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Trump’s Congo-Rwanda Peace Accord is an affront to Congolese human rights and sovereignty.
After the signing of the so-called peace agreement between Rwanda and Congo on June 27, U.S. President Donald Trump took a victory lap. “This is a Great Day for Africa and, quite frankly, a Great Day for the World! I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for this... but the people know, and that’s all that matters to me!” he posted. The agreement, heralded as a breakthrough ending more than three decades of violence in Congo, was quickly praised by powerful institutions in the West, including the United Nations and the European Union.
There’s no question that peace in Congo is a desperately needed goal. Since 1996, war in the country has killed nearly 6 million people and displaced over 7 million. More than 21 million require humanitarian assistance, and in 2023 alone, the U.N. recorded over 133,000 cases of sexual violence, almost certainly a significant undercount.
However, while world leaders and celebratory headlines applaud the deal, violence continues to rage in the eastern Congo. The deal will not end this suffering; instead, it prioritizes Western private interests over peace, justice, and dignity for the Congolese people, serving as a blueprint for resource extraction and continued violence in the country rather than a true diplomatic success.
The deal, while ostensibly aimed at ending hostilities, places a heavy emphasis on mineral exploitation, leading Congolese civil society to question its true purpose. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Denis Mukwege has denounced it for “legitimizing the plundering of Congolese natural resources,” a concern supported by the agreement’s inclusion of a clause committing signatories to “launch and/or expand cooperation on… formalized end-to-end mineral value chains… with the U.S. government and U.S. investors.” Upon the release of the Declaration of Principles that laid the deal’s foundations, the International Crisis Group noted that the deal reads “partly like a framework for ending a conflict and partly like a commercial memorandum.”
It is highly unlikely that the deal will bring a just and lasting peace to Congo. Though a potential cease-fire was announced between the Congo government and M23, the conflict’s largest rebel group, experts say that M23 has already broken the agreement while serious implementation challenges remain. M23 has left withdrawal—and, thus, a true and lasting end to the conflict—out of the question, telling reporters they “will not retreat, not even by one meter.” Meanwhile, over 100 other armed groups continue to fight in the east. On July 23, the U.N. condemned three recent deadly attacks by groups not party to the agreement.
More troublingly, the deal grants Rwanda a green light to continue looting Congolese resources, furthering a central driver of the conflict. By backing M23, Rwanda has taken control of Congolese mines, and committed widespread human rights abuses. Up to 90% of its coltan exports are believed to be illicitly smuggled from eastern Congo, funding armed groups. The accord, which invites Rwanda into a “regional economic integration framework,” legitimizes this theft and proxy warfare.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame doesn’t seem ready to scale back this influence. Just days after the agreement was signed, he cast doubt on the peace process, telling reporters, “If the side that we are working with plays tricks... then we deal with the problem like we have been dealing with it.”
Today, the Congolese people endure violence not only from armed conflict but also from systemic exploitation, through forced labor, environmental destruction, and land seizures. The scramble for Congo’s mineral wealth has forced tens of thousands of children into dangerous mines, polluted and devastated ecosystems, and displaced entire communities from their homes.
A recent policy brief by the Oakland Institute lays bare how, through handing over Congolese mineral wealth to a web of U.S.-aligned corporate actors and billionaire investors, Trump’s peace deal will deepen the ravages of the country’s mining industry, leaving the Congolese people to pay the price.
The list of the deal’s likely beneficiaries is a veritable who’s-who of Trump-linked billionaires: Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz, among others. Also on it are mining giants like Ivanhoe Mines, Rio Tinto, and Glencore.
The accord threatens to entrench this cyclical poverty and violence in service of enriching behemoth mining firms and Trump’s billionaire friends.
The track records of these companies undermine any claim that Trump’s deal is about peace for the Congolese people. Ivanhoe Mines’s cochair Robert Friedland once ran Galactic Resources, responsible for one of the worst mining-related environmental disasters in U.S. history. He has already been exposed for harmfully evicting Congolese families to expand his new operations in the Congo. Rio Tinto, notorious for sparking a civil war in Papua New Guinea and for destroying a 46,000-year-old sacred Aboriginal site in Australia, is now eyeing Congo’s Manono Lithium Deposit. Glencore has been fined over $1 billion for abuses in its African mines and maintains illicit financial ties to sanctioned Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler. Both Ivanhoe and Rio Tinto are reportedly set to join a forthcoming minerals agreement tied directly to the deal’s economy-driven clauses.
