Once a week, a huge, battered flatbed truck creaks its way down a mountain road and stops in this small village in eastern Congo, where the dirt track ends at a small army checkpoint.
The truck is driven by a couple of traders from Bukavu, the regional capital, a day's drive away. And when the traders arrive, the miners of Luntukulu come forward with what they have to sell: small piles of loose rock, some of them gleaming with shiny yellow threads: wolframite, or tungsten ore, bound for industrial use in Europe. The traders pay the miners $6 (U.S.) a kilogram, which works out to about $8 for a week's work, and then pile the ore in the back of the truck.
Then they do something else. "The vehicle stops here, but the traders continue on foot, and they take labourers with them to carry out what they will buy," said Pierre Beningabo, who spends his days in a shallow cave chiselling for the dull glint of wolframite.
The traders walk five kilometres along a dirt track to the next village, he and many local miners said, and there they buy more minerals - this time, from soldiers of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), one of 23 different armed groups in eastern Congo who have worked to bring this region back to war once again.
Congo's long-running war feeds on mining money. An estimated five million people have died in this conflict, which nominally ended in a peace deal in 2003, but which never really went away in the east. The war has roared back into life in recent weeks; at least 850,000 people are now displaced in the east and thousands of women have been victim of the war's signature tactic, public gang rape.
Congo's war is often linked, in vague terms, to the mineral trade, but here in Luntukulu, it is easy to see exactly how it works: the industry is essentially unregulated, smuggling is simple to do and rife, and no one has any incentive to try to drive the armed militias out of the business. "The armed groups are all involved in mining - even our Congolese armed forces," sighed Juvenal Nyamugusha, who heads the provincial mining ministry.
The FLDR, for instance - made up of the remnants of the Interahamwe, who carried out the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and some new Congolese and Rwandan recruits - controls vast swaths of territory in this region of Congo, and there is no confusion about how they chose the land they seized. "The mineral areas, the FDLR are only in mineral areas - they are there where you find tin or coltan or wolframite," said Joseph Kakez, the administrator for this district, which is dotted with patches of rich mines, and rebel groups.
Here, near Luntukulu, the militia members dig in particular for coltan, or tantalite, the mineral that goes into making cellphones, laptop computers and Sony PlayStations. And they sell to the traders, who have the ore carried back out to their trucks back up at the village checkpoint - after paying $40 a kilogram. And so the Interahamwe, or what remains of it, is wealthier and more powerful than it was 14 years ago, when the killing ended in Rwanda.
"The FDLR are the ones controlling the coltan mines and they are very strong," said Mr. Beningabo, the miner. The provincial mining ministry says the FDLR, in fact, controls 20 per cent of mining here.
