The key factors fueling conflict in eastern DRC

The past three years have been turbulent for the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a region that has experienced prolonged conflict for many years. The recent advancement of M23, a Rwanda-backed rebel force, has displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The militia has captured key sites, including Goma, the region’s largest city, and, on Feb. 14, the airport in Bukavu, a city to the south.

The underlying causes of the conflict stem from a complex interplay of ethnic tensions linked to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, political and corporate corruption, and the lingering effects of Western colonialism in Africa. Throughout this turmoil, the quest to profit from natural resources has exacerbated violence and poverty, in sharp contrast with the technological progress the minerals have enabled in other parts of the world.

The disparity, between the richness of the DRC in coltan, cobalt, gold, diamonds and other valuable minerals and the often-crippling poverty that besets many Congolese people, is striking. According to the World Bank, nearly three-quarters of the country’s 102.3 million citizens live on less than $2.15 a day. The country’s GDP per capita, at less than $630, ranks among the lowest globally, even as the companies that rely heavily on Congolese minerals rake in trillion dollars annually.

The DRC is also home to verdant lowland and mountain rainforests, expansive green savannas, and swampy wetlands, all supporting human communities and a unique array of wildlife. The okapi (Okapia johnstoni), the Grauer’s gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri) and the bonobo (Pan paniscus) are among the IUCN Red-Listed endangered or critically endangered animals found nowhere else on Earth. The DRC also holds a vast expanse of carbon-rich rainforest second only to the Brazilian Amazon in area. Conflict threatens that richesse, and nowhere is the situation more dire than in the eastern DRC, which has repeatedly been a flashpoint for new violence. Experts indicate that minerals play a significant role in the perpetuation of violence. But they also say it’s not entirely accurate to finger them as the primary cause of the conflict, even as armed groups, including M23, have used their trade to finance operations.

“Minerals became, to various degrees, a driving factor in the ongoing conflicts in eastern DRC,” says Alex Kopp, a senior campaigner with the London-based watchdog group Global Witness. But, he adds, “The conflicts usually didn’t start because of minerals.”

The conflict minerals ‘narrative’

Oluwole Ojewale, regional coordinator for Central Africa with the Institute for Security Studies in Dakar, Senegal, says that ascribing blame solely to the pursuit of natural resources in the eastern DRC fails to adequately capture the complexity of factors that have led to today’s dire situation.

“They are just new layers that have been added to the drivers or the enablers of the conflict,” Ojewale tells Mongabay. Across the African Great Lakes region, identity and ethnicity issues have significantly influenced the land struggle and the question of who owns it. “This is a major factor that you can’t wish away,” Ojewale says.

In the early 2000s, “a narrative” took hold that focused on minerals — particularly those used in modern electronics like coltan, explains Sara Geenen, an associate professor in international development at Belgium’s University of Antwerp whose research focuses on artisanal and small-scale mining in the eastern DRC. That part of the country is a major supplier of coltan to the world market. Still, since the turn of the century, when it helped stoke the rise of smartphones, coltan’s supply chain has been plagued by problems, including child labor, violence, hazardous conditions and paltry wages for miners. Trading coltan and other minerals has also helped finance numerous armed groups, from rebel militias, such as M23, to state actors, including the Congolese army.

But focusing just on minerals and the financing of conflict doesn’t encapsulate the whole picture, says Geenen, also the co-director of the Centre d’Expertise en Gestion Minière (CEGEMI) at the Université Catholique de Bukavu in the DRC. Problems exist throughout the system, and the trade in other natural resources, such as timber and charcoal, also contributes to the conflict.

“The fact that the narrative is so focused on this one type of occupation, one type of resource, has distracted us for a very long time,” she tells Mongabay.

Geenen points out that there’s been far less investment in addressing “political conflicts and conflicts over land [and] ethnic tensions” that have contributed to the violence.

A brief historical perspective

The Rwandan genocide from April to July 1994 resulted in the deaths of 800,000 to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus by extremist Hutus in just 100 days. After the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a rebel army led by Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s future president and a Tutsi, took control of Rwanda and ended the genocide, some two million Hutus fled across the border into the DRC, then known as Zaïre. The influx of refugees sparked tensions and laid the groundwork for two major wars beginning in 1996 that drew in not just the DRC and Rwanda but also Uganda and Burundi in the Great Lakes region and several other African countries.

