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Friday, October 17, 2008
RAPE VICTIMS' WORDS HELP JOLT CONGO INTO CHANGE
By Jeffrey Gettleman
Bukavu, Congo—Honorata Kizende looked out at the audience and began with a simple, declarative sentence.
"There was no dinner," she said.
"It was me who was dinner. Me, because they kicked me roughly to the ground, and they ripped off all my clothes, and between the two of them, they held my feet. One took my left foot, one took my right, and the same with my arms, and between the two of them they proceeded to rape me. Then all five of them raped me."
The audience, which had been called together by local and international aid groups and included everyone from high-ranking politicians to street kids with no shoes, stared at her in disbelief.
Congo, it seems, is finally facing its horrific rape problem, which United Nations officials have called the worst sexual violence in the world. Tens of thousands of women, possibly hundreds of thousands, have been raped in the past few years in this hilly, incongruously beautiful land. Many of these rapes have been marked by a level of brutality that is shocking even by the twisted standards of a place riven by civil war and haunted by warlords and drug-crazed child soldiers.
After years of denial and shame, the silence is being broken. Because of stepped-up efforts in the past nine months by international organizations and the Congolese government, rapists are no longer able to count on a culture of impunity. Of course, countless men still get away with assaulting women. But more and more are getting caught, prosecuted and put behind bars.
European aid agencies are spending tens of millions of dollars building new courthouses and prisons across eastern Congo, in part to punish rapists. Mobile courts are holding rape trials in villages deep in the forest that have not seen a black-robed magistrate since the Belgians ruled the country decades ago.
The American Bar Association opened a legal clinic in January specifically to help rape victims bring their cases to court. So far the work has resulted in eight convictions. Here in Bukavu, one of the biggest cities in the country, a special unit of Congolese police officers has filed 103 rape cases since the beginning of this year, more than any year in recent memory.
In Bunia, a town farther north, rape prosecutions are up 600 percent compared with five years ago. Congolese investigators have even been flown to Europe to learn "CSI"-style forensic techniques. The police have arrested some of the most violent offenders, often young militiamen, most likely psychologically traumatized themselves, who have thrust sticks, rocks, knives and assault rifles inside women.
"We're starting to see results," said Pernille Ironside, a United Nations official in eastern Congo.
The number of those arrested is still tiny compared with that of the perpetrators on the loose, and often the worst offenders are not caught because they are marauding bandits who attack villages in the night, victimize women and then melt back into the forest.
This is all happening in a society where women tend to be beaten down anyway. Women in Congo do most of the work—at home, in the fields and in the market, where they carry enormous loads of bananas on their bent backs—and yet they are often powerless. Many women who are raped are told to keep quiet. Often, it is a shame for the entire family, and many rape victims have been kicked out of their villages and turned into beggars.
Grass-roots groups are trying to change this culture, and they have started by encouraging women who have been raped to speak out in open forums, like a courtroom full of spectators, just with no accused.
At the event in Bukavu in mid-September, Ms. Kizende's story of being abducted by an armed group, then putting her life back together after months as a sex slave, drew tears—and cheers. It seems that the taboo against talking about rape is beginning to lift. Many women in the audience wore T-shirts that read in Kiswahili: "I refuse to be raped. What about you?"
Activists are fanning out to villages on foot and by bicycle to deliver a simple but often novel message: rape is wrong. Men's groups are even being formed.
But these improvements are simply the first, tentative steps of progress in a very troubled country.
United Nations officials said the number of rapes had appeared to be decreasing over the past year. But the recent surge of fighting between the Congolese government and rebel groups, and all the violence and predation that goes with it, is jeopardizing those gains.
"It's safer today than it was," said Euphrasie Mirindi, a woman who was raped in 2006. "But it's still not safe."
Poverty, chaos, disease and war. These are the constants of eastern Congo. Many people believe that the rape problem will not be solved until the area tastes peace. But that might not be anytime soon.
Laurent Nkunda, a well-armed Tutsi warlord, or a savior of his people, depending on whom you ask, recently threatened to wage war across the country. Clashes between his troops, many of them child soldiers, and government forces have driven hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in the past few months. His forces, along with those from the dozens of other rebel groups hiding out in the hills, are thought to be mainly responsible for the epidemic of brutal rapes.
