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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio during a peace agreement signing ceremony between Democratic Republic of the Congo Foreign Minister Therese Kayikwamba Wagner and Rwandan Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe in Washington, DC on June 27, 2025. Photo: AFP.
By Rana Harbi – Jul 11, 2025
The US-brokered agreement between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda is being marketed as a “peace deal,” ending a three-decade long conflict. While the people of that region hold on to hope, the deal is beginning to look like a “mineral grab” in another round of colonization of Africa.
Last week, US President Donald Trump celebrated the signing of a US-brokered “peace agreement” between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda, positioning himself, yet again, as a “peacemaker” who can swiftly end conflicts across the globe.
“In a few short months, we’ve now achieved peace between India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran and the DRC and Rwanda,” Trump bragged, drawing more attention to his near obsession with winning the Nobel Peace Prize, a desire he has brought up dozens of times over the past decade, and even more since his return to the White House. The agreement, which Trump described as a “glorious triumph,” was signed by the east African nations on June 27 in Washington, DC, and commits both sides to cease hostilities and end all support for armed groups operating in the DRC’s resource-rich eastern region.
But the US president’s theatrical approach to negotiations and deals failed to conceal the true intentions behind the agreement: a new mineral grab in Africa. The US will be getting “a lot of mineral rights” from the DRC, Trump told reporters, including privileged access to the country’s rich mineral resources, like cobalt, lithium, tantalum, and coltan reserves.
Decades of violence
The agreement, mediated by the US and Qatar, aims to end a decades-long conflict that has resulted in more than 6 million deaths and widespread displacement in eastern DRC, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The conflict broke out over three decades ago but most recently, M23, a Congo-based ethnic Tutsi armed militia, embarked on a fast advance and occupied vast swaths of land, worsening an already bad humanitarian crisis. M23’s rapid territorial control exposed weaknesses in the DRC’s military, but it also revealed the militia’s high level of training and possession of advanced weapons.
While there’s no clear evidence of how, where, and when M23 rebels got their training and equipment, Maomela Moreti Motau, a retired South African army general, noticed that the group was using weapons and equipment similar to those used by the Israeli army and US special forces. Motau told the Newsroom Afrika local broadcaster “the weapons I saw, I believe, are ones used by the armed forces of Israel. I could be mistaken, but it is not a weapon that Rwanda generally uses.”
M23 rebels have been documented as obtaining weapons from several sources but primarily through external routes, including neighboring Rwanda. Although Rwanda has repeatedly denied backing the armed militia, there is strong evidence, from the UN and other sources, of direct involvement and close military coordination between Rwandan troops and the rebel group. A recent Reuters exclusive report obtained on July 2, revealed that Rwanda has “exercised command and control” over M23, providing training and deploying high-tech systems that gave the armed group a “decisive tactical advantage.”
Rwanda obtains weapons from many countries, including Poland, France, Slovakia, and Israel. According to the United Nations COMTRADE database on international trade, Israel has exported $23.93 million worth of arms, ammunition and parts to Rwanda in 2022. The African country maintains close relations with Israel, especially when it comes to cybersecurity technology, and has been documented using Israeli-made weapons in conflicts.
While the US distances itself from this cooperation between its ally and Rwanda, and between Rwanda and M23, many analysts believe that the US itself has enabled such relations to destabilize the DRC. In a post on “X”, Jason Hickel, an anthropologist and professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, wrote that the US aimed to “prevent a functional state from arising and achieving sovereignty (in the DRC) over its mineral wealth, and thus ensure minerals stay cheaply available for US firms.”
Mineral smuggling
While the conflict in the DRC is often portrayed as ethnic, its deeper underlying cause has always been economic, in particular access to valuable natural resources, such as gold and other critical minerals used in cellphones, military equipment, and electric car batteries.
