In 1884 and 1885, Otto von Bismarck hosted the powers of Europe and the United States in Berlin, and King Leopold II of Belgium left with the Congo as his personal property. He did not win it in battle. He was handed it in a room where no Congolese person was permitted to speak.

Over 23 years, his agents cut off the hands of people who fell short of rubber quotas and killed an estimated 10 million people. Leopold’s Congo exposed what Europe called civilisation: African people worked to death to enrich others, with the approval of the world’s powerful states.

Colonial rule has ended. The exploitation of African people and resources for foreign profit continues and so does the killing: by the UN’s estimate, around 6 million people have died in eastern Congo since 1996.

Congo’s minerals, foreign profits

Congo produces around 70 per cent of the world’s cobalt, alongside copper, coltan, gold, tin and tungsten, the raw materials of the digital and green economies of the global North. Every smartphone, electric vehicle battery and data centre depends on minerals mined in Congo.

In the cobalt mines of the south by Unicef’s estimate, 40,000 children, some as young as six, have dug the ore by hand. A lawsuit brought for child miners and their families against Apple, Alphabet, Dell, Microsoft and Tesla failed when a US appeals court ruled in March 2024 that buying cobalt through a global supply chain did not make a company a participant in the abuse.

A second suit against Apple, filed in Washington in November 2025 by International Rights Advocates, remains pending. Apple denies wrongdoing, and its latest filing to US regulators says it found “no reasonable basis” to link its smelters to armed groups. Leopold, too, claimed his rule in Congo was a humanitarian mission.

Under the US-Congo Strategic Partnership Agreement signed in December 2025, Kinshasa intends that within five years 30 per cent of the cobalt and half the copper its state companies sell will leave through the US-backed Sakania-Lobito corridor to the Atlantic.

Rwanda, Uganda and Europe
Congo’s neighbours have been drawn into its plunder as junior partners in a system run from abroad. Rwanda arms, trains and directs the M23 militia. In April 2024, M23 seized Rubaya, one of the richest coltan deposits on Earth, and the UN Group of Experts found the AFC/M23 coalition held a monopoly on its extraction and illegal export to Rwanda. France has told the UN security council that through Rubaya, M23 controls 15 to 30 per cent of world coltan production, financing an illegal administration on Congolese soil.

In 2026 the US Treasury listed the Rwanda Defence Force in March and, on October 28, the Rwandan Ministry of Defence itself, stating that it had deployed thousands of troops alongside M23 and brought surface-to-air missiles onto Congolese battlefields. Rwanda denies it.

Congo’s parliament has recognised the killing, as the Genocost, a genocide for economic gain, and in June Congo took Rwanda to the International Court of Justice, accusing it of genocide. Rwanda rejects the charge.

When M23 and Rwandan forces seized Uvira in December 2025, Human Rights Watch documented the summary execution of 53 civilians, and mass graves followed. The US-brokered peace agreement between Kinshasa and Kigali stood only 33.3 per cent implemented at the end of October, according to the African Peace Accords Barometer.

On October 12 former president Joseph Kabila launched a new front in Goma to take over from the AFC/M23 alliance, a front the African Union and the EU have condemned for advocating the seizure of power by force. Days later, South Kivu’s provincial government accused Rwandan troops and M23 of forcing families from their homes in Katogota.

M23 takes the mines, drives people from their land, installs its own officials and taxes the trade. It is the method of settler conquest that Europe brought to Congo in Leopold’s time. Denis Mukwege, the Congolese Nobel Peace Laureate, has described the situation in North and South Kivu as “a de facto annexation.”

Uganda’s government serves the same system more quietly. In 2005 the International Court of Justice found that Uganda had illegally exploited Congo’s resources while occupying Ituri. Bank of Uganda figures show gold exports more than doubling to $8.9 billion (£6.7bn) in the year to June 2026, from a country with modest mines of its own, and the UN Group of Experts says its refining sector is “predominantly supplied by gold originating from eastern DRC.”

In October, The Sentry found that gold from mining areas under the influence of the Allied Democratic Forces, an armed group responsible for mass killings in eastern Congo, passes through Butembo to traders and refineries in Uganda. The trade helps finance the group’s violence. Uganda’s government says its troops are in Congo to fight armed groups, the security role its Western partners pay it to play elsewhere, while the gold those groups trade passes through Kampala to markets abroad.

