Nairobi — A campaign is growing in the United States to end wars and atrocities in eastern Congo by discouraging the export of what organisers describe as "conflict minerals."

The effort is inspired by the movement a few years ago that helped stop murderous conflicts in West Africa by successfully targeting the "blood diamonds" that were financing them.

The Congo initiative is also modelled on the influential US varsity-based campaign to halt mass killings in Darfur as well as on the earlier push against US corporate investment in apartheid South Africa.

Prof Herbert Weiss, a Congo expert at a Washington think tank, noted at a US university forum last week that an increasing number of Americans are at last paying attention to Congo.

The organiser of the conflict-minerals campaign John Prendergast told activists to rally behind proposals in the US Congress to create a global certification system for four valuable metals found in large quantities in Congo.

Monitoring would be put in place to ensure lawful control of these minerals, which are essential for the manufacture of telecommunications devices, Mr Prendergast said.

Such a certification system is needed to squelch eastern Congo's "mafia economy," he added. "Until the logic of illegal mineral extraction is transformed," Mr Prendergast said, "peacekeepers will have little impact."

The dons of this mafia economy operate out of Kampala and Kigali as well as in Kinshasa, he observed.

Minerals mined in eastern Congo by warlords make their way via Uganda and Rwanda to smelters in Asia overseen by multinational companies, added Mr Prendergast.

He noted that Congo is a leading source of four minerals -- "gold and the three T's" -- essential to the workings of mobile telephones, computers and digital music players.

Mr Prendergast explained that gold is used to coat the wiring of these devices; tantalum, also known as coltan, acts as a coolant; tungsten lights the screen on mobile phones; and the devices' components are soldered with tin.

"US consumers play a direct but inadvertent role in perpetuating the violence in Congo," he told an audience at St Michael's College in the northern state of Vermont.

But the campaign he leads -- Raise Hope for Congo -- is not calling for a boycott of consumer electronics, nor does it seek to ban purchase of gold and the three T's from the DRC.

A consumer boycott would be impractical because the devices have become integral to everyday life in the United States, Mr Prendergast said.

And Raise Hope for Congo sees properly regulated mineral exports as a potential engine for development in the DRC.