United Nations officials say the most sadistic rapes are committed by depraved killers who participated in Rwanda's genocide in 1994 and then escaped into Congo. These attacks have left thousands of women with their insides destroyed. But the Congolese National Army, a ragtag undisciplined force of teenage troops who sport wrap-around shades and rusty rifles, has also been blamed. The government has been slow to punish its own, but Congolese generals recently announced they would set up new military tribunals to prosecute soldiers accused of rape.
No one—doctors, aid workers, Congolese and Western researchers—can explain exactly why Congo's rape problem is the worst in the world. The attacks continue despite the presence of the largest United Nations peacekeeping force, with more than 17,000 troops. Impunity is thought to be a big factor, which is why there is now so much effort on bolstering Congo's creaky and often corrupt justice system. The sheer number of armed groups spread over thousands of miles of thickly forested territory, fighting over Congo's rich mineral spoils, also makes it incredibly difficult to protect civilians. The ceaseless instability has held the whole eastern swath of the country hostage.
In Bukavu, everywhere you look, something is broken: a railing, a window, a pickup cruising around with no fenders, a woman trudging along the road with no eyes.
The Congolese government admits it is at a loss, especially in keeping women safe.
"Every day, women are raped," said Louis Leonce Muderhwa, the governor of South Kivu Province. "This isn't peace."
Activists from overseas have been pouring in. Few are more passionate than Eve Ensler, the American playwright who wrote "The Vagina Monologues," which has been performed in more than 100 countries. She came to Congo last month to work with rape victims.
"I have spent the past 10 years of my life in the rape mines of the world," she said. "But I have never seen anything like this."
She calls it "femicide," a systematic campaign to destroy women.
Ms. Ensler is helping open a center in Bukavu called the City of Joy, which will provide counseling to rape victims and teach leadership skills and self-defense. Her hope is to build an army of rape survivors who will push with an urgency—that has so far been absent—for a solution to end Congo's ceaseless wars.
The City of Joy is rising behind Panzi Hospital, where the worst of the worst rape cases are treated. But even this refuge has come under attack. Last month, an irate mob stormed the hospital. The mob demanded that the doctors give them the body of a thief, so it could be burned. When the doctors refused, several angry young men beat up nurses and smashed windows. But it was not clear if the body was the only thing that had set them off.
"They don't like our work," said Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist. "Maybe what we're doing is disturbing people."
The stories of these rapes are clearly disturbing. But that is the point, to shake people up and grab their attention.
"The details are the scariest part," Ms. Ensler said.
At the event last month, many people in the audience covered their mouths as they listened. Some could not bear it and burst out of the room crying.
One speaker, Claudine Mwabachizi, told how she was kidnapped by bandits in the forest, strapped to a tree and repeatedly gang-raped. The bandits did unspeakable things, she said, like disemboweling a pregnant woman right in front of her. "A lot of us keep these secrets to ourselves," she said.
She was going public, she said, "to free my sisters."
But Congo, if anything, is a land of contrasts. The soil here is rich, but the people are starving. The minerals are limitless, but the government is broke.
After the speaking-out event was over, Ms. Mwabachizi said she felt exhausted.
But, she added, "I feel strong."
She was given a pink shawl with a message printed on it.
"I have survived," it read. "I can do anything."
CBS News
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Sunday, August 17, 2008
WAR AGAINST WOMEN
The Use Of Rape As A Weapon In Congo's Civil War
This segment was originally broadcast on Jan. 13, 2008. It was updated on Aug. 14, 2008.
Right now there's a war taking place in the heart of Africa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and more people have died there than in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur combined.
You probably haven't heard much about it, but as CNN's Anderson Cooper first reported last January, it's the deadliest conflict since World War II. Within the last ten years, more than five million people have died and the numbers keep rising.
As Cooper and a 60 Minutes team found when they went there a few months ago, the most frequent targets of this hidden war are women. It is, in fact, a war against women, and the weapon used to destroy them, their families and whole communities, is rape.
Dr. Denis Mukwege is the director of Panzi Hospital in eastern Congo. In this war against women, his hospital is the frontline. One of the latest victims he's treating is Sifa M'Kitambala. She was raped just two days before the team arrived by soldiers who raided her village.
"They just cut her at many places," Dr. Mukwege explains.
Sifa was pregnant, but that didn't stop her rapists. Armed with a machete, they even cut at her genitals.
In the last ten years in Congo, hundreds of thousands of women have been raped, most of them gang raped. Panzi Hospital is full of them.
