NGO WORK
Profit off Peace? Meet the Corporations Poised to Benefit from the DRC Peace Deal
The peace agreement signed in June 2025 between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) under the auspices of the Trump administration raises serious concerns about whom it truly serves. Rather than securing lasting peace for the Congolese people, the deal appears poised to benefit corporate and financial interests eager to access the country’s vast mineral wealth. Investigating these interests, this Policy Brief alerts that the US firms and oligarchs set to profit from the deal lack the interest, history, and know-how to make peace happen and last. Barring a radical shift, this deal may only perpetuate the deadly cycle of exploitation that has plagued the country for centuries.
On June 27, 2025, a peace agreement was signed between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) under the auspices of the Trump administration, after extensive diplomacy work and mediation by Qatar. On the surface, the deal offered hope to a country devastated by three decades of war, which have claimed over six million lives, displaced millions more, and inflicted widespread suffering.
The most recent escalation began in 2024, when the M23 rebel group and the Rwandan Defense Forces launched a violent offensive, exacerbating an already massive humanitarian crisis. The United Nations has gathered overwhelming evidence that Rwanda was actively supporting and directing M23’s offensive in eastern DRC. President Kagame has framed the intervention as a defense of the Tutsi population – targeted during the 1994 genocide – but it has been extensively documented that Rwanda’s illegal extraction of the DRC’s highly valuable minerals has been a major driver of the conflict. The DRC, rich with mineral reserves worth US$24 trillion, produces 70 percent of the world’s cobalt, and has large reserves of several critical minerals. Rwanda’s support of M23 has allowed it to take over much of eastern DRC, capture many mines, and perpetrate massacres and egregious human rights abuses. It is estimated that up to 90 percent of Rwanda’s coltan exports are illegally sourced from eastern DRC and that many of the armed groups involved in the area are financed by this illegal extraction.
The peace deal came under criticism even before it was signed. The 2018 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Denis Mukwege warned that the deal “would amount to granting a reward [to Rwanda] for aggression, legitimizing the plundering of Congolese natural resources, and forcing the victim to alienate their national heritage by sacrificing justice in order to ensure a precarious and fragile peace.” In June, a coalition of 80 Congolese non-governmental organizations and public interest attorneys, called for “the rejection of the hasty and ill-conceived peace and business agreement.” The appeal from the Mobilisation pour la Sauvegarde de la Souveraineté et de l’Autonomie Congolaise (MOSSAC) alerted on a number of critical shortcomings in the agreement, a draft of which had been leaked in previous weeks. Their concerns included impunity the deal provides to perpetrators of violence and abuses; and that it was forced upon the DRC and thus may not benefit the country and its people. It was also criticized for allowing Rwanda’s continued plundering of the DRC’s mineral resources while ultimately catering to the interests of US mining and corporate interests.
These concerns are legitimate given the deal is not just a peace agreement between two warring countries – it unusually also involves the expansion of mineral exploitation in partnership with the US government and American investors. President Trump even claimed at the signing of the deal: “We’re getting, for the United States, a lot of the mineral rights from the Congo as part of it.”
At the launch of the “Declaration of Principles” that preceded the peace deal in April 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated, “Our firms are good corporate citizens, American firms, and they’ll bring good governance and ensure responsible, reliable supply chains for things like critical minerals that benefit regional governments and our partners and allies as well.”
However, the terms of the peace agreement are vague on business arrangements with US interests. The text does not indicate which US firms would be involved and how they would deliver on the above promises. Details on specific business interests are expected to be disclosed in a forthcoming US-DRC critical minerals agreement.
Read full report: oaklandinstitute.org
Source: The Oakland Institute
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NGO WORK
The Great “Green” Heist: When Artificial Intelligence and Arms Dealers Seize the Minerals of the South
By Franck Zongwe Lukama, Congolese journalist and researcher, leads the independent media KilaloPress in DRC.
