opaque, hence the easy exploitation. Even now, as the issue of conflict minerals gains traction, companies like Apple continue to tell us that their products do not contain conflict minerals because their suppliers said so.

From towns and campuses across the United States to the U.S. Congress, advocates are protesting this inadequate response and pushing to put a system in place to trace, audit, and certify the minerals in our electronic devices, so that ultimately, we as consumers can choose to buy conflict-free.

Visit RAISE Hope for Congo, www.raisehopeforcongo.org, and send the message to tech companies that you want them to make their products conflict-free. And please share this video with your friends.

Brooke Smith is an actress, writer and director. Brooke has acted in many feature films including "The Silence of the Lambs", "Vanya on 42nd Street" and "Series 7: The Contenders." On television, Brooke played Dr. Erica Hahn on "Grey's Anatomy." The MAC/PC Conflict minerals ad is the third PSA Brooke has directed for The Enough Project's RAISE Hope for Congo campaign.

John Prendergast is Co-Founder of Enough, the anti-genocide project at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., and co-author with Don Cheadle of the forthcoming book The Enough Moment.

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With the release of the new iPhone 4, various groups are attempting to raise consumer awareness about where the materials used in cell phones originate. The reality is sickening. Two opinion pieces posted within the last week, one by Brooke Smith and John Prendergast for the Huffington Post (shown above) and one by Nicholas Kristof (link below) for the New York Times, detail how our demand for cell phones, and lack of real corporate accountability are fueling the war in Congo, at least in part.

Essential minerals used in the production of cell phones, such as (Tin, tantalum, tungsten among others), are sourced from the Congo. The mineral trade is very lucrative there and those who are in control of the mines are the same people responsible for mass rape in the country along with indentured servitude and the use of child labor in these mines. Electronics companies claim that their products are free from conflict materials but this is because the suppliers tell them they are conflict free not because they are. This is why many people are calling for companies to take more interest and be more responsible for their supply chain.

If you are interested in learning more, please watch the video Brooke and her team put together which is posted here. To take action please visit http://www.raisehopeforcongo.org/content/take-action and click on the Commit to Purchase Conflict Free Electronics, where you can email the 21 largest electronic companies and let them know you are committed to conflict free electronics. Tell your friends too. Until corporations know their customers are serious about conflict free materials, they won’t take the problem seriously. Make sure to check out Kristof’s article as well http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/opinion/27kristof.html?scp=1&sq=death%20by%20gadget&st=cse

Determinants of Trafficking: Understanding the problem and the actors

The starting point for understanding the problem of trafficking and finding a solution is to figure out what we think and know about the problem. So this is where I started.

Recently, I read a report which said, half the districts in India are affected by human trafficking. I have read similar reports on different countries across the globe, and each report claims the problem exists because people know either nothing or very little about trafficking. While this may be true, what confused me is the fact that even though there are people or groups who know more than others, it is not always easy to figure out what those people or groups precisely think about the problem.

As I read more, I want to know what everyone thinks of the problem. To keep this exercise structured, I have broken down the study into multiple parts. Today's post is an attempt to understand the factors that influence activities of victims, exploiters, and buyers.

PART I: Determinants of Trafficking: Understanding the problem and the actors

It is crucial to understand all the actors involved in human trafficking as well as the dynamics between the actors and between the actors and the environment.

There have been many articles written on human trafficking, but there is no consensus on what the necessary conditions are to create and maintain human trafficking, i.e. what causes human trafficking and what keeps it going? The answers of course range from political factors such as war and conflict to social factors such as gender discrimination. Perhaps we can never have a uniform answer to these questions. It seems that only now we're beginning to agree on a definition of trafficking so it is hard to believe we will be able to find a set of common determinants of trafficking so soon. Hence, I am very interested in learning what everyone thinks about the questions below and where we differ in our ideas - I hope this exercise will help us see the problem from different perspectives. The goal of this post is to start a discussion on determinants of trafficking and to learn from others' views.

1. What conditions are necessary for trafficking to occur? What (plausible) assumptions can we make about the type of factors that influence trafficking and what makes these assumptions plausible?
• For example, in terms of economic drivers, we know poverty and high level of unemployment are some of the (essential) conditions traffickers look for in recruitment areas , but they may not be causes of trafficking, but rather conditions for it. There may be poor communities which may not be be suitable for 'recruitment' because those communities, for example, may not have well connected criminal networks.
  Categories:
1. Personal: literacy, communication channels, home environment, etc.
   
2. Economic: debt, high levels of unemployment, etc. :
   
• For example, we've read globalization may have created conditions that make it easy for criminal networks to flourish and hence for trafficking to occur. In this case, we would attempt to understand precisely how globalization creates these conditions.
  
