The looting of the Congo: the Democratic Republic of Congo has perhaps the richest concentration of precious metals and minerals on earth. Colette Braeckman describes how their exploitation by warring factions has fuelled the worst conflict anywhere since the Second World War.

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Democratic Republic of Congo

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The looting of the Congo: the Democratic Republic of Congo has perhaps the richest concentration of precious metals and minerals on earth. Colette Braeckman describes how their exploitation by warring factions has fuelled the worst conflict anywhere since the Second World War.

ONLY the tiny planes that sit on Kamituga's bare earth runway link this mining town in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to the rest of the world.

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The last time Europeans visited Kamituga was over five years ago, before the war began. The children shout with surprise when they see white skin.

The installations of the former Sominki (Societe des Mines du Kivu) company have been ransacked, the shafts flooded and the jungle has invaded the crumbling sheds and offices. But exploitation of the site continues.

Teams of local diggers remove lumps of stone, threaded with veins of gold from grooves hand-cut into the hillsides. The work is intense. The diggers take the stones to women who grind them for hours until they have reduced them to powder mixed with spangles of gold dust. The dust is then carefully sifted.

For this slave labour, the ...

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