Nicholas Kristof offers a good column about the much-neglected unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in the Congo. Sometimes the current round of fighting (the “Kivu Conflict”) is demarcated as separate from the earlier round (“Second Congolese War”) but over the past 15 years more people have died in this business than anything else.

He calls it “a pointless war — now a dozen years old — driven by warlords, greed for minerals, ethnic tensions and complete impunity.” But it’s not really unusual for a war to be pointless in this sense. The point is that, as he says, it’s driven by greed for minerals. The minerals provide funds that allow the fighting to continue, and it’s desire for control over the minerals that motivates the fighting.

CAP’s Enough Campaign has been working on a variety of initiatives to help address the links between electronics in western stores in brutal violence in Congo. The Conflict Minerals Trade Act would be a start.

You’ve probably heard of “conflict diamonds.” Diamonds that come from a war zone, typically in Africa, whose export fuels civil conflict. On the one hand, it’s the funds from the diamonds that allow the participants to get the money they need to arm and pay their troops. And on the other hand, the ostensible political issues behind civil conflict are often really just a pretext for securing control of diamonds. Or, of course, other valuable natural resources. For example, in Congo—scene of a long-running and extraordinarily deadly series of conflicts—warring factions are often after metals such as tin and tantalum that are needed to make electronic devices such as cell phones.

But unlike “conflict diamonds” the phrase “conflict metals that are used in electronic devices” doesn’t have much public profile. The Enough Campaign is running an effort to raise awareness of the issue, and they’re working in partnership with YouTube. The idea, basically, is to get people to make videos about the subject. Videos like this:

Submissions will be judged by an exciting celebrity panel of Wim Wenders, Ryan Gosling, and Sonya Walger:

Design the best video that raises awareness about the link between our cell phones and the violence in Congo, and we will fly you to LA (from within the U.S.) where your winning video will be screened at a red carpet event to mark the occasion. The winning video will also be featured on the Enough Project’s websites and YouTube’s contest page.

Here’s a paper and another one if you want some more detailed information on the subject.

Good news is, of course, a relative term when it comes to Congo—perhaps the country that’s seen the most suffering over the past ten years. But it seems the government of Rwanda cut a deal with the government of Congo to form an agreement to crack down on Hutu militias the Rwandans don’t like and have Rwanda turn on its proxy, the rebel leader Laurent Nkunda who Rwanda used to fight the Hutus but who’d been making all sorts of trouble and attempting, as Rwanda-backed rebels in Congo tend to, to overthrow the central government.

Mark Goldberg observes that this is a pretty unexpected turn of events since “last month a no-nonsense Security Council ‘panel of experts’ report showed that Nkunda was essentially a front for Rwandan business interests in Eastern Congo.” One hopes Kigali’s decision to switch sides will help put Congo back on a path toward stability.

Congo’s seemingly endless civil conflict is heating back up again, with the flashpoint once again being the region around the town of Goma that’s near the Rwandan border. Conflict has been raging on-again, off-again for over a decade but the humanitarian disaster this has caused has attracted relatively little attention since there’s no plausible way to blame it on Arabs or the United Nations or to argue that if only the world would embrace unrestrained American military power the problem could be solved.

On the contrary, the best hope for the country keeps being that UN peacekeeping efforts there will be backed up by a force with a reasonable level of manpower and resources. But the countries with resources available haven’t been interested in ponying much of anything up. At the beginning of October the ENOUGH Project was warning that the peace process was on the verge of collapse as a result of these kind of problems and now it has, of course, collapsed. Note that despite the “humanitarian” rationales mooted for the invasion of Iraq we could have done much more good at much less cost by devoting resources to things like multilateral peacekeeping in Congo.