Researchers estimate that the violence claimed the lives of 6 million people in the ensuing decades. It also led to a 1997 coup d’état that forced the DRC’s long-serving dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, out of power and into exile. His successor, Laurent Kabila, was assassinated in 2001 after defying the Rwandan forces that helped him overthrow Mobutu.

Joseph Kabila, the son of Laurent Kabila, assumed control of the government shortly after his father’s assassination. He held the presidency until 2019, when contentious elections elevated Félix Tshisekedi, widely regarded as Joseph’s chosen successor.

In Rwanda, Paul Kagame became president in April 2000, a post he still holds nearly 25 years later. Early on, Kagame set out to repair the wounds inflicted by the genocide and to economically develop Rwanda with significant success. Though the country remains densely populated, and around half of its people live on $2.15 a day, according to the World Bank, Rwanda has made strides in reducing poverty rates and increasing access to health care and education.

As these bloody entanglements beset the DRC and its neighbors, much of the industrialized world has advanced technologically. Personal computers had become commonplace in homes and offices in the Global North, and smartphones began changing how people interacted globally. Later, in the 2010s, the acknowledged need for cleaner sources of power led to advancements in batteries to store energy — in particular, for electric vehicles that, so the thinking went, would someday be powered entirely by carbon-neutral generation from the sun, wind and geothermal sources.

Meeting those needs required minerals found in the DRC: cobalt, for batteries; tantalum, derived from coltan, for capacitors; tin, for circuit boards; and tungsten, used to produce semiconductors and essential for products like solar panels. As had so often happened in the DRC’s past, the country’s people and the land paid the heaviest price for extracting these minerals. Work in the mining sector remains dangerous, with few safeguards in place to prevent catastrophic accidents or debilitating exposure to toxic chemicals and tainted air. Wages usually aren’t enough to support even the most basic standard of living, and school-age children often work to help families make ends meet.

Sourcing natural resources from the DRC is nothing new, nor are the wounds the practice inflicts on the country. Rubber, ivory, gold and diamonds have all wrought misery in Congo since the 1800s. Since the DRC’s independence from Belgium in 1960, many of the more than 100 armed groups that operate in the DRC have exploited mining to finance their operations.

The fall of Rubaya and Goma

In late April 2024, the M23 gained control over a mine near Rubaya town in North Kivu province. To that point in its history, the militia had taxed the smuggling of minerals into Rwanda as a source of money. However, after seizing Rubaya, the group itself began mining for the first time, according to a Feb. 6 article on the news site The Africa Report. Doing so currently brings in around $800,000 a month for the militia, the United Nations reported.

The U.N. and other groups have long accused Rwanda of profiting from the trade of minerals originating in the DRC. At times, it appears Rwanda has passed them off as if they were from Rwandan mines, as evidenced by discrepancies in the amounts of minerals exported compared to what the country’s mines could plausibly produce.

M23’s Jan. 28 capture of Goma, the capital of North Kivu province that sits on the border with Rwanda, punctuated a campaign that began with the militia group’s advances in the DRC in 2021. Since Jan. 1, 2025, the U.N. estimates that more than 500,000 Congolese have been forced from their homes, primarily due to the fighting, to other parts of the DRC. At least 3,000 people have been killed and nearly 2,900 wounded since the fall of Goma to M23. The provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu alone hold 4.6 million internally displaced people, a tragic toll from decades of conflict.

That instability in the eastern DRC has facilitated the flow of illicitly mined minerals out of the country and into international markets, according to Ojewale. In part, that’s because the government can’t maintain the level of presence necessary in the region, which is essential for effectively monitoring mining activities.

“The urgency to get those minerals might make someone … just wait at the other end of the supply chain to say, ‘Just give us the minerals,’” he says. “There are people — middlemen, artisanal miners, industrial mining companies — who participate, willingly, wittingly.

“If we don’t have sufficient state presence, it is … very difficult to carry out traceability,” he adds, “and I do not think highly of any traceability techniques or approach that is being deployed in those places.”

