Peace for profit and minerals

 

President Donald Trump holds up a signed document to present to Congo’s Foreign Minister Therese Kayikwamba Wagner, right, as Rwanda’s Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe, from left, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio watch June 27, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington. Photo: AP Photo/Ali 

Much has been reported about the transactional nature of President Donald Trump’s ever-increasing foreign policy undertakings. In the aftermath of the illegal bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites, the president signed a U.S.-backed peace deal and mineral agreement with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda on June 27.

“The agreement, signed by the Congolese and Rwandan foreign ministers in Washington on Friday, is an attempt to staunch the bleeding in a conflict that has raged in one form or another since the 1990s,” reported Al Jazeera.

“At the signing, Rwandan Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe called it a ‘turning point,’ while his Congolese counterpart, Therese Kayikwamba Wagner, said the moment had ‘been long in coming,’” the outlet continued. “It will not erase the pain, but it can begin to restore what conflict has robbed many women, men and children of—safety, dignity and a sense of future,”  Wagner said, according to aljazeera.com. 

Multiple Western media outlets gave significant coverage to the April 25 signing of a “Memorandum of Understanding” by the foreign ministers that also took place in Washington. “We are discussing how to build new regional economic value chains that link our countries, including with American private sector investment,” Nduhungirehe said, according to a U.S. Department of State transcript from the April 25 meeting.

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However, the U.S. motive for intervening in the process is being scrutinized. 

“Framed as a step toward regional stability, the accord also marked a deeper shift in U.S. foreign policy. For decades, Washington’s diplomacy followed the oil. Today, it follows cobalt and copper. The initiative by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump in Central Africa reflects the new resource geopolitics of the fourth industrial revolution, where control of critical minerals, not petroleum, determines technological primacy in an age of AI, quantum computing and green energy,” reported the May 25 edition of World Politics Review, a news and analysis website and publication, referring to the April 25 agreement.  

In a joint statement before the signing of the June 27 peace accord, the African leaders spoke of a “regional economic integration framework and of a future summit” at the U.S. capital that would bring together President Trump, Rwandan President Paul Kagame, and DRC President Félix Tshisekedi.

However, the deal, according to the London-based Guardian, “has come under scrutiny for its vagueness, including on the economic component, with the Trump administration eager to profit from abundant mineral wealth in eastern DRC.” The Guardian also suggested that America’s aims include pulling together Western investors interested in the DRC’s “mining sector, which contains deposits of tantalum, gold, cobalt, copper and lithium, while giving the U.S. access to critical minerals.”

After the deal was signed, President Trump told reporters that “the U.S. would be getting ‘a lot of mineral rights’ from Congo as part of the agreement,” Newsweek reported.

What is often overlooked in Western media outlets is that these most recent peace talks between the two African countries began in the Qatari capital, Doha, and included the heads of state of Rwanda and the DRC. The African Union (AU) welcomed these talks. In a statement in March, AU Chairperson Mahamoud Ali Youssouf “commended the two countries for ‘their commitment to dialogue’ and urged all parties to ‘maintain the momentum,’” noted Al Jazeera.

Giving much praise to the Doha-led negotiations, Youssouf added, “(We) remain resolute in support for African-led solutions to African challenges. … The Doha discussions, held in a spirit of constructive engagement, align with these efforts and complement ongoing regional mechanisms.”

According to the business blog Macau Business on macaubusiness.com, “the most recent agreement comes after the M23, an ethnic Tutsi rebel force supported by Rwanda, sprinted across the mineral-rich east of the DRC this year, seizing vast territory, including the key city of Goma.”

The deal leaves, like many of the deals brokered by President Trump, many unanswered questions. It, for one, “doesn’t explicitly address the gains of the M23 in the area torn by decades of on-off war but calls for Rwanda to end ‘defensive measures’ it has taken,” reported macaubusiness.com. While denying offering M23 military support, Rwanda has “demanded an end to the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR),” the website reported. It also reported that the FDLR was “created by ethnic Hutus involved in the massacres of Tutsis in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.” Then, U.S. President Bill Clinton ignored the genocide.

Dr. Denis Mukwege, who shares the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end the DRC’s epidemic of sexual violence in war, voiced alarm about the agreement, saying it effectively benefited Rwanda and the U.S., reported the digital news platform, pressreader.com.

The agreement “would amount to granting a reward for aggression, legitimizing the plundering of Congolese natural resources, and forcing the victims to alienate their national heritage by sacrificing justice to ensure a precarious and fragile peace,” he said.

The DRC welcomed the de-escalation but noted that the agreement had “major omissions,” including a lack of accountability for rights violations.

According to reporting by Al-Jazeera, experts say U.S. companies hope to gain access to minerals like tantalum, gold, cobalt, copper and lithium that they desperately need to meet the demand for technology and beat China in the race for Africa’s natural resources.

“But this has raised fears among critics that the U.S.’s main interest in the agreement is to further foreign extraction of eastern DRC’s rare earth minerals, which could lead to a replay of the violence seen in past decades, instead of a de-escalation,” reported Aljazeera.com.