One hundred feet beneath the green slope of a steep hill in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a man lying flat on his front in a narrow tunnel chips at a rock face with a hammer and chisel.

After two hours, drenched in sweat, he tugs on a cord tied to his waist and is pulled back to the surface, carrying with him a 30 kilogram sack of raw columbium-tantalite ore.

Few people have heard of this rare mineral, known as coltan, even though millions of people in the developed world rely on it. But global demand for the mineral, and a handful of other materials used in everything from cellphones to soup tins, is keeping the armies of Congo's ceaseless wars fighting.

More than 80 per cent of the world's coltan is in Africa, and 80 percent of that lies in territory controlled by Congo's various ragtag rebel groups, armed militia and its corrupt and underfunded national army.

Despite Friday's ceasefire summit in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, and visits to Congo by earnest international politicians and diplomats, there will be no peace until the economic forces driving the conflict are addressed, experts warn.

"Until now, this question has been avoided on the basis that it is too sensitive or could derail peace talks," said Patrick Alley, director of Global Witness, a British charity which has investigated the militarisation of Congo's mineral trade.

"That is a short-sighted view. If international dialogues continue to ignore this critical aspect of the conflict, they will not find long-term solutions."

In Congo's North Kivu province, scene of the current bloody conflict, the supply chain that links the sweating miner to the mobile telephone in your pocket starts around Masisi district, the rebel-held area 110 miles northeast of the provincial capital, Goma.

Back up on the surface again, the miner hands his sack of ore to his shift boss, who pays him less than a dollar per kilogramme. Some mines also use child labour, often for no pay at all.

The rocks are then packed into even heavier 50kg loads and passed to porters, who hoist them on to their backs and set off, in flip flops or Wellington boots, for the two-day walk through the mountains to the town of Walikale.

There, the ore is sold once again, now for just over a dollar a kilogramme, to a middleman known as a negociant. He consolidates several loads and calls in an aircraft to land at the town's grass airstrip, collect the rocks and fly them to Goma.

Dotted across Goma, behind high walls and locked gates, there are hundreds of small-scale traders called comptoirs. Men in dusty overalls sit with large piles of rocks in front of them, using a trained eye to scan scan for the chunks likely to yield the best-quality product, samples of which they then grind to assess its coltan purity and how much to pay the negociant accordingly. In an office to the rear, the comptoir director sits in front of his laptop, scanning coltan and cassiterite prices on the internet site of the London Metal Exchange.

Full Story: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindian
ocean/congo/3407217/How-the-mobile-phone-in-your-pocket-is-helping-to-pay-for-the-civil-war-in-Congo.html

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