While the armed groups of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo continue reaping terror, the financial dimension of the pillaging of natural resources, particularly in favour of Uganda and Rwanda, remains the key to their presence and justifies the decision adopted by the Security Council to extend the arms embargo: this is the picture' of the situation in the eastern provinces of ex-Zaire given by Mamadouh Bah, spokesman for the MONUC (United Nations Mission in DR-Congo), presenting a report of UN experts in the capital Kinshasa. The report establishes - or better, confirms - a direct link between the illegal exploitation of natural resources of East DR-Congo and the arms trafficking in the zone, benefited by the numerous rebel groups still active in Ituri, in North and South Kivu. In their report, the experts reveal a series of incongruences between the effective mineral resources of Uganda and Rwanda and the relative exportations: in 2004, for example, Congo exported 647,85kg of gold, for a value of around $7,5-million. Based on an inquiry conducted in Uganda, the quantity of gold from neighbouring ex-Zaire and then exported from Uganda on the international markets is of 6 tonnes, equivalent to over $60-million, explained Bah, adding that according to the government of Kampala this production is local, but is entirely contradicted by the statistics from the world gold market. Another example: last year ex-Zaire exported 6-thousand tonnes of cassiterite (from which tin is extracted), for a value of $5-million, while Rwanda - which does not result to have large quantities of this mineral - provided figures indicating that it exported around 3,500 tonnes of it, with a profit of over $15-million. The UN experts call for close co-operation between the Great Lakes Nations to put an end to the exploitation of the resources and halt the violations of the arms embargo imposed by the UN only in 2003, at the end of a war that starting in 1998 resulted - also from famine and disease - in no less than 2.5-million victims (up to 3.3m according to some estimates). The Security Council also extended the mandate of the experts by another 6 months, calling on them to continue providing information on the source of illegal financing of arms, in particular that from the illegal exploitation of resources of Congo.