Focusing on supply chains

In attempts to address the mineral-related aspects of the crisis, the DRC has filed charges in Belgium and France against U.S.-based Apple for sourcing conflict minerals to make its products. On the international stage, the U.S. and the EU have tried implementing laws, such as the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, requiring companies to reveal if they use “conflict minerals.”

In best-case scenarios, these measures aimed at supply chains “have their limits,” Sara Geenen says. “At worst, they actually have adverse impacts on the ground.”

For example, the Dodd-Frank Act provoked a mining ban in the DRC in 2010 and 2011, which a 2018 study in the journal PLOS One found increased looting and violence, primarily due to the disruptions in how militias taxed mining before the ban.

Observers say the influx of illegally mined resources into streams of legal minerals complicates the ability to distinguish where these stocks came from and whether they were mined according to agreed-upon principles. Groups such as the International Tin Supply Chain Initiative (ITSCI) have set up traceability schemes aimed at ensuring minerals aren’t associated with child labor or support for armed groups in the DRC. The initiative’s goals include ensuring that minerals are responsibly sourced and haven’t been smuggled through Rwanda.

However, a 2022 report from Global Witness on ITSCI’s efforts found that high levels of illicit minerals were making their way out of the DRC into Rwanda. Back in 2001, the U.N. traced the movement of minerals through Rwanda, a practice to impose taxes on Congolese minerals to finance the Rwandan military then fighting the Second Congo War, which had begun in 1998. After Laurent Kabila took power in 1997, he soon ordered out the Rwandan and Ugandan troops that had helped him overwhelm Mobutu. Both sides stoked ethnic tensions, Rwanda invaded DRC, and “Africa’s World War” ensued, eventually involving seven other African countries and killing about three million people in the fighting and surrounding humanitarian catastrophe. Many experts believe Rwanda has continued to profit by moving Congolese minerals into international supply chains.

Much of the focus has been on scrubbing supply chains of conflict minerals, which ultimately helps consumers feel better about the products they buy. However, Geenen’s work with artisanal and small-scale miners in the eastern DRC has reinforced her view that these initiatives have not consistently achieved their objectives.

A more productive approach than the supply chain methods would be starting from the “bottom-up” to address the structural and economic inequalities that condemn miners to a life of poverty and keep them reliant on a system that continues to finance conflict, Geenen says.

Today in eastern DRC

Currently, the presence of the M23, and, according to the U.N., 3,000-4,000 Rwandan troops, has complicated any such efforts. Kagame said he didn’t know whether his country had any troops in the DRC. He has repeatedly defended the M23 and other Rwanda-backed forces, saying they are necessary in the DRC to protect Congolese Tutsis. Some observers refute that justification. But others note that speakers of Kinyarwanda, Rwanda’s national language, are often viewed with suspicion in the DRC.

African leaders continue to advocate for talks between the DRC and Rwanda to help solve the immediate crisis, beginning with a lasting ceasefire. A Feb. 8 statement from the East African Community (EAC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) called for the withdrawal of Rwandan troops.

Ojewale says a ceasefire is paramount right now. But he also says that would be just a starting point and that, beyond addressing the issues around “conflict minerals,” solving the perpetual instability in the eastern DRC will require difficult discussions that address the historical foundations of the conflict — a history that long predates the genocide in Rwanda of 1994.

He sees the creation of “artificial borders” by colonial powers as underpinning issues around identity and ethnicity that still plague the Great Lakes region today.

“Minerals may end,” Ojewale says. “The world in another 10 years or 20 years may move into other things … But what you can’t take away is the role of identity politics.”

Solving the broader crisis will require “frontline African leaders” to come together to find a new path forward, he adds.

Banner image: Congolese troops in the eastern DRC during fighting with M23 in 2013. Image © MONUSCO/Clara Padovan via Flickr(CC BY-SA 2.0).

John Cannon is a staff features writer with Mongabay. Find him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Citations:

Geenen, S., Stoop, N., & Verpoorten, M. (2021). How much do artisanal miners earn? An inquiry among Congolese gold miners. Resources Policy, 70, 101893. doi:10.1016/j.resourpol.2020.101893

Ojewale, O. (2022). Mining and illicit trading of coltan in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Stoop, N., Verpoorten, M., & Van der Windt, P. (2018). More legislation, more violence? The impact of Dodd-Frank in the DRC. PLOS One, 13(8), e0201783. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0201783

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