It is something of a truism that the Road to Hell is paved with good intentions. I think if it is paved with such, the mortar between the paving stones must be made of NGOs. It would be hard to argue, for instance, that NGOs in Haiti in recent years have been especially helpful, considering there is a good argument that they are responsible for the death of local industry there and the spread of cholera, and their track record in many other endeavors is decidedly a mixed bag of horrible waste and fraud concocted of economic ignorance and meddling do-gooderism. So it is with no small bemusement on my part that yet another of their mad quests is now bearing fruit far different than they claimed to have desired. In this case, their crusade against mining in central Africa, ostensibly to shut down funding for a prolonged civil war, now appears to have made it far worse. That this would happen was, of course, predictable at the time.

This holy crusade combined, for these NGOs, what should have been all of their favorite checkboxes: a patronizing view of Africans as being unable to look out for their own interests (and therefore needing Western help), plenty of photo opportunities with impoverished peasants and thuggish militias, and moral proof that our modern lifestyle (in particular, our electronics) are murdering people and raping the planet. All that was needed was a catchy phrase. The practically poetic “blood diamonds” was already taken, and it being a bit of a mouthful to say “Bloody Tin, Bloody Tantalum, etc.”, they instead used the phrase “Conflict Minerals”, though as @midge rightly pointed out this does rather sound like a PC way of saying “a cage match between pet rocks”. So “Conflict Minerals” it is.