"All these women have been raped?" Cooper asked Dr. Mukwege, standing near a very large group of women waiting.
All the women, the doctor says, have been patients of his.
Within a week, Dr. Mukwege says this room will be filled with new faces, new victims.
"You know, they're in deep pain. But it's not just physical pain. It's psychological pain that you can see. Here at the hospital, we've seen women who've stopped living," Dr. Mukwege explains.
And not all the people the hospital treats are adults. "There are children. I think the youngest was three years old," Mukwege says. "And the oldest was 75."
To understand what is happening here, you have to go back more than a decade, when the genocide that claimed nearly a million lives in neighboring Rwanda spilled over into Congo. Since then, the Congolese army, foreign-backed rebels, and home-grown militias have been fighting each other over power and this land, which has some of the world's biggest deposits of gold, copper, diamonds, and tin. The United Nations was called in and today their mission is the largest peacekeeping operation in history.
Since 2005, some 17,000 UN troops and personnel have cobbled together a fragile peace. Last year they oversaw the first democratic election in this country in 40 years. But now all they have accomplished is at risk. Fighting has broken out once again in eastern Congo and the region threatens to slip into all-out war.
Each new battle is followed by pillaging and rape; entire communities are terrorized. Forced to flee their homes, people take whatever they can, and walk for miles in the desperate hope of finding food and shelter. Over the last year, more than 500,000 people have been uprooted. A fraction of them make it to cramped camps, where they depend on UN aid to survive.
One camp Cooper visited sprang up just two months before. It was already overcrowded, but more people kept arriving. They would go there seeking refuge, a safe haven, but the truth is in Congo, for women, there's no such thing. Even in these supposedly protected camps, women are raped every single day.
"Has rape almost become the norm here?" Cooper asks Anneka Van Woudenberg, who is the senior Congo researcher at Human Rights Watch.
"I think because of the widespread nature of the war, because there has been so much violence, rape is now on a daily basis - rape is the norm," Van Woudenberg replies.
"Women get raped in wars all the time. How is it different here?" Cooper asks.
"I think what's different in Congo is the scale and the systematic nature of it, indeed, as well, the brutality. This is not rape because soldiers have got bored and have nothing to do. It is a way to ensure that communities accept the power and authority of that particular armed group. This is about showing terror. This is about using it as a weapon of war," she explains.
It's hard to imagine this war happening in the midst of such breathtaking natural beauty and abundance. But after decades of dictatorship and corruption, the country is broken. Most of the fighting and the raping takes place in remote areas difficult to get to.
Cooper and the team headed to an isolated village in the mountains in eastern Congo called Walungu. For years there's been armed groups fighting in this region; thousands of men emerge from the forest to terrorize villages and steal women. Congo's government seems unable or unwilling to stop them.
In the week before they arrived there were three attacks in which women were raped. The youngest victim was just six years old.
In some villages as many as 90 percent of the women have been raped; men in the villages are usually unarmed, and incapable of fighting back. In Walungu the team found 24-year-old Lucienne M'Maroyhi. She was at home one night with her two children and her younger brother, when six soldiers broke in. They tied her up and began to rape her, one by one.
"I was lying on the ground, and they gave a flashlight to my younger brother so that he could see them raping me," she recalls.
"They were telling your brother to hold the flashlight?" Cooper asks.
"Yes," she says. "They raped me like they were animals, one after another. When the first one finished, they washed me out with water, told me to stand up, so the next man could rape me."
She was convinced they'd kill her, just as soldiers had murdered her parents the year before. Instead, they turned to her brother. "They wanted him to rape me but he refused, and told them, 'I cannot do such a thing. I cannot rape my sister.' So they took out their knives and stabbed him to death in front of me," she recalls.
Lucienne was then dragged through the forest to the soldier's camp. She was forced to become their slave and was raped every day for eight months. All the while, she had no idea where her children were.
"Did you know if they were alive or dead?" Cooper asks.
"I was thinking that they had killed. I didn't think I would find them alive," she replies.
Finally, Lucienne escaped. Back in her village, she found her two little girls were alive. But she also learned that she was pregnant. She was carrying the child of one of her rapists. Lucienne's husband abandoned her. That happens to rape survivors all over Congo.
"When a woman is raped, it's not just her that's raped. It's the entire community that's destroyed," says Judithe Registre, who is with an organization called "Women for Women." They run support groups for survivors of rape.