Lacking the infrastructure to process its own resources, Congo remains trapped in a cycle where foreign actors siphon off its $24 trillion in mineral wealth while its citizens remain among the poorest in the world. Compounding that systemic inequality, both corporate and artisanal mines enact severe human rights abuses and environmental devastation on the Congolese people, injustices that the agreement appears likely to bolster as it opens the door to firms perpetrating them against communities around the globe. In doing so, the accord threatens to entrench this cyclical poverty and violence in service of enriching behemoth mining firms and Trump’s billionaire friends.
Despite what he may think, or wish, Donald Trump deserves no applause for this “peace agreement” because the agreement itself is misnamed. Its focus has never been peace, but rather profit, and his attempt to launder it into something more benevolent is transparently disingenuous.
Without a radical shift, Trump’s deal will likely achieve exactly what it was intended for, funneling billions to already wealthy oligarchs and multinational corporations while sidelining the communities forced to live with its consequences.
"As we did with the U.K.-Rwanda deportation deal... let us unapologetically and loudly oppose this again," said one Rwandan human rights defender.
Rwanda's foreign minister confirmed Sunday that the East African nation's government is in "early stage" talks with the Trump administration about possibly taking in migrants deported from the United States.
"It has not yet reached a stage where we can say exactly how things will proceed, but the talks are ongoing," Rwandan Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe told Rwanda TV. He added that the Rwandan government is in the "spirit" of offering "another chance to migrants who have problems across the world."
Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Trump administration is seeking nations that are willing to accept its deportees.
"We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings to your countries."
"We are working with other countries to say, 'We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings to your countries. Will you do that as a favor to us?'" Rubio said. "And the farther away from America, the better, so they can't come back across the border."
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Trump administration officials have also asked other countries including Benin, Eswatini, Kosovo, Libya, Moldova, and Mongolia about resettling U.S. deportees.
In 2022, Rwanda agreed to take in some people seeking asylum in the United Kingdom while their claims were being processed. However, the scheme was shelved amid legal and human rights concerns following the return to power of the center-left Labour Party. Rwanda is still seeking to collect £50 million ($66.4 million) from Britain despite the canceled deal.
The United Nations refugee agency condemned the U.K.-Rwanda deal, asserting that "externalizing asylum obligations poses serious risks for the safety of refugees" and "is not compatible with international refugee law."
Local human rights defenders strongly oppose any resettlement of third-country migrants in Rwanda.
"I with other concerned and responsible Rwandans are going to wage a legal war to challenge this arrangement between [Trump's] government and the dictatorial regime of [Rwandan President Paul Kagame]," investigative journalist Samuel Baker Byansi said on social media Sunday.
"Rwanda is not a dumping site of migrants with criminal records who have served their sentence in the U.S.," he added. "As we did with the U.K.-Rwanda deportation deal, fellow Rwandans in the country and abroad, let us unapologetically and loudly oppose this again."
Last month, the U.S. deported Omar Abdulsattar Ameen, an Iraqi refugee who had lived in the United States since 2014, to Rwanda after officials in Baghdad accused him of being a former Islamic State militant who murdered an Iraqi police officer. This, despite a U.S. judge's order blocking his deportation on the grounds that the murder allegation was "not plausible" since Ameen was living in Turkey at the time of the officer's killing.
Critics have sounded the alarm over potential perils migrants might face in Rwanda, including human rights violations and the possibility that they could be sent to third countries where they are at risk of violence and persecution.
The Trump administration is facing legal challenges to its mass deportation efforts, which include sending immigrants to the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay and the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) prison in El Salvador. President Donald Trump has even proposed deporting U.S. citizens to CECOT.
Trump appeared on NBC News' "Meet the Press" Sunday and was pressed by moderator Kristen Welker about the legality of his mass deportation program. Asked whether every person in the United States is entitled to due process, Trump replied: "I don't know. I'm not a lawyer."
"The U.K. government could literally pay every refugee a £30,000 annual salary for life, and it would be cheaper," said one critic. "We're burning money just to enjoy the cruelty."