Kambale Musavuli, an analyst at the Center for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa, recently said on a podcast that there was no discussion of ethnicity during the brokering of the deal. According to Musavuli, the narrative kept shifting in the past years from “protecting minority groups” to “bringing democracy,” but in reality it has always been about resources and minerals.
Evidence of mineral looting has surfaced from M23 occupied region, while simultaneously Rwanda’s export of particular natural resources has increased. According to UN experts, M23 rebel group is estimated to be collecting at least $800,000 monthly from taxes on coltan production and trade in just the city of Rubaya. Meanwhile figures from the US Geological Survey show that Rwanda’s coltan exports rose by 50% between 2022 and 2023, with experts saying it could not have all come from inside the country.
According to a UN’s experts report, mineral smuggling from the DRC into neighboring Rwanda has reached “unprecedented levels.”
“Once in Rwanda, the looted minerals were mixed with local production, effectively laundering them into the downstream supply chain under the guise of Rwandan origin,” the report stated. Rwanda primarily sells minerals to international markets, with key buyers including companies in China, the European Union, the United Arab Emirates, and of course, the US.
In a post on “X” on February 24th, Tinsa Salama, the spokesperson of the DRC president, urged the US to get these minerals directly from the DRC instead of Rwanda. Salama wrote: “Setting the record straight: (Congolese) President (Felix) Tshisekedi invites the USA, whose companies source strategic raw materials from Rwanda, materials that are looted from the DRC and smuggled to Rwanda while our populations are massacred, to purchase them directly from us the rightful owners.”
Mining for peace?
The rapid change of events, both on the ground and on the political and diplomatic levels, leading up to the “peace deal” supports the belief that the US created a problem and ultimately sold the solution. A strategic projection made by Africa Intelligence suggests that the mineral agreement between Trump and the DRC is valued at an estimated $3 trillion. The deal has turned into a “peace for exploitation” agreement, in what many see as a setback in today’s postcolonial world.
Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist who shared the 2018 Nobel Peace prize for his work to end the DRC’s epidemic of sexual violence in war, released a statement on X calling the deal “vague” and that it would amount to “legitimizing the plundering of Congolese natural resources.” Mukwege added that the “riches of the Congolese subsoil cannot be sold off in an opaque manner within the framework of a neo-colonial extractivist logic.”
Mirroring this stance, Musavuli said that while there are “mixed reactions” from people in regard to the deal, and that the “process was not transparent … only a little has been made public,” adding that the deal “did not go through the Congolese parliament.”
Fearing that the agreement would validate foreign exploitation and decades of impunity, Musavuli believes that the only way the US would “engage constructively” in such deals is if the DRC “gives up their resources,” insisting “we can’t lose control of our land. Congo is not for sale.”
Congo has become in the heart of US interests in Africa, with Washington repeatedly presenting the issue of gaining access to these minerals as a national security imperative. The importance of this deal is directly tied to the importance of the diverse range of minerals that the DRC has to offer. The country is considered one of the world’s richest in terms of natural resources, with an estimated $24 trillion worth of untapped mineral deposits. The African country holds 60% of global coltan reserves and is also the world’s largest producer of cobalt, amounting to approximately 70% of the world’s production in 2024.
Recent geological surveys revealed the mineral wealth may be even greater than previously estimated. “Only about 30% of the country’s subsurface has been properly mapped using modern techniques,” Alphonse Katanga, a Congolese geologist, said, suggesting undiscovered potential in previously unexplored regions.
Currently, Chinese companies dominate the mining sector in the DRC. Chinese investment in mining infrastructure has exceeded $7 billion, particularly in the production of cobalt, a mineral that reports say China controls approximately 80% of its total output in the country.
However, following this deal, the US will establish superiority over Chinese presence, while also supporting the companies and business dealings of those who contributed to Trump’s campaign and paved the way for his White House return.
“The geopolitics between China and the US is directly affecting the lives of the people of Africa,” Musavuli explained, adding that “the curse is not the minerals but capitalism.”