The European Union has also done business with Rwanda. In February 2024 the EU signed a raw materials memorandum with Rwanda, a country that UN investigators had shown was exporting minerals from conflict zones across the border. A year later the European Parliament voted 443 to 4 to suspend it. The Commission refused.

Cardiff University’s Gordon Cumming notes that British budget support helped pay for Rwanda’s and Uganda’s military campaigns in Congo. In 2002, UN investigators listed 12 British companies among those they said had breached international business guidelines in Congo.

Kwame Nkrumah, who stood by Patrice Lumumba until Lumumba’s murder in 1961 with Belgian and US complicity, wrote that “neo-colonialism is also the worst form of imperialism.” Congo has never been allowed to escape it, and nor have its neighbours: states that are, in Nkrumah’s words, “in theory, independent” but whose “economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”

Fanon warned that Africa’s new ruling classes would be content with “the role of the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent.”

Mukwege told AFP that the US arrangement was transactional at the outset, adding: “But today it looks more like predation. We give, but in return we don’t receive the desired security.”

Ebola, aid cuts and hunger

The Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak declared in May has become the largest in Congo’s history, with more than 10,000 confirmed cases by early November, roughly half of them fatal, according to the World Health Organisation. There is still no licensed vaccine.

The WHO says last year’s deep cuts to international aid slowed the response. Of more than $2.1bn announced by donors, the ONE Campaign found only $28.5m documented as new money, and Africa CDC says more than $700m paid to international agencies remains unaccounted for.

The UN-backed hunger monitor found 28.8 million people facing acute food insecurity through December, and more than six million are displaced inside the country. Frantz Fanon described colonialism as violence in its natural state. Empty clinics and missing food supplies in a genocide driven by minerals are the result of decisions made by the world’s richest governments.

African Union

Ayisha Osori, a Nigerian writer, says in Africa Is a Country: the African Union “is ineffectual and relies on external donors for 70 per cent of its budget.” The African Union has answered with a Togolese mediator, a panel of former presidents and a six-month roadmap. Its joint communiqués with the UN security council call for the unconditional withdrawal of Rwandan troops. None has been enforced. Maurice O Ndole, writing in The Africana Voice notes that the African Union “has never formally named a member state as the aggressor in another member state’s war.”  

Kinshasa has been left to seek protectors abroad because no African body has defended its borders. Lumumba understood that African unity was a practical necessity for survival.

What justice looks like

The solutions are clear. They threaten only those who profit from Congo’s suffering.

Rwanda must withdraw its forces unconditionally, and face real penalties if it does not. Penalties must fall on the generals, ministers, traders and companies who profit, never on the poor of Rwanda and Uganda, who are not Congo’s enemies. Western governments must end the security contracts that make Kigali and Kampala their regional enforcers. The EU and Britain must match Washington’s sanctions on Rwanda’s military and suspend the raw materials memorandum. The refiners and traders who move Congolese gold through Kampala and Kigali must face sanctions and prosecution. Supply-chain laws must make company executives criminally liable for sourcing from conflict zones. Congo’s debts must be cancelled in full, along with the IMF and World Bank conditions that stop it taxing its own wealth.

Thomas Sankara told the Organisation of African Unity in 1987 that debt is “a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa,” and that “if we don’t repay, lenders will not die… But if we repay, we are going to die.” Belgium and the United States must pay reparations into Congolese public health, starting with a publicly owned, African-controlled system for vaccines and outbreak response. The AU must be funded by African peoples and answerable to them alone.

The governments of Belgium, the United States and Britain, the European Commission, and Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, Dell and Alphabet stand as the beneficiaries of Congo’s genocide, with the governments and armies of Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni as their regional partners. They have grown rich on it. The peoples of Rwanda and Uganda have not.

We, the world, are consumers of Congo’s minerals. History will judge us all for what was allowed to happen there. Those who grew rich from it must be judged first, in a court of law. Don’t stop talking about Congo.

Claudia Webbe was the Member of Parliament for Leicester East (2019-2024). You can follow her at https://www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE/ and https://x.com/claudiawebbe