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A front page article in today’s New York Times begins:

“They call the machete a weapon of mass destruction here"

“Its ghastly wreckage can be found inside what passes for this town's only functioning hospital. On a thin foam mattress lies a wide-eyed old man who has survived an attempted decapitation. Nearby, a mother with black moons around her eyes nurses two wounded children back to health and mourns for another two, freshly killed.”

The article is about the town of Bunia, in the Ituri province of Congo. In the last couple of weeks, some 350 bodies have been found in the area. Most of them were civilian women and children. Many of the bodies were mutilated. The New York Times reports that townspeople became so terrified they tried to climb over barbed wire fences to get into the UN compound there. A tent city has sprung up in the compound, and now as many as 17,000 people have taken refuge there and at the airport and at the heart of the town.

The Times also reports:

“By the standards and logic of war in Congo, the Bunia massacre was neither unexpected nor extraordinary. The only thing that distinguished this one was that it happened before the eyes of United Nations peacekeepers who had warned of its risks.

“The grim facts that led to the carnage here were no mystery to anyone, certainly not to the members of the Security Council who sent in the peacekeepers. Troops from Uganda were pulling out of Ituri under a multinational peace deal. Rival warlords were at one another's throats. Indeed, there was no peace to keep in Congo's northeast, certainly not by a paltry force of some 300 blue-helmeted Uruguayan soldiers who were deployed with orders to guard United Nations property and to escort aid workers.”

The Congo has received little attention, despite the fact that it is in the throes of one of the most devastating and brutal conflicts of all time. In the last five years of the war there, it is estimated that more than three million people have died. The conflict has been called Africa's First World War because it has involved the national armies of seven African countries. They are all interested in the gold, diamonds, oil, timber and other vast natural resources of the Congo.

The name “World War” is apt, because it is not only African nations that are involved.

Just yesterday, human rights groups and opposition politicians in Britain accused the British government of blatant hypocrisy yesterday for allowing arms sales worth millions of dollars to central African nations embroiled in the Congo war. British companies sold shotguns, pistols, helmets and body armour to Angola, Namibia, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Zimbabwe between 1999 and 2001. (Only last week, the British government claimed that careful checks were made on arms exports to central Africa to ensure they could not make their way to the Congo.)

And then there are the Congo’s vast natural resources, including diamonds, gold and oil.

Today we’re going to focus on the gold in the embattled Ituri region of the Congo.

Specifically, Ituri is the gateway to the Kilo Moto gold field, the world's largest. A Candian company, Barrick Gold, claims it owns the exploration rights to the gold mine. Barric Gold has ties to former President George Bush, Sr.

We invited Barrick to come on the program, but they declined.

 

• Greg Palast, BBC investigative reporter and author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

   

• Joan Kuyek, National Coordinator of MiningWatch Canada, which has called for an independent investigation of the Bulyanhulu mining massacre.