We were sold a simple equation: to save the planet, we must dig. Dig faster, deeper, extracting from the earth the cobalt, lithium, or copper needed for solar panels and electric vehicles. Yet, this climate rescue rhetoric conceals a staggering statistical deception. Today, 70% of global demand for critical minerals does absolutely nothing to support the energy transition. These resources end up in aerospace, communication technologies, and, above all, weaponry. Sectors that, ironically, exacerbate the global ecological crisis. The green revolution has become the perfect smokescreen, the moral veneer for a very different kind of war.
Far from the promises of sustainable development touted by the World Bank, the current scramble is driven by a strict logic of geopolitical power. A damning report from the California-based Oakland Institute exposes this global scheme. The report reveals an unprecedented and formidable convergence of interests between the American military-industrial complex and the giants of Silicon Valley. With the Pentagon openly pivoting toward a combat strategy focused on artificial intelligence (AI), securing supply chains is no longer a matter of ecology, but a question of survival in the face of Chinese influence. The United States is not seeking to reduce carbon emissions; it is seeking to guarantee its technological and military supremacy.
The real winners of this frantic race wear suits far removed from environmental activism. Trillions of dollars are flowing into new alliances that intertwine AI-driven mining companies, like KoBold Metals—backed by billionaires such as Bill Gates—and companies specializing in cutting-edge defense technologies, like Palantir and Anduril, not to mention the networks of influence close to the Trump family. For these players, the discourse of climate emergency acts as a powerful public relations tool. It justifies massive and accelerated extraction that would otherwise provoke international outrage.
Local communities and Indigenous populations find themselves on the frontlines, forced to resist an extraction machine that has the audacity to justify their suffering by claiming it is necessary to save the world.
And the price of this hypocrisy is being paid in full throughout the Global South. In the Rubaya hills, in the Kolwezi copper belt, as in the Indigenous territories of Latin America and Asia, the promise of “prosperity” translates into a terrifyingly familiar tragedy. Land grabbing, forced displacement, devastating groundwater pollution: the plundering of ecosystems and human lives is accelerating. Local communities and Indigenous populations find themselves on the frontlines, forced to resist an extraction machine that has the audacity to justify their suffering by claiming it is necessary to save the world. Today, opposing the destruction of one’s village by a multinational mining company risks being accused of hindering the fight against climate change. The rhetorical trap is devastatingly effective.
The long-term consequences of this diversion are alarming. The exponential surge in demand generated by future AI data centers, mass surveillance, and global rearmament will mathematically deplete available reserves. Every ton of copper, nickel, or cobalt consumed by combat drones or algorithmic data processing servers is a ton diverted from the production of renewable energy infrastructure. We are not equipping the energy transition; we are cannibalizing it to militarize our future.
We are not equipping the energy transition; we are cannibalizing it to militarize our future.
If no strict regulations are put in place to curb this rampant mining frenzy, hundreds of new mines will spring up in the coming years, causing irreversible damage on an unprecedented scale. The question facing citizens today, from Kinshasa to Washington, is no longer whether we will have enough minerals to save our atmosphere. It is why we are willing to sacrifice millions of lives and destroy our lands to fuel next-generation algorithms and weapons. In ten years, when the Global South is nothing more than a vast crater serving a militarized hyper-technology, it will be too late to realize that the planet was never the priority.
Photos: Artisanal Coltan – manganese – cobalt mining in Mudere mine under control of Nyatura militia, town of Rubaya, North Kivu region (Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa). Erberto Zani – stock.adobe.com
Source: oaklandinstitute.org/
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No Heritage Without its People: Why Ngorongoro Cannot be a World Heritage Site and an Eviction Zone
The Tanzanian government, under the guise of “conservation,” restricts Maasai livelihoods and denies access to essential services forcing Indigenous residents away from their ancestral lands and turning their heritage into a playground for safari tourists.
As the 48th Session of the World Heritage Committee begins July 19, UNESCO continues to legitimize the continued forced displacement of the Maasai from Ngorongoro. If UNESCO cannot ensure that the World Heritage designation protects the rights of its Indigenous custodians, then the Committee must remove the Ngorongoro Conservation Area from the World Heritage List.
Increased international pressure is imperative to hold UNESCO accountable and protect the lives and rights of the Maasai!
Read our Open Letter to the World Heritage Committee.
Source: oaklandinstitute.org
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