Congo: A controversial section of a UN report detailing the continued plundering of Congo's minerals has been omitted for fear it might derail the country's fragile peace process.
It details how business and military figures - some tied to the governments of Rwanda and Uganda - are continuing to illegally export minerals from eastern Congo, say sources who have read it.
The UN panel on the illegal exploitation of wealth is due to deliver its fourth, and possibly final, report this week.
The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations argued the information could endanger the transitional government recently formed in the capital, Kinshasa.
The debate also split the five-member UN panel, with some supporting the controversial material while others challenged its veracity. It has been privately distributed to Security Council members, who are due to debate it on Thursday. As well as coming under pressure from UN management, the panel was also intensively lobbied in recent months by powerful Western business interests and governments.
Human rights campaigners are worried the influence has resulted in a heavily compromised report. "They don't want to rake over the messy past of some people, or to chastise international companies," said Ms Patricia Feeney of Rights and Accountability in Development, an Oxford-based group which has shadowed the panel's work.
After initially focusing on African involvement, over the past year the panel focused on the complicity of Western multinationals in the illegal exploitation of gold, diamond, cobalt, coltan and other minerals. Last October the panel accused 85 companies of breaching OECD standards through their business activities.
Rape, murder, torture and other human rights abuses have followed the scramble to exploit Congo's wealth since war exploded in 1998.
For example, the trade in coltan, a rare mineral used in computers and mobile phones, had social effects "akin to slavery", according to the panel. However, no Western government has investigated the companies with alleged links to such abuses.
Instead, some, including the UK, US, Belgium and Germany, have lobbied to have their companies' names cleared from the "list of shame" in recent months.
"Many governments, overtly or covertly, exerted pressure on the panel and the Security Council to exonerate their companies," said Ms Feeney.
In this week's report the cases against 48 companies are described as "resolved" and requiring "no further action". They include Barclays Bank and mining giant Anglo American.
But four British companies - diamond giant De Beers, air transporters Avient and Das Air, and the mineral exploitation venture Oryx Natural Resources - still have "unresolved" cases.
In the last report Avient was alleged to have been contracted to conduct bombing raids over eastern Congo in 1999 and 2000. It also allegedly sold six attack helicopters to the Kinshasa government last year.