"When they take a woman to rape her, they'll line up the family, they'll line up other members of the communities to actually witness that," Registre says. "They make them watch. And so, what that means for that particular woman when it's all over, is that total shame, personally, to have been witnessed by so many people as she's being violated."
Many of the women in Dr. Mukwege's hospital are not only blamed for what happened to them, they are shunned because of fears they've contracted HIV and shunned because their rapes were so violent they can no longer control their bodily functions.
Dr. Mukwege says he's doing about five surgeries a day.
His patients often have had objects inserted into their vaginas, like broken bottles, bayonets. Some women have even been shot between the legs by their rapists.
"Why would somebody do that? Why would somebody shoot a woman inside?" Cooper asks.
"In the beginning I was asking myself the same question. This is a show of force, of power, it's done to destroy the person," Dr. Mukwege says. "Sex is being used to commit evil. People flee. They become refugees. They can't get help, they become malnourished and it's disease which finishes them off."
For these women, Dr. Mukwege is both healer and counselor. Dunia Karani is an orphan. She has polio, and can't walk, but that didn't stop soldiers from raping her. Now she's pregnant and has no idea how she'll cope.
Asked what he can tell a young girl about her future, Dr. Mukwege says, "The most difficult thing is when there is nothing I can do. When I see a 16-year-old, a pretty 16-year-old who's had everything destroyed, and I tell her that I have to give her a colostomy bag…that is difficult."
Despite those difficulties, more often than not, Dr. Mukwege is able to repair the damage to these women's bodies. They see him as a miracle worker, one of the only men they can trust.
While Dr. Mukwege gives Cooper a tour of the hospital wards, one of his patients gives him the thumbs up.
"And now she's very happy," he says, "Very happy."
That reaction not only gives him hope, he says, but also the strength to continue his work.
Strength is something that few women in Congo lack. They bear the burdens, farm the fields, and hold the families together, yet nothing it seems is being done to protect them.
The war is so widespread that rapes are increasingly being committed by civilians. A few washed out billboards tell men that rape is wrong, but there's little evidence Congolese officials take the problem seriously.
In the prosecutor's office, the complaints pile up. We were told a $10 bribe could get a rape accusation investigated, but few cases ever go to court.
We asked the prosecutor to show us the prison, to see how many rapists were actually behind bars, but when we got there, we were in for a surprise. The prison had no fences, and the guards had been kicked out. The inmates had taken over the asylum.
"The fact is the justice system is on its knees in Congo," says Van Woudenberg, the human rights investigator. "I can count on one hand the number of cases that we're aware of that have been brought to trial. Literally here people get away with rape, they get away with murder. The chances of being arrested are nil."
There may be no justice in Congo, but there are organizations trying to help rape survivors get back on their feet. "Women For Women" teaches survivors how to make soap, how to cook - skills they can use to earn money. They also learn how to read and write. It is the first time many of these women have ever been in a classroom - it is their chance for a whole new life.
Remember Lucienne M'Maroyhi? She's jumped at that chance. She hopes to start her own business one day.
She is also now the mother of a little baby girl, born a year ago. The father is one of her rapists, one of the men who killed Lucienne's brother. She named the girl "Luck."
"I named her Luck because I went through many hardships," she explains. "I could have been killed in the forest. But I got my life back. I have hope."
Hope is not something you'd expect Congo's rape survivors to still cling to. But they do.
Each morning in Panzi hospital they gather to raise their voices, singing at a religious service. Our sufferings on earth, they sing, will be relieved in heaven.
Relief in Congo, it seems, is just too much to ask for.
The New York Times
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Sunday, October 7, 2007
RAPE EPIDEMIC RAISES TRAUMA OF CONGO WAR
By Jeffrey Gettleman
BUKAVU, Congo—Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, cannot bear to listen to the stories his patients tell him anymore.
Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.
"We don't know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear," said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo's rape epidemic. "They are done to destroy women."
Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence, and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen here. According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country.
"The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world," said John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. "The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity—it's appalling."
The days of chaos in Congo were supposed to be over. Last year, this country of 66 million people held a historic election that cost $500 million and was intended to end Congo's various wars and rebellions and its tradition of epically bad government.
