Is your phone a cause of war? A lot of the high-tech gadgets we can't live without contain minerals that are part of the conflict in war-torn Congo.

• Author: Kristof, Nicholas D.
• Position: OPINION - Viewpoint essay

A few years ago, there was a lot of talk about "blood diamonds"--diamonds from war-torn countries in Africa, the sales of which were financing brutal rebel armies inflicting horrible violence on civilians in a number of African countries.

You don't hear much about blood diamonds these days, * but we may now be carrying "blood phones."

Some of our elegant symbols of modernity--smartphones, laptops, and digital cameras--are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire).

I've never reported on a war more barbaric than Congo's, and it haunts me. In Congo, I've seen women who've been mutilated, children who've been forced to eat their parents' flesh, and girls who've been subjected to rapes that destroyed their insides. Various warlords, each vying for control, finance their armies and this abuse in part through the sale of mineral ore containing tantalum, tungsten, tin, and gold. Tantalum from Congo is used to make electrical components that go into phones, computers, and gaming devices.

Electronics manufacturers have tried to hush all this up. They want you to look at a gadget and think "sleek" not "blood."

Yet now there's a grassroots movement pressuring companies to keep these "conflict minerals" out of high-tech supply chains. Using Facebook and YouTube, activists are harassing companies like Apple, Intel, and Research in Motion (which makes the BlackBerry) to get them to lean on their suppliers and ensure the use of, say, Australian tantalum rather than tantalum peddled by Congolese militias.

Facebook Activism

In June, for example, protesters demonstrated outside the grand opening of an Apple store in Washington, D.C., demanding that the company commit to using only "clean" minerals. In May, activists blanketed Intel's Facebook page with calls to support tough legislation to curb trade in conflict minerals. For a time, Intel disabled comments--creating a stink that called more attention to blood minerals than human rights campaigners ever could.

Partly as a result, the U.S. financial reform legislation passed this summer includes requirements that companies report on their use of conflict minerals.

Here's the background: Eastern Congo is the site of the most lethal conflict since World War II and is widely described as the rape capital of the world. The war had claimed 5.4 million lives as of April 2007, with the toll mounting by 45,000 a month, according to a...