Legal and human rights experts on Tuesday said the British Conservative Party's decision to push through a bill allowing the government to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda—effectively overriding last year's Supreme Court ruling—represented a "desperate low" from lawmakers eager to exploit migrants ahead of elections expected later this year.
"A lot of this is performative cruelty," Daniel Merriman, a lawyer whose clients have included some asylum-seekers whom the Tories tried to deport after it first introduced its plan in 2022, told NPR. "The elephant in the room is the upcoming election."
After a prolonged debate, the unelected House of Lords cleared the way to pass the Safety of Rwanda bill early Tuesday morning, after dropping several proposed amendments including one that would have required independent verification that the central African country is a safe place to send migrants.
The House of Commons then passed the bill, and King Charles III is expected to formally approve the legislation in the coming days.
The bill requires courts and immigration officials to "conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country" to send asylum-seekers, even though the Supreme Court ruled in November that people deported to the country would face a significant risk of refoulement, or being sent back to the countries where they originally fled persecution or violence.
The Conservative government signed a treaty with Rwanda last December to strengthen protections for asylum-seekers, including a provision that partially bans Rwanda from sending people back to their home countries.
But the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) called on the U.K. to abandon the plan and instead "take practical measures to address irregular flows of refugees and migrants, based on international cooperation and respect for international human rights law."
"The new legislation marks a further step away from the U.K.'s long tradition of providing refuge to those in need, in breach of the Refugee Convention," said Filippo Grandi, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees. "Protecting refugees requires all countries—not just those neighboring crisis zones—to uphold their obligations. This arrangement seeks to shift responsibility for refugee protection, undermining international cooperation and setting a worrying global precedent."
"The U.K. has a proud history of effective, independent judicial scrutiny," Grandi added. "It can still take the right steps and put in place measures to help address the factors that drive people to leave home, and share responsibility for those in need of protection, with European and other international partners."
Dorothy Guerrero, head of policy and advocacy at Global Justice Now, noted that "disastrous foreign and economic policies of successive governments have contributed to the need for people to seek refuge."
"These same people's lives are continually used as a political football, after years of being scapegoats for bad government decisions," said Guerrero. "Statements from politicians are now even more blatantly devoid of any pretense of care for human rights. We will not stop pushing for a change of course, with safe routes to seek asylum in the U.K. so that people no longer have to risk their lives in the Channel."
"The passing of the Rwanda Bill is a shameful day for the U.K.," she added.
Hours after the legislation was passed, French officials announced that at least five people, including a seven-year-old child, had been killed while attempting to cross the English Channel, bound for the U.K. in an overloaded inflatable boat.
At The New Statesman, associate political editor Rachel Cunliffe wrote Tuesday that the tragedy reveals "the flaws of the Rwanda plan," which proponents say could deter migrants from seeking refuge in Britain.
Proponents of the Rwanda plan will inevitably point to today's disaster as further evidence that strong measures are needed to address the issue of Channel crossings. They will accuse Labour and opposition parties of ignoring the human cost of letting this crisis continue and argue that lives are at stake if the government does not act.
[...]
The reality is that a substantial number of people who pay people traffickers large sums of money to crowd them on to a tiny boat do so because they feel they have no other option. Fleeing war and persecution, they are desperate. And so they are prepared to take desperate measures. Measures that sometimes lead to tragedy, but which are deemed necessary given the hopelessness of their situation.
It is hard to see how the threat to send a tiny fraction of those who arrive (Rwanda has said it will only take 150-200 migrants) changes this calculation.
The Labour Party, which is leading Conservatives in polls ahead of the expected elections, has vowed to scrap the legislation if it wins control of the government later this year, and critics have expressed doubt that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will actually secure deportation flights before Britons vote.
One flight was grounded in June 2022 after the European Court of Human Rights intervened, and on Monday the OHCHR warned aviation authorities that they would risk violating international law if they allow "unlawful removals" of asylum-seekers to Rwanda.
Critics have also pointed to a finding by the National Audit Office that the deportations would cost £1.8 million ($2.2 million) per person.
"The U.K. government could literally pay every refugee a £30,000 annual salary for life, and it would be cheaper than sending them to Rwanda," said David Andress, a history professor at the University of Portsmouth. "We're burning money just to enjoy the cruelty."