3. Political: war, conflicts, exclusion by caste or some other group, etc.
   
4. Social: gender discrimination, marital status, etc.
   
5. Geographic: forced migration due to scarcity of water, etc.
2. How are the necessary conditions for trafficking (from question 1) created and maintained?
3. Who can we classify as exploiters (trafficker, pimps, etc) ? What assumptions can we make about the exploiters?
   
4. What assumptions can we make about the buyers? Who (and what process) creates the demand?
• We've read that trafficking enables "commodification" of humans. We also know that the demand for any commodity is much more complex than just the need of the buyer. Hence, what are these other variables that make understanding this demand and the buyers so difficult and complex?
5. Are we missing something? Who else plays a role and how important is it?

Input from everyone would be extremely helpful and I look forward to a discussion about the questions in this post.

Colombian armed groups recruiting child soldiers

The Colombian government's 41-year war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) has become increasingly dangerous for children.

The group is looking more and more at child soldiers - boys and girls below the age of 18 - as it seeks to recruit new fighters.

The Colombian government says there are 9,000 soldiers in that age group in irregular armies, but independent sources say the number is closer to 11,000.

Al Jazeera's Gabriel Elizondo reports from San Jose de Guaviare in Colombia.

South Asians Left Jobless, Homeless In Iraq

From NPR:

By Lourdes Garcia-Navarro

Morning Edition, December 15, 2008 · Tens of thousands of poor South Asians have made their way to Iraq since the U.S. invasion, in the hopes of making money to send home to support their families.

Dishwashers, cleaners, drivers and cooks from countries like Bangladesh, India and Nepal form part of an army of contractors that service America's expensive war.

But the system that gets them to Baghdad is riddled with corruption and exploitation, leaving some South Asians living in hovels, jobless and afraid.

Four months ago, Sushil Khadka, 26, left his wife, his two children and his home country of Nepal for Iraq.

"I'd dreamt of a good job, sending home my salary every month to feed my family, to send my children to school. That's why I came here. But that never happened. The opposite happened. It's terrible," he says.

Now Khadka sits in a hut made out of salvaged cardboard, huddled next to a chain-link fence in a dusty corner near Baghdad's international airport. Flies swarm around splattered bits of old food and dirty blankets.

"They made fools of us," he says. "Had we gotten work, it would've been alright but they took our money and ran away."

He sold the family jewelry — all they had in the world — to pay a recruiter in Nepal $5,000. He says the recruiter promised him a job working for American contractor KBR that would earn him $800 a month — a fortune in Nepal. The average income there is $340 a year.

But when he arrived in Iraq he was told there was no work, he says. The agent who was supposed to help him was arrested and the visa in Khadka's passport was ripped out. He was left to his own devices, scrounging around the airport to find shelter and food.

Khadka is not alone. The 40-or-so men who live with him in this makeshift camp tell similar tales.

Upendra Das, 17, sits on the floor chopping vegetables on a dirty plank of painted wood.

"We eat once a day. Sometimes we can't even do that," he says. "I've been here three months so far. To get here I borrowed from the village moneylender. They charge a lot of interest. I can't leave so I'm still waiting, hoping that I will get some work."

Another group of 1,000 South Asians have been held in a nearby warehouse for several months by KBR subcontractor Najlaa Catering Services, a company based in Kuwait. The men say they had their passports taken away and were confined in substandard conditions.

The U.S. military and KBR say they are investigating.

The U.S. State and Defense departments have issued contracting guidelines that are supposed to protect workers in Iraq.

"As in all things, in Iraq there is a policy in place but there is no one really there to enforce it," says investigative journalist T. Christian Miller, who works for Pro Publica and has written a book called Blood Money about the mismanagement of Iraq's reconstruction.

He says that the abuse of South Asian workers in Iraq is common.

"It's definitely a situation of exploitation. You are talking about the most vulnerable people in the world," Miller says. "The U.S. has contracted some of the most dangerous and dirties jobs to some of the poorest people in the world. At this point, five years into the war, there are no excuses for U.S. companies not to be aware of the issue of human trafficking or labor trafficking."

Back at the Baghdad airport, a representative from the International Organization of Migration (IOM) has just showed up offering the homeless South Asians free repatriation. The IOM heard about the men only 10 days ago.

The men crowd around as Thair Issan hands out forms for them to fill out if they want to go home. Issan says the men's plight is desperate.

"Those are victims," he says. "You see the conditions they're living in. It's a very big humanitarian crisis."

Bangladeshi Mohammad Nazrul Islam says he wants to stay here but he's been told he'll be jailed if he does.

"The Iraqi authorities say ... they will jail us if we stay. If we leave right now, it's OK. But we don't want to leave because we've all paid a lot of money to get here," he says.

Where will we find the money to pay off that debt? he asks desperately, adding that he wants to stay but no one will give him a job.

Child Traffickers Active in the Philippines

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Organ Trafficking During Kosovo War

Conflict in Sri Lanka Raises Risk of Trafficking

By Shihar Aneez

From Reuters:

COLOMBO, March 25 - Sri Lanka's protracted and increasingly bloody civil war is making the country more vulnerable to human trafficking, a senior United Nations official said on Tuesday.

