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Playstation 2 component incites African war - Video Game Feature - Yahoo! Video Games

Playstation 2 component incites African war

Console war reaches past the couch and into the Congo, claims report.

By Ben Silverman

s the video game industry dug up its very own blood diamond?
According to a report by activist site Toward Freedom, for the past decade the search for a rare metal necessary in the manufacturing of Sony's Playstation 2 game console has fueled a brutal conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
At the center of the conflict is the unrefined metallic ore, coltan. After processing, coltan turns into a powder called tantalum, which is used extensively in a wealth of western electronic devices including cell phones, computers and, of course, game consoles.
Allegedly, the demand for coltan prompted Rwandan military groups and western mining companies to plunder hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the rare metal, often by forcing prisoners-of-war and even children to work in the country's coltan mines.
"Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms," said Ex-British Parliament Member Oona King.
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So where's the connection to Sony? According to Toward Freedom, during the 2000 launch of the PS2, the electronics giant was having trouble meeting consumer demand. To pump out more units, Sony required a significant increase in the production of electric capacitors, which are primarily made with tantalum. This helped drive the world price of the powder from $49/pound to a whopping $275/pound, resulting in the frenzied scouring of the Congolese hills known for being ripe with coltan.
Sony has since sworn off using tantalum acquired from the Congo, claiming that current builds of the PS2, PSP and PS3 consoles are sourced from a variety of mines in several different countries.
But according to researcher David Barouski, they're hardly off the hook.
"SONY's PlayStation 2 launch...was a big part of the huge increase in demand for coltan that began in early 1999," he explained. "SONY and other companies like it, have the benefit of plausible deniability, because the coltan ore trades hands so many times from when it is mined to when SONY gets a processed product, that a company often has no idea where the original coltan ore came from, and frankly don't care to know. But statistical analysis shows it to be nearly inconceivable that SONY made all its PlayStations without using Congolese coltan."
Currently, the Playstation 2 is the best-selling video game console of all-time, having sold through over 140 million units.

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PlayStation Wars: What's All This "PlayStation Wars" Business?

We were flooded by emails today from readers tipping us off about this piece, which for some reason made it to Yahoo News' front page today. The story - based off a report conducted by Toward Freedom - suggests that Sony's humble PlayStation 2 "has fuelled a brutal conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo". Huh? Putting aside the fact Yahoo are a few weeks late on the last time this story did the rounds, and seem to be running the story solely to take delight in linking a gaming console with human rights abuses, the fact the original Toward Freedom article repeatedly points the finger at Sony - and in particular the PlayStation 2 - is more than a little, well, strange.
To give you some background, the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Central Africa, is sitting on a reserve of a metallic ore known as coltan. From coltan, we are able to extract tantalum, which is used in all kinds of modern consumer electronics products, from PCs to mobile phones to DVD players to, yes, games consoles. Specifically, it's used to make resistors and capacitors. The DRC's coltan supplies constitute around 1% of the world's total, with the bulk coming from Brazil, Canada and Australia.
During the late 90s and early 00s, as war engulfed most of Central Africa, people also fought over the DRC's coltan supply. Just as they fought over diamonds, over people, over ideals, over religion and over land. It was during this fighting that, aside from the theft of coltan by the DRC's neighbouring states, some terrible atrocities took place in the DRC, including the enslavement of local children, who were sent into dangerous mines to extract coltan, which was then sold to overseas buyers to help further fuel the conflict.
These human rights violations took place. There's no doubt about this, nor is there any doubt that it was Western and Asian demand for consumer electronics that helped sustain the battles over the DRC's coltan. This isn't some political think-piece, however. We're just curious as to why someone would call this a "PlayStation War", when really, PlayStations had very little to do with it.
See, it's believed that the war was at its worst when the price of tantalum spiked between 1998 and 2001, due to "increased demand". Yes, that timeline coincides with the roll-out of the PS2. But come on. Tantalum is used to make personal computers and mobile phones and DVD players, the sales of which dwarf those of games consoles. 1998-2001 happens to be the time when DVD players first hit the market, when mobile phones first became common place and the internet hit the big time, bringing increased PC usage with it. It was those market conditions that increased demand, not the building of a few million PlayStation consoles.
Yet no PC manufacturers are named by Toward Freedom. Or by Yahoo, or by any other mainstream media outlet which reported this story. No mobile phone companies. Or any other consumer electronics manufacturers. They're not called the "Nokia Wars", or the "Samsung DVD Player Wars". They're called the "PlayStation Wars", regardless of how minuscule a contribution the PS2 actually made, because that's sexier, and will help get your story picked up by a game-fearing mainstream media.

3:30 AM on Fri Jul 25 2008
By Luke Plunkett