A prisoner with bound wrists pleads while being beaten by government soldiers just outside Goma in eastern Congo. Photo/REUTERS
By KEVIN J. KELLEY, Posted Monday, December 7 2009 at 00:00
Officials in Tanzania, Uganda and Burundi are conniving with arms dealers and gold smugglers working for rebel forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a panel of United Nations experts charges in an unreleased report.
The report also appears to imply that some of the gold is being flown out of East Africa aboard a Kenya-based airline’s flights.
When contacted, the airline confirmed that it had been in touch with the UN experts.
The rebel groups, along with the DRC’s own military, are responsible for the deaths of millions of Congolese civilians over the past several years.
Rwanda and the UN’s peacekeeping mission in the DRC have also been implicated due to their links to figures accused of committing atrocities.
The report also names countries and corporations outside Africa in the course of tracing a global network that helps finance the Hutu-dominated rebel FDLR (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Rwanda) militia that carries out much of the pillaging inside the DRC.
Rwanda genocide
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