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New York. Does that smartphone in your pocket contribute to rape and murder in the depths of Africa? Soon, you will know: A new United States law requires companies to certify whether their products contain minerals from rebel-controlled mines in Congo and surrounding countries.

It is a move aimed at starving the rebels of funds and encouraging them to lay down their arms.

But experts doubt the law will stop the fighting. Furthermore, they say, it could deprive hundreds of thousands of desperately poor Congolese of their incomes and disrupt the economy of an area that is struggling for stability after more than a decade of war.

“For many, many people, it’s the only livelihood they have,” said Sara Geenen, a researcher at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, who has just returned from a trip to the Kivu provinces in eastern Congo.

At issue are three industrial metals — tin, tantalum and tungsten — as well as gold. Tin is used in the solder that joins electronic components together.

Tantalum’s main use is in capacitors, a vital component in electronics. Tungsten has many uses, including light-bulb filaments and the heavy, compact mass that makes cellphones vibrate.

Exports of these metals from eastern Congo have been the subject of a campaign by nonprofit advocacy groups for a few years, one that has borne fruit with the addition of a “conflict minerals” provision to the financial-regulation legislation President Barack Obama signed into law last week.

While Congo has vast reserves, poverty and war mean most of the mining and processing is done by hand, so production is slow. The country produced 5 percent of the world’s tin supply in 2008.

The figure for tantalum ore, a rarer mineral, is higher, but the main sources for world supply are in Brazil and Australia.

Even though Congo’s production is relatively small, the minerals constitute much of the economic activity in eastern Congo.

Advocacy groups, the United Nations and academic researchers such as Geenen agree that the mines fund rebel groups, homegrown militias and rogue elements of the Congolese army.

But the academics say the advocacy groups have been overselling the link between the mines and violence, such as when John Prendergast, the co-founder of the Enough Project, told “60 Minutes” last year that minerals are the “root cause” of the fighting.

“The fight is not a fight over the minerals,” said Laura Seay, a professor of political science at Morehouse College in Atlanta, who studies and visits Congo. “The minerals are used to fund some of the fighting, but it’s not a fight for control of the mines.”

More important causes of the fighting, she said, were land rights and the status of the refugees and militias from neighboring Rwanda who flooded into eastern Congo in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

Sasha Lezhnev, a consultant to the Enough Project and the director of an organization that tries to rehabilitate child soldiers, agrees that the fighting was not originally about the minerals. But Lezhnev said that has changed.

“The minerals are the chief driver and fuel for feeding the flames out in the East now. One of the main results of the military operations over the last year has been for one armed group to take control of minerals from the other armed group,” Lezhnev said.

“You have many people displaced from their homes because mines are being set up.”

The United States law does not ban the minerals trade with the area, something the United Nations has avoided doing as well. Instead, it forces companies to report annually whether their products contain any of the four “conflict minerals” from Congo.

The nine surrounding countries are included as well, out of concern that minerals might be smuggled out of the Congo to obfuscate their origin.

If companies find they use minerals from any of the 10 countries, they need to do audits to determine which mine they are from.

Companies can label their products as “conflict free” if they manage to prove that their products do not contain minerals that directly or indirectly finance or benefit armed groups in any of the 10 countries.


Associated Press