This document is likely to add momentum in the United States and elsewhere to efforts to crack down on Congo’s illicit mineral trade. Congolese officials estimate that 80,000 pounds of gold are smuggled out of the country each year, which at today’s high gold prices is worth more than $1 billion, much of it going straight into rebel hands.

Image A gold mine in northeastern Congo. A United Nations report says rebels are financed through the smuggling of Congo’s minerals. Credit... Lionel Healing/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Already the Enough Project, an antigenocide group based in Washington, and Eve Ensler, an American playwright who has been supporting Congolese women’s projects for years through the organization V-Day, among others, have been urging Congress to pass legislation that would bar American companies from buying Congo’s “conflict minerals,” which include gold, tin and coltan, a metallic ore used in many cellphones and laptop computers. Several bills have been proposed.

This effort is akin to a successful movement in the early years of this decade to crack down on blood diamonds, the term given to the gems unearthed in the rebel-held areas of West Africa that fueled gruesome civil wars in Liberia, Angola and Sierra Leone.

It is a bleak picture of Congo that the report paints. Despite the billions of dollars the United Nations has spent on peacekeeping, countless so-called peace treaties and pledges of regional cooperation, the eastern part of the country remains in the grip of incredibly violent criminals, some of them high-ranking officers in the national army.

Nothing seems to be working. Recent military operations to sweep out the rebels have mostly failed and instead led to widespread massacres and human rights abuses. The rebels, meanwhile, continue to seize mines and use their networks in Europe and the United States to raise cash.

Timothy Raeymaekers, a professor at the University of Ghent in Belgium, who specializes in studying Congo, said the report contained “some substantial new information.”

“It’s high time the U.N. gets serious about this criminal connection,” he said.

The United Nations Security Council is expected to discuss the Congo report this week. But the United Nations is in a difficult position. It recently cut ties to Congolese Army units accused of widespread human rights abuses. But at the United Nations headquarters in New York, diplomats are trying to delay the release of the new report because “there is a lot in there that makes us look complicit,” admitted one United Nations official, who asked for anonymity because he said he could be punished for speaking candidly.