Displaced children at Camp Roe, DR Congo. Photo: Shafted/Oakland Institute.
Whereas Donald Trump hailed the “peace” agreement between Rwanda and DRC as marking the end of a deadly three-decade war, a new report from the Oakland Institute, Shafted: The Scramble for Critical Minerals in the DRC, exposes it as the latest US maneuver to control Congolese critical minerals.
“US involvement in Congolese affairs has always been unequivocally tied to the goal of securing access to critical minerals,” said Frédéric Mousseau, report co-author and Policy Director at the Oakland Institute. “The ‘peace’ deal comes after decades of US training, advising and sponsoring foreign armies and rebel movements, and at a time when Rwanda and its proxy M23 have expanded territorial control in eastern DRC. This is a win-lose deal that serves US mining interests and rewards Rwanda for decades of pillaging Congolese resources.”
The report’s analysis of previously overlooked coltan trade data shows that the US has been a central actor in laundering illegally smuggled Congolese minerals. Rwanda’s overall tantalum (metallic ore extracted from coltan) exports to the US increased 15-fold between 2013 and 2018. This was after the first M23 invasion in 2012 and at the time when the US administration waived its sanction mechanism against Rwanda. At its peak, over half of US imports of tantalum originated from Rwanda, despite the country’s limited production. Shafted: The Scramble for Critical Minerals in the DRC details how the regional economic integration at the center of the “peace” agreement will legalize this laundering.
“With the world’s largest reserves of critical minerals, the Congolese will continue to bear the social and environmental costs of extraction, while Rwanda reaps the benefits from processing and exporting its neighbor’s resources,” said Andy Currier, report co-author and Policy Analyst at the Oakland Institute. “The deception is even more obvious knowing that Rwanda’s Minister of State for Regional Integration is none other than James Kabarebe–sanctioned by the US Treasury in early 2025 for orchestrating Rwanda’s support for the M23, coordinating the export of minerals from the DRC, and managing the revenue generated by this extraction,” Currier continued.
The report shows that the regional integration negotiated by the US is actually about building two separate export routes for Congolese minerals. One that establishes Rwanda as a hub for minerals extracted in the conflict areas of eastern DRC and another that upgrades the Lobito Corridor, a key export route to the Atlantic Ocean for copper and cobalt mined in the south of the country – financed through a US$553 million loan to Angola by the US Development Finance Corporation (DFC).
Several mining deals along these two routes are already being negotiated by a number of US firms–backed by high-profile billionaires like Bill Gates, close Trump associates, and US military and intelligence figures. “True peace and prosperity will only come when the Congolese–not foreign powers–set the terms of the country’s future,” said Maurice Carney, Executive Director of Friends of the Congo. “Under the US-brokered ‘peace,’ the suffering of the Congolese people persists and a new era of exploitation unfolds.”
With over 1,000 civilians killed in the months since the “peace” deal was signed, Shafted proves that Congolese civil society’s concerns are well founded. American involvement has little to do with ending violence, and everything to do with unlocking strategic mining access for corporate interests. The agreement effectively rewards aggression while sidelining essential conditions for durable peace: Accountability of the perpetrators and their enablers, justice for the victims, and sovereignty of the Congolese people.
