Promote Warfare - Buy a Cell Phone
NewsMax.com
Friday, Oct. 18, 2002
Go down to the local mall and buy a cell phone, a diamond ring or a piece of tropical wood and you'll be personally responsible for murders, rapes, civil wars and the killing of whole herds of gorillas, elephants and other wildlife.
That's the charge made by the Worldwatch Institute in a new study. Cell phone buyers, for example, are helping to support civil warfare over coltan supplies, the mineral used in making cell phones.
"From Colombia to Angola to Afghanistan, people are dying every day because consumer societies import and use materials irrespective of where they originate," says Worldwatch Institute senior researcher Michael Renner, author of the Institute's "The Anatomy of Resource Wars" study.
"If you purchase a cell phone, for example, you may very well be paying to keep the war going in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where rival armies fight for control over deposits of coltan, a commodity that just over a decade ago had little commercial value, but is now vital for the one billion plus cell phones in use today.
"The enormous expansion in global trade, coupled with lax or corrupt customs officials, has made access to key markets relatively easy for warring groups," Renner wrote. "Companies and rich nations that benefit from cheap raw materials have long turned a blind eye to the destruction at their source, and most consumers don't know that a number of common purchases bear the invisible imprint of violence," Renner says, adding that most of the violence in resource-related conflicts is directed against civilians.
If you're a phone buyer (shame on you) you are therefore responsible for:
- Grotesque practices like hacking off limbs, which serve to terrorize local populations into submission or flight.
- Young boys being turned into child soldiers and girls into sex slaves for older fighters.
- Child labor, which is used to extract the resources.
- The more than 5 million people who were killed in resource-driven conflicts during the 1990s and another 5 to 6 million who fled to neighboring countries, and the 11 to 15 million people who were displaced inside the borders of their home countries.
Buy a cell phone, kill an elephant.
And all of this hurts the environment - "many resource-related conflicts are being fought in or near areas of great environmental value, accelerating deforestation and decimating populations of gorillas, elephants, and other wildlife."
In the study Renner says he wants unnamed international groups to track diamonds, timber and other resources such as coltan to screen out those produced and traded illicitly in conflict areas, empower governments and international groups to monitor trade in these items "so that traffickers can no longer operate with impunity," and identify the companies doing business with them.
And, of course, Worldwatch wants international gun control.
And probably cell phone and diamond control as well.
The Worldwatch Institute says it is an independent research organization based in Washington, D.C., that works toward the evolution of an environmentally sustainable and socially just society in which the needs of all people are met without threatening the health of the natural environment or the well-being of future generations.
In other words, a Marxist world order.
Editor's note:
"Let Freedom Ring" - Sean Hannity reveals how to triumph over the left