The United Nations has accused the DR Congolese army of funneling weapons to rebel groups that are smuggling millions of dollars in gold and other minerals out of DR Congo, thereby helping sustain one of Africa’s bloodiest and most complicated wars.
In its lengthy report, which officials say is due to be unveiled to the public within days, the UN details a vast, rebel-driven criminal network in eastern DR Congo with tentacles touching Spanish charities, Ukrainian arms dealers, corrupt African officials and even secretive North Korean weapons shipments.
For years, eastern DRC has been widely viewed as “a steaming cauldron” of ethnic tensions, competing commercial interests, land disputes and regional politics playing out at gunpoint.
Most of the fighting is not soldier versus soldier but soldier versus civilian, and millions of people are thought to have died from gunshot wounds or easily preventable diseases since the war broke out in the mid-1990s.
The report has further confirmed the US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s earlier claim that women especially have borne the brunt of the conflict, with hundreds of thousands raped and mutilated, a sexual violence epidemic that has caught the eye of global figures.
The UN officials say their report lays bare exactly how various rebel groups finance their brutality, tracing the flow of illegal minerals from the lush green mountainsides of Congo, formerly Zaire, to Uganda, Burundi and Rwand , and eventually to markets in Europe or smelters in the Far East .
The report charges that government officials in several African countries are working hand in hand with the rebels to help smuggle out minerals and bring in guns.
“The Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, one of the most notorious rebel armies, “has a far-reaching international Diaspora network involved in the day-to-day running of the movement ; the coordination of military and arms-trafficking activities and the management of financial activities”, the report insists.
This document is likely to add momentum in the United States and elsewhere to efforts to crack down on Congo ’s illicit mineral trade.
Congolese officials estimate that 80,000 pounds of gold are smuggled out of the country each year, which at today’s high gold prices is worth more than $1 billion, much of it going straight into rebel hands.
It is a bleak picture of Congo that the report paints. Despite the billions of dollars the United Nations has spent on peacekeeping, countless so-called peace treaties and pledges of regional cooperation, the eastern part of the country remains in the grip of incredibly violent criminals, some of them high-ranking officers in the national army.
Nothing seems to be working. Recent military operations to sweep out the rebels have mostly failed and instead led to widespread massacres and human rights abuses. The rebels, meanwhile, continue to seize mines and use their networks in Europe and the United States to raise cash.
The UN Security Council is expected to discuss the Congo report this week under what officials have described as a “difficult position”, coming just after the world governing body recently cut ties to Congolese Army units accused of widespread human rights abuses.
But at the UN headquarters in New York , diplomats are trying to delay the release of the new report because “there is a lot in there that makes us look complicit,” admitted one United Nations official.
Source African Press Agency
loading...