But the elections have not unified the country or significantly strengthened the Congolese government's hand to deal with renegade forces, many of them from outside the country. The justice system and the military still barely function, and United Nations officials say Congolese government troops are among the worst offenders when it comes to rape. Large swaths of the country, especially in the east, remain authority-free zones where civilians are at the mercy of heavily armed groups who have made warfare a livelihood and survive by raiding villages and abducting women for ransom.
According to victims, one of the newest groups to emerge is called the Rastas, a mysterious gang of dreadlocked fugitives who live deep in the forest, wear shiny tracksuits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys and are notorious for burning babies, kidnapping women and literally chopping up anybody who gets in their way.
United Nations officials said the so-called Rastas were once part of the Hutu militias who fled Rwanda after committing genocide there in 1994, but now it seems they have split off on their own and specialize in freelance cruelty.
Honorata Barinjibanwa, an 18-year-old woman with high cheekbones and downcast eyes, said she was kidnapped from a village that the Rastas raided in April and kept as a sex slave until August. Most of that time she was tied to a tree, and she still has rope marks ringing her delicate neck. The men would untie her for a few hours each day to gang-rape her, she said.
"I'm weak, I'm angry, and I don't know how to restart my life," she said from Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, where she was taken after her captors freed her.
She is also pregnant.
While rape has always been a weapon of war, researchers say they fear that Congo's problem has metastasized into a wider social phenomenon.
"It's gone beyond the conflict," said Alexandra Bilak, who has studied various armed groups around Bukavu, on the shores of Lake Kivu. She said that the number of women abused and even killed by their husbands seemed to be going up and that brutality toward women had become "almost normal."
Malteser International, a European aid organization that runs health clinics in eastern Congo, estimates that it will treat 8,000 sexual violence cases this year, compared with 6,338 last year. The organization said that in one town, Shabunda, 70 percent of the women reported being sexually brutalized.
At Panzi Hospital, where Dr. Mukwege performs as many as six rape-related surgeries a day, bed after bed is filled with women lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling, with colostomy bags hanging next to them because of all the internal damage.
"I still have pain and feel chills," said Kasindi Wabulasa, a patient who was raped in February by five men. The men held an AK-47 rifle to her husband's chest and made him watch, telling him that if he closed his eyes, they would shoot him. When they were finished, Ms. Wabulasa said, they shot him anyway.
In almost all the reported cases, the culprits are described as young men with guns, and in the deceptively beautiful hills here, there is no shortage of them: poorly paid and often mutinous government soldiers; homegrown militias called the Mai-Mai who slick themselves with oil before marching into battle; members of paramilitary groups originally from Uganda and Rwanda who have destabilized this area over the past 10 years in a quest for gold and all the other riches that can be extracted from Congo's exploited soil.
The attacks go on despite the presence of the largest United Nations peacekeeping force in the world, with more than 17,000 troops.
Few seem to be spared. Dr. Mukwege said his oldest patient was 75, his youngest 3.
"Some of these girls whose insides have been destroyed are so young that they don't understand what happened to them," Dr. Mukwege said. "They ask me if they will ever be able to have children, and it's hard to look into their eyes."
No one—doctors, aid workers, Congolese and Western researchers—can explain exactly why this is happening.
"That is the question," said André Bourque, a Canadian consultant who works with aid groups in eastern Congo. "Sexual violence in Congo reaches a level never reached anywhere else. It is even worse than in Rwanda during the genocide."
Impunity may be a contributing factor, Mr. Bourque added, saying that very few of the culprits are punished.
Many Congolese aid workers denied that the problem was cultural and insisted that the widespread rapes were not the product of something ingrained in the way men treated women in Congolese society. "If that were the case, this would have showed up long ago," said Wilhelmine Ntakebuka, who coordinates a sexual violence program in Bukavu.
Instead, she said, the epidemic of rapes seems to have started in the mid-1990s. That coincides with the waves of Hutu militiamen who escaped into Congo's forests after exterminating 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus during Rwanda's genocide 13 years ago.
Mr. Holmes said that while government troops might have raped thousands of women, the most vicious attacks had been carried out by Hutu militias.
"These are people who were involved with the genocide and have been psychologically destroyed by it," he said.
Mr. Bourque called this phenomenon "reversed values" and said it could develop in heavily traumatized areas that had been steeped in conflict for many years, like eastern Congo.
