Dear Friends,

Please take a moment to watch this video and pass it along to everyone you know.

Our goal is no small feat. We need to get the attention of every technology company purchasing conflict minerals and urge them to stop funding the deadliest conflict in the world and ensure their profits are not being built on the blood of women and girls of the Congo.

Please click on the video below, and take one of the Congo Pledges.

What takes a few minutes out of your day today can change the course of history tomorrow.

• The conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo is the deadliest conflict in the world since World War II.
  
  
• Approximately six million people have dies and hundreds of thousands of women and children have been raped while the violence worsens every day.
  
  
• The war is fuled by a multi-million dollar trade in minerals (tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold) which are referred to as "conflict minerals" used in high demand electronic products such as cell phones, lap tops, computers, mp3 players, etc. the technology companies buying these minerals are funding this war.
  
  
• Once consumers realize their purchases are funding the worst sexual violence on the planet against women and children, they will be motivated to purchase the only "conflict free" electronic systems on the market.
  
  
• Inside cell phones, laptops, computers, mp3 players, video games, etc. are "conflict minerals" which are purchased by electronic companies who are the largest users of these minerals.
  
  
• Conflict Minerals are:
         1.  Tin: used as a solder to keep parts together on circuit boards.
         2.  Tantalum: Used as a mini-battery inside electronics.
         3.  Tungsten: Helps a phone vibrate.
         4.  Gold: Most valuable metal in a cell phone.


• Conflict Minerals fuel the war in Eastern Congo:
         1.  The war is now a fight over which rebel group is controlling the mines and trading routes which earn                 approx $180 million dollars per year.
         2.  This has created the deadliest war in the world since World War II with over six million dead.
  

Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.

“We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo’s rape epidemic. “They are done to destroy women.”

Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence, and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen here. According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country.
 
“The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” said John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. “The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling.” 

No one — doctors, aid workers, Congolese and Western researchers — can explain exactly why this is happening. “We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr. Mukwege. “They are done to destroy women.”