At the Berlin Conference of 1885, European powers convened to partition African territory. England, France, Holland, Germany, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal were involved in this colonial division, which occurred approximately 140 years ago.
Today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was, at that time, brutally taken over by the Belgians and King Leopold II. During Leopold’s rule, more than ten million Congolese lost their lives when they were forced to work in the rubber and ivory industry.
In 1960, anti-colonial leader Patrice Lumumba took on the struggle against colonial rule. Declassified documents show that after Lumumba became the first prime minister of Congo, he was assassinated in a plot involving the Belgians and the CIA.
Mobutu Sese Seko came to power soon after and led the country through a one-party system from 1965 to 1997; during his rule, he renamed the country the Republic of Zaire as part of an Africanization campaign. In 1997, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, with support from Rwanda and Uganda, overthrew Mobutu during the First Congo War (1996-1997). Kabila assumed the presidency and changed the country’s name to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kabila was assassinated in 2001.
Cobalt, coltan, gold, and copper: 6 million deaths per year
With the assassination of Kabila and Joseph Kabila’s assumption of the DRC presidency, the Second Congo War (1998-2003) began. Once it was revealed that the DRC’s North Kivu and South Kivu provinces contained vast deposits of coltan and cobalt (alongside significant reserves of gold and copper), the conflict escalated into a struggle for these strategic minerals that are essential for digital communications, electric cars, and power vehicles and used by companies in the United States, Switzerland, Canada, Rwanda, China, and Uganda. The nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations says the militia fighting in the DRC has led to a death toll of nearly six million people and the displacement of two million more.
The 1994 Rwandan massacres drove many Hutus to take refuge in the DRC’s Kivu region. This led Rwanda to create the March 23 (M-23) Movement, a paramilitary militia made up of mostly Tutsis to fight the Hutus in Congolese territory; they frequently raided the North and South Kivu provinces. In response, the Patriotic Alliance for a Free and Independent Congo (APCLS) allied with the Congolese army and other regional paramilitary groups to resist the M-23. The APCLS allied with DRC President Félix Tshisekedi and the Congolese army to fight against the M23 militia. They joined with paramilitary groups from Burundi and Uganda and hundreds of other paramilitary gangs to also seize Kivu’s various coltan, gold, and cobalt mines.
African Union, U.N., and SADC
“The origins of this war are varied, as there are many people, institutions, and states that profit from this situation, from the riches of the soil,” said Dr. Steve-Régis “Kovo” N’Sondé, a researcher affiliated with CIRECK, Congo-Mioa (Centre International de Recherche-Éducation sur la Civilisation Kôngo/ International Research Center – Education on Kongo Civilization) when he was asked to analyze the DRC situation.
“To propose 1885, the year of the Berlin ‘conference’ on the Congo, would be to give too much importance to the colonial era and its duration. But at the same time, the borders of the territory now called Democratic Republic of Congo, which was called Zaire (a deformation of Nzadi or Nzari which means the Congo river) during Mobutu’s time, were born in that ‘conference’ … So, one cannot reduce the current war or the actions of paramilitaries like the M23 to the genocide of Tutsis by Hutus in 1994, as if it was just another tribal war between ‘ethnicities’ as people always think happens with Black people.”
The United Nations has 14,000 of its blue helmet soldiers in the Kivu region, and this past December, 14 blue helmets were killed. The countries that make up the Southern African Development Community (SADC), met last January 31 in Zimbabwe’s capital of Harare to urgently analyze this “third Congo war.”
N’Sondé believes that resolving the war means looking at who is selling arms to the M23, and looking at which countries financed Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s rebellion. In the DRC, protestors have blamed Rwanda for initiating the conflict.
The African Union met on February 1 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to seek a political solution to the DRC crisis. As of February 4, M-23 rebels have captured the gold, tin, and coltan-rich city of Goma and petitioned for a ceasefire and safe corridor for area residents. “The Alliance Fleuve Congo (AFC/M-23),” the rebels wrote in a statement, “informs the public that in response to the humanitarian crisis caused by the regime in Kinshasa it declares a ceasefire starting February 4, 2025, for humanitarian reasons.” The only response from the DRC government to the ceasefire calls was made to CNN. Military spokesperson General Sylvain Ekenge told CNN that he didn’t trust that the ceasefire calls were genuine. “Have you seen the Rwandans do what they say?” Ekenge told the outlet. He called the ceasefire call “[a] communication for international consumption and to put the international community to sleep on its feet.”