This place, one of the greenest, hilliest and most scenic slices of central Africa, continues to reverberate from the aftershocks of the genocide next door. Take the recent fighting near Bukavu between the Congolese Army and Laurent Nkunda, a dissident general who commands a formidable rebel force. Mr. Nkunda is a Congolese Tutsi who has accused the Congolese Army of supporting Hutu militias, which the army denies. Mr. Nkunda says his rebel force is simply protecting Tutsi civilians from being victimized again.
But his men may be no better.
Willermine Mulihano said she was raped twice—first by Hutu militiamen two years ago and then by Nkunda soldiers in July. Two soldiers held her legs apart, while three others took turns violating her.
"When I think about what happened," she said, "I feel anxious and brokenhearted."
She is also lonely. Her husband divorced her after the first rape, saying she was diseased.
In some cases, the attacks are on civilians already caught in the cross-fire between warring groups. In one village near Bukavu where 27 women were raped and 18 civilians killed in May, the attackers left behind a note in broken Swahili telling the villagers that the violence would go on as long as government troops were in the area.
The United Nations peacekeepers here seem to be stepping up efforts to protect women.
Recently, they initiated what they call "night flashes," in which three truckloads of peacekeepers drive into the bush and keep their headlights on all night as a signal to both civilians and armed groups that the peacekeepers are there. Sometimes, when morning comes, 3,000 villagers are curled up on the ground around them.
But the problem seems bigger than the resources currently devoted to it.
Panzi Hospital has 350 beds, and though a new ward is being built specifically for rape victims, the hospital sends women back to their villages before they have fully recovered because it needs space for the never-ending stream of new arrivals.
Dr. Mukwege, 52, said he remembered the days when Bukavu was known for its stunning lake views and nearby national parks, like Kahuzi-Biega.
"There used to be a lot of gorillas in there," he said. "But now they've been replaced by much more savage beasts."
BBC News
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Wednesday, August 1, 2001
CONGO'S COLTAN RUSH
By Helen Vesperini in Goma, DRC
In the yard of the Shenimed sorting house, young men are busy sorting and cleaning colombo-tantalite ore, or coltan, as it is known in this part of the world.
Regional analysts say the international demand for coltan is one of the driving forces behind the war in the DRC, and the presence of rival militias in the country.
First the young men toss it up into the air as if they were winnowing rice.
Then they sort it with magnetic tweezers to eliminate any particles of iron ore.
It is then washed, crushed manually in a big pestle and mortar and tested again for iron ore before being fed into a photospectrometer to test its tantalum content.
The men concentrate calmly on their work or joke among themselves.
Blood tantalum
It is a far cry from the drama of the "No blood on my cell phone" campaign that a group of NGOs and religious communities have launched in Europe to lobby for an embargo on so called "blood tantalum", the colombo-tantalite ore that comes from the war zones in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Tantalum is essential in the manufacture of electrical components known as pinhead capacitors.
These regulate voltage and store energy in mobile phones, tens of millions of which have been sold in the past few years.
The European lobby groups, like the regional analysts, say that coltan production is fuelling the war in Congo.
Such allegations infuriate both the rebels who control this part of Congo and their Rwandan backers.
They baffle the men on the ground in the coltan business, too preoccupied with making a living.
"It's our only way of making a living," said Blanchard, an intermediary who travels upcountry to buy coltan from the small-scale miners and brings it back to Goma to sell. "There's nothing else to do here."
Most of the men now in the coltan trade used to be farmers.
Bandits
Local human rights' groups say that coltan production does lead to security problems.
They say it is not uncommon for a miner who has just sold, say, $200 worth of coltan to be visited by bandits in military uniform who know exactly how much money he has in his house.
Foreign criticism of child labour in the coltan mines must be put into the context of Congo.
It is a country where the preoccupation of the average peasant is finding enough cassava to eat for the day.
If children were not helping mine coltan they would be working in the fields.
What would be cause for concern in the long term is if coltan were to be such big business for so long that the peasants forgot their farming skills in the way that some Central African villagers have forsaken logging for oil jobs.
When the coltan or the oil reserves run out they no longer have any means of livelihood.
Given the recent slump in coltan prices on the world market that scenario no longer seems so likely.
Local people say the price drop has had a disastrous effect on the region's economy.
"It's been a catastrophe," said Antoine, a local businessman. "I would estimate that 80% of all business here is either in coltan or dependent on the coltan trade and there's just a lot less money in circulation now."