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As the trial at the International Criminal Court of a Congolese rebel leader approaches, some fear that the voice of girls forced into militias may go unheard. While human rights organisations welcome the fact that Congo warlord Thomas Lubanga will soon stand trial at the International Criminal Court for conscripting child soldiers, some are concerned that the scope of the official charge is inadequate. They allege that girls who were kidnapped into Lubanga's Hema tribal militia in Ituri province will not be able to give full testimonies at the ICC hearings in The Hague because charges of sexual violence have not been included in his indictment. Thomas Lubanga Dyilo made history in March this year when he became the first - and, so far, only - person to be arrested by the ICC and imprisoned in its cells in the capital of the Netherlands. Lubanga, 45, is charged with "enlisting and conscripting children under the age of 15 and using them to participate actively in hostilities" against rival Lendu tribespeople. The scale of the inter-ethnic slaughter in the remote, mineral-rich Ituri region, in the northeastern corner of the sprawling Democratic Republic of the Congo, DRC, has been compared in intensity, though not in scale, with that of the genocide in nearby Rwanda in 1994. In an Ituri population of just over four million, the United Nations estimates that more than 60,000 people have been killed in internecine fighting since 1999, while more than half a million have been forced to flee their homes, encountering further violence in their flight. While no one is disputing that the conscription of children into armed groups is a grave abuse that must be tackled, human rights groups and activists argue that the additional problem caused by the presence of young girls in guerrilla armies is being overlooked by the international community. Beck Bukeni T Waruzi works with a charity in the east and northeast of the DRC that rehabilitates child soldiers, including those from Ituri's Hema, Lendu and Lendu-aligned Ngiti militias. Waruzi told IWPR that when former girl combatants - who often have been raped and kept as sex slaves - hear there is a court in Europe called the ICC dealing with war crimes they are disappointed to find it is not also pressing charges of sexual violence. "They feel that they are forgotten, and the court is only concerned with boys," said Waruzi, whose Ajedi-Ka/Projet Enfants Soldats organisation is based in Uvira, on Lake Tanganyika, some 700 kilometres south of Ituri. He said girls very specifically feel that their exploitation as sex slaves has "broken their future ... [as] they cannot be married and are rejected by their communities". Lubanga's next appearance - after three earlier postponements - before the ICC court, in a confirmation of charges hearing, is scheduled to happen on November 9. No one is expecting that the charges in his indictment will be widened at this stage to encompass allegations of sexual abuse. The DRC government and World Bank agree there are currently about 30,000 child soldiers in the Congo, long torn by a cat's cradle of national and provincial wars that have taken more than four million lives since 1998. An estimated 12,500 of these child soldiers are girls, some as young as six-years-old, who become sex slaves. Peace was officially established in the Congo in 2003, but militia warfare has continued unabated in many parts of the vast country. In a report entitled DRC: Children At War, published in October 2006, Amnesty International claims that the presence of large numbers of girls in armed groups has been "largely overlooked by the government and international community". The report said there is "systematic abuse of these children through torture, sexual violence and ill-treatment". It said commanders and male fighters often do not feel obliged to release the girls, as they assume ownership of them, claiming them as their "wives". The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 38(3), prohibits recruitment of children under the age of 15. The DRC government launched a nationwide programme after 2003 to coordinate disarmament and demobilisation and to reintegrate fighters into civil society. However, Renner Onana, a United Nations demobilisation officer who was on the programme's drafting team, told IWPR, "We did not touch the issue of the girl soldiers, but wrongly took them as the dependants of combatants." Regrettably, he said, "it was not seen as a serious issue". With an estimated 1,200 people still dying every day in the Congo's unresolved regional conflicts, according to International Rescue Committee mortality surveys, Waruzi said he is surprised by the narrowness of the ICC charge against Lubanga. Many people in the eastern Congo feel he is guilty of "grave crimes like killing, maiming, abducting, and sexual violence", said Waruzi. [Source: Institute for War and Peace Reporting]