People fleeing conflict-torn areas in Sri Lanka's north and east, where fighting between Tamil Tiger rebels and state security forces has raged since 1983, opened the door to people smugglers keen to profit from the vulnerable, the United Nations said.

"The conflict you have is quite clearly going to be a major factor in increasing vulnerability of some of the country's young people," Gary Lewis, representative of the U.N. Office for Drugs and Crime in South Asia, told Reuters.

"Migration is the key in which traffickers and traffic victims meet," Lewis said after a briefing in Colombo.

Sri Lanka, a developing nation of 20 million, has one of the lowest incidences of people smuggling in Asia, despite the ongoing conflict which has claimed 70,000 lives.

Lewis's office estimates at least 150,000 people are trafficked within South Asia each year, led by India and followed by Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

But with fighting intensifying between government troops and the rebels, the U.N.'s refugee agency UNHCR says around 188,000 Sri Lankans have been forced from their homes since April 2006.

Read the full article

Children in Iraq

This article is from Al Jazeera from last month, but I was prompted to look deeper into the subject of human trafficking in Iraq after listening to a free netcast from Yale University featuring Yanar Mohammed, founder of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq (available on iTunes under iTunes U). The article deals specifically with the problem of Iraqi children and how the conflict is worsening their chances of becoming victims of trafficking:

Local officials and aid workers have expressed concern over the alarming rate at which children are disappearing countrywide in Iraq's current unstable environment.

Omar Khalif, vice-president of the Iraqi Families Association (IFA), an NGO established in 2004 to register cases of those missing and trafficked, said that at least two children are sold by their parents every week.

Another four are reported missing every week.

He said: "[The] numbers are alarming. There is an increase of 20 per cent in the reported cases of missing children compared to last year."

"In previous years, children were reported missing on their way home from schools or after playing with friends outside their homes. However, police investigations have revealed that many have been sold by their parents to foreign couples or specialised gangs."

According to police investigations and an independent IFA study, Iraqi children are being sold to families in many European countries- particularly the Netherlands and Sweden - Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.

"Taking advantage of the desperate situation of many families living under poverty conditions in Iraq, foreigners offer a good amount of money in exchange of children as young as one-month old and up to five years of age, " Khalif said.

He said there are fears children are being trafficked for the sex trade and the organ transplant black market.

Children drugged

Hassan Alaa, a senior ministry official, said that while it has been difficult to precisely trace where the missing children are taken, government forces have captured 15 human trafficking gangs operating in Iraq in the past nine months.

"Many were carrying false documents prepared to take some children out from the country."

"During their confessions, they said many children are sold for as little as $3,000 and for very young babies, the price could reach $30,000," Alaa said.

The interior ministry has stepped up its security at checkpoints and border posts throughout Iraq.

He said that the child traffickers resort to drugging children with powerful sedatives during the trip out of Iraq. When they drive up to a checkpoint, the police are told the children are merely sleeping.

"All the children leaving Iraq now have to be woken up and interviewed by the police and border patrols, except those who are infants and unable to speak," Alaa said.

Extreme poverty

Mahmoud Saeed, a senior official at the ministry of labour and social affairs, says extreme poverty and nationwide unemployment have pushed parents to the edge, forcing them to make decisions once believed unthinkable.

"Desperate seeing their families without food and hygiene, parents prefer to give their children for adoption, to save their lives," he said.

Saeed said the ministry was making employment a national crisis issue in 2008, hoping to find immediate work for the poor. He is hoping international aid agencies and NGOs will increase their participation and investments in projects geared towards helping children. 

But for many parents, help will inevitably come too late. 

Iraq is on the Special Cases list of the State Department's 2007 TIP Report as it states, "Iraq was in political transition during the reporting period and is therefore not ranked in this Report [meaning the country's efforts are not placed into the tier system]." It has been on the Special Cases list since 2003. Although in 2007, it reported that there was credible evidence that this problem was getting worse and that legislation is severely lagging behind international standards.

UNICEF also painted a grim picture for the current state of the children in Iraq. Among their findings:

• Almost a million children of primary school age are now out of school indefinitely,
• Almost 75,000 children have resorted to living in temporary camps or shelters by the end of 2007,
• Almost 25,000 children were internally displaced per month throughout the year,
• Approximately 1,350 children were detained by police for "security reasons."

While the report also details good things UNICEF has been able to see accomplished in the time period, the violence and instability is obviously still affecting children. The displaced children and children living in temporary housing and refugee camps are especially vulnerable according to information on the UN Special Representative of the Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict:

Evidence indicates that refugee and internally displaced persons' camps are often recruiting grounds for child soldiers because of the convenient concentrations of children in these zones. These children also face severe protection risks during flight as well as outside camp boundaries that can include killing or maiming, sexual violence, abduction and trafficking.