Sasha Lezhnev's blog

Four years ago, electronics companies gave us many excuses for why digging into their supply chains to find conflict minerals was too difficult. “This is too ambitious,” they said. “We have thousands of suppliers, how can we know our smelters?”   Read More »

This morning the Wall Street Journal published an exposé on the conflict gold trade from eastern Congo, which is worth an estimated $285-400 million per year. The article details the lucrative trade in conflict gold as it is transported from mines in eastern Congo to smugglers in Uganda and Burundi and then to jewelers and dealers in Dubai and India. As the piece highlights, conflict gold is an increasingly important issue for jewelers and the gold industry, as there now exists a “shadowy chain of smuggled gold that stretches from the conflict zones of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the markets of Dubai and jewelry shops around the world.”  Read More »

On March 18, a Congolese warlord known as Bosco "the Terminator" Ntaganda surrendered to the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda.   Read More »

In the coming days, the United Nations Security Council will be debating the mandate of the U.N. mission in Congo known as MONUSCO, the world’s largest peacekeeping force. Based on a recent trip to eastern Congo and conversations with U.N. peacekeepers themselves, here are three ideas that I would want my taxpayer dollars to go toward.  Read More »

Tech giant Apple has come a long way on conflict minerals. In 2010, they were one of the worst consumer electronics companies in their response to this serious problem, and Enough Project, Campus Progress, and A Thousand Sisters protested the opening of their store in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. But Apple has started to turn the corner on conflict minerals with some substantial steps.  Read More »

Last week, the electronics industry updated its list of audited conflict-free smelters to 29. This is up from 11 smelters in the Conflict-Free Smelter program, or CFS, at the start of 2012—nearly tripling the size of the program over the past year.  Read More »

The Obama administration announced last Thursday that it will support a critical missing link in the fight against conflict minerals: independent monitoring. This is a major step in the long fight against the illegal trade in conflict minerals.  Read More »

In this op-ed for Global Post, I outline some steps people moved by "Kony 2012" can take to help end the Lord's Resistance Army.  Read More »

The Congolese army captured two of the largest minerals mines in eastern Congo last week—the enormous Bisie tin mine and the Omate gold mine. If the objective is to enable conflict-free minerals from Congo to be sold in international markets, the Congolese government should ensure that the army hands these mines over to the mining police as soon as possible.  Read More »

Apple released its 2012 Sustainability Report last Friday, and it showed that it is doing some things very well on conflict minerals and other things not very well.  Read More »