Fresh bullet holes pepper what is Walikale's only road sign following fighting in June between traditional Mai-Mai warriors and the former Rwanda-backed RCD rebels who now control the town deep in the forests of eastern Congo.

Walikale is the scene of a war within a war, a microcosm of a broader regional conflict where groups of armed men prey upon civilians and fight for control of the valuable natural resources found in Democratic Republic of Congo.

A five-year war in which 3 million people died, most from hunger and disease, was supposed to have wound down after successive peace deals forged an interim government last year.

The clashes continue for there is much to be won. The territory of Walikale, an area about the size of neighboring Rwanda, is where the wartime rebels mined coltan, a mineral used in mobile phones, computer games and stealth bombers.

The price of coltan has since crashed, but Walikale is now in the flush of a new mining boom for cassiterite, the base element of tin.

A global shortage of tin ramped world prices to near 15 year highs of $9,600 a ton in May, up from $6,500 a ton in January.

And as with coltan during the war, the sudden price rise has fueled power struggles in the bush, where gold and diamonds are also mined by peasants in rags who dig by hand using hammers.

GHOST TOWN

The fighting here in June was accompanied by such widespread looting that nearly all of Walikale's 15,000 residents fled the area. The United Nations and foreign aid agencies left too.

Walikale is now a ghost town, with rows of mud houses along the main road abandoned and stripped to the bone, their wooden doors kicked in and thatched roofs sagging from neglect. The market consists of empty wooden shacks. "We are cut off, living in a black hole in the jungle. We are still at war," says one of the few remaining residents.

"There are fabulous riches being pulled out from underneath us, but the population does not benefit at all. Instead, we suffer," he said, too afraid to give his name.

During Congo's conflict, the Rwanda-backed RCD rebels controlled the mining areas and remote landing strips in much of the eastern part of the vast, virtually roadless state.

Under the peace deals, both the RCD and the Mai-Mai warriors are theoretically now part of the country's unified national army, but old rivalries linger, as do alliances.

"Since August 1998, most of the cassiterite concessions have reportedly been sold on by RCD to Rwandese interests," said a June report by the London-based organization, Global Witness.

"A highly efficient network has been set up by the RCD and the Rwandan army to transport the resources by planes and trucks from eastern Congo to Kigali," the report said.

Rwanda is also a cassiterite producer and shipments can easily be "lost" among the country's own supplies while flight paths used for resource extraction also move "troops, equipment, supplies and arms into Congo," the report added.

Rwanda, which has twice invaded Congo during the past eight years to hunt down renegades implicated in the country's 1994 genocide, has repeatedly denied plundering Congo's riches and says it has no troops in the former Belgian colony.

It also insists it has supplied neither weapons nor support to the RCD or insurgent groups fighting the Kinshasa government.

PRECIOUS CARGO

In Walikale, the nightly whine of mosquito swarms is replaced by the daytime drone of airplanes swooping in from the eastern border city of Goma to collect their precious cargo.

About 10 planes a day land on a short strip of remote, skid-marked tarmac 19 miles from Walikale, near the town of Mubi, where the market is thronging with traders selling 110-pound bags filled with heavy cassiterite stones. Each flight brings in goods from Goma and carries off up to 2 tons of cassiterite, removing a daily total of about $50,000, or some $1 million per month of the mineral, which is cleaned or sold in Goma and exported at a higher price.

Cassiterite has been legally mined for decades in the former Zaire, but war has turned the business into a deadly racket that forces terrified villagers from their farms and into the bush, where too often they starve, fall sick and die.

The gunmen profit by charging local taxes, while RCD administrators in Goma do the same, often doubling taxes set by Kinshasa, according to miners, traders and exporters.

"I have to pay tax to 16 different offices. They are crazy with taxes. It's difficult to work because they make their own rules here," said one Belgian exporter in Goma.