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When Donald Trump boasted recently that he had stopped the conflict between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – though fighting persists in the DRC, at appalling human cost – he made clear that his goals went beyond a long-sought Nobel Peace prize.
“They said to me, ‘Please, please, we would love you to come and take our minerals.’ Which we’ll do,” the US president added. Now he is following through. Last Monday he launched a new strategic reserve plan, “Project Vault”, worth almost $12bn. Two days later, JD Vance hosted a summit seeking to create a trade zone for critical minerals.
The US – and others – are trying to counter the dominance of Beijing, which was far quicker to grasp the strategic importance of such resources. Key to its plan is a deal touted as a way to bring the DRC wealth and create incentives for peace. Few on the ground are convinced. The deal does nothing to help the DRC build processing capacity and requires it to freeze its tax and regulatory regimes for a decade. The EU likes to portray itself as taking higher ground. But in December, the parliament and council agreed to weaken key due diligence rules.
The incredible resources of the DRC have been violently plundered over centuries for the benefit of richer nations and a handful of individuals on the ground. Four-fifths of the population live below the poverty line. Extraction has meant exploitation and danger. The week before the Washington gathering, at least 200 artisanal miners were crushed to death or suffocated when a coltan mine in Rubaya in the eastern DRC collapsed. It became, said one survivor, a tomb.
As the journalist Nicolas Niarchos writes in his new book The Elements of Power, “tech profiteers, politicians, and battery-makers have made a trade-off: cleaner power at home for pollution and suffering elsewhere”. Meeting climate goals will require many times the current production of materials such as lithium and cobalt. But environmental despoliation, the eviction of communities and the exploitation of labourers including children are not the inevitable results of the necessary shift away from fossil fuels. And the NGO Global Witness suggests that Mr Trump’s mineral-hunger is better explained by their use in military technology. Tantalum, extracted from coltan, is essential to jet engines and missiles as well as smartphones and laptops.
Just as growing conflict helps to drive demand, so demand is fuelling conflict. Rubaya is part of the swathes of land seized by M23 rebels in the eastern DRC in recent years, with mines there generating an estimated $800,000 monthly, funding the insurgency. The group is backed by Rwanda (though Kigali denies it) and experts say Rwanda is now selling far more coltan than it can produce, with smuggling across the border reaching unprecedented levels. The EU minerals deal with Kigali has been rightly criticised.
Natural resources are increasingly intertwined with security policies across the continent, the African Policy Research Institute noted recently, via Russian private military companies, the US promise of peacebrokering and China’s infrastructure-for-resources model. Its report suggests that resource demand could give African states leverage to negotiate more equitable partnerships that benefit their populations. But that depends, as the authors note, on institutional strength, regional coordination and transparency in deal-making – as well as determination not to compromise human rights, environmental standards or national sovereignty. The DRC’s example is not encouraging.
