Why Congo's minerals matter
Coltan, cobalt and gold connect a distant war to the phone in your pocket.
Eastern DR Congo sits on some of the richest mineral deposits on Earth. Those resources are both a potential path out of poverty and a driver of the violence.
The minerals
Coltan is refined into tantalum, used in the tiny capacitors inside phones, laptops and games consoles. Cobalt, mined mostly in the country's south, is essential to the rechargeable batteries in smartphones and electric cars — the DRC supplies the majority of the world's cobalt. Eastern Congo also produces gold, tin and tungsten.
Minerals and the fighting
In parts of the east, armed groups tax, control or smuggle minerals to fund themselves. Tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold are sometimes called "conflict minerals" for this reason. International rules now require some companies to check that their supply chains are not financing armed groups — but tracing a mineral from a remote mine to a finished product is difficult, and enforcement is patchy.
A resource curse
Congo's mineral wealth should make it rich. Instead, weak government, corruption and competition over the mines have helped fuel decades of instability — a pattern economists call the "resource curse." It is one reason the conflict has proved so hard to end: there is money to be made from it continuing.