The worst war in terms of death counts since WWII
A possible way out of the relentless tragedy was brokered in Washington under the aegis of President Donald Trump on 27 June 2025, as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which faces its 29th year of war, occupation and genocide that began with a US-UK-Rwandan and Ugandan backed regime change in 1996, signed a peace deal with Rwanda.
In the Oval Office President Donald Trump, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, US vice President James David Vance as well as Congolese Foreign Minister Therese Kayikwamba Wagner and Rwandan Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe, spoke briefly about the peace accord. Trump presented the respective foreign ministers with letters inviting Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi and his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame to Washington to sign a package of agreements, dubbed the Washington Accords by Trump’s senior adviser for Africa, Massad Boulos. The deal will include commitments to build a regional economic integration framework to be defined in the upcoming meeting, with promises of U.S. investment in eastern DRC’s abundant critical mineral reserves, among other commercial agreements.
The first glaring shortcoming upon reading the accord is the omission of the term genocide when describing the Congolese war. The NGO International Rescue Committee (IRC) conducted four mortality surveys in the DRC between 1998 and 2004. According to the IRC since the start of the Second Congo War in August 1998 to the end of April 2004, around 3.8 million people died, either as direct or indirect victims of the armed conflict. The United Nations Mapping report published in 2010 speaks of more than 5 million deaths for the period March 1993-2003 alone. Figures that prompted Noam Chomsky and Andre Vltchek in 2015 to define the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a super genocide. Today the death toll is well over 10 million Congolese and the country has 7 million internally displaced people (IDPs).
Trump did however underscore at the press conference that “somebody said it’s the biggest war on the planet since WWII” and US vice president James David Vance underlined that the team under the Trump administration took “ what was 30 years of killing and war, the worst war in terms of death counts since WWII, and now we are on a pathway to peace.” (emphasis mine)
Despite acknowledging the genocidal violence eastern Congo has undergone in the last 30 years, where one tenth of the country’s population was wiped out and another one tenth displaced, Rwanda’s crime of aggression is not sufficiently reiterated in the accord, although with its proxy, the M23, its policies seem to be the root cause of main security threats in the region.
Rwanda’s crime of aggression
Rwandan affairs analyst and the president of a Brussels-based Rwandan human rights organization Jambo Asbl, Norman Ishimwe Sinamenye in Rwanda and Congo’s Unstable Peace published in Foreign Policy on 7 July 2025 points to Rwanda as a dangerous destabilizing factor in the region. The article’s subtitle is very telling: “A recent U.S.-brokered agreement can only ensure stability if it does not reward Rwanda’s aggression.” (emphasis mine)
“ Though often touted as a success story, Rwanda’s economic model is now tied to the illicit exploitation of Congolese minerals. M23’s control extends beyond mining sites to critical transport corridors, facilitating illicit mineral exports into Rwanda. These raw materials are then laundered into international supply chains as Rwandan exports, circumventing global traceability measures and benefiting from access to U.S. and European markets. Despite having minimal domestic reserves, Rwanda’s coltan exports surged by 50 percent from 2022 to 2023—a discrepancy documented by U.N. experts,” Sinamenye writes. He concludes: “ Peace cannot be built on the goodwill of a regime whose power depends on permanent conflict and systemic destabilization.”
San Francisco Bay area based journalist Ann Garrison, writing for the Black Agenda report on 9 July 2025 on the UN Group of Experts on DRC Report published in June reveals “ the savage truth of the 30-year war of aggression.” What has become a settler colonial project and a genocidal war economy on the part of Rwanda in eastern Congo also transpires in the UN report: “Much of the report is devoted to Rwanda’s “systematic effort to dismantle existing State authority and civil structures in territories under its control, replacing them with its own parallel governance while targeting perceived dissenters, erasing institutional records, and laying the groundwork for demographic and land control changes. New governors are appointed; more Rwandans are empowered to oversee mining, taxation, banking, border controls, and all else official. Property is confiscated and new deeds are drawn up”, writes Garrison.
Garrison proposes sanctions against Rwanda as a possible policy tool in case of non-compliance : “ The UN Security Council has passed resolutions demanding that M23 withdraw from the territory it controls and that Rwandan troops withdraw from DRC, but no sanctions serious enough to force them to are ever imposed, neither by the UN nor by the big Western powers. The US and its NATO allies exclude Russia, North Korea, and Eritrea from the SWIFT system for conducting international financial transactions, but no one has ever proposed imposing this harshest of Western sanctions on Rwanda, not at any point in its 30 years of invasion, occupation, and plunder.”
Particularly disturbing are the number of customary chiefs which the M23 has removed and replaced since January this year, thus also carrying out policies that attempt to erase the social fabric of Congolese communities living in the east. An extract of the UN Experts report regarding this : “For example, it (AFC/M23 ) dismantled administrative services and forcefully removed all civil servants who did not adhere to AFC/M23. Similarly, it systematically tracked, intimidated and substituted legally appointed customary chiefs, and threatened civil society leaders. Ephrem Kabasha, AFC/M23 territorial administrator of Nyiragongo, abducted and tortured several civil society leaders. Corneille Nangaa, Bertrand Bisimwa, Bahati Erasto, Willy Manzi, Ndayambaje and Vianney Kazarama seized and redistributed public and private properties, targeting civil society leaders in particular. AFC/M23 systematically occupied public buildings and destroyed archives aimed at erasing institutional memory and evidence of land tenure, notably in view of the return from Rwanda to North and South Kivu of all Congolese refugees (annex 17).”
Also very disturbing is the M23’s systematic destruction of Congolese archives.
Ten days before the signing of the accord a June 17 2025 article Could Africa’s Forever War Finally End? How U.S. Diplomacy Could Resolve the Conflict Between Congo and Rwanda by Joshua Z. Walker, Reagan Miviri, and Jason K. Stearns also recognized that Rwanda “derives huge material benefit from its neighbor’s instability, which facilitates the smuggling of gold, coltan, and other minerals” (…) “According to diplomats and UN reports, over the past year, it has deployed up to 20 percent of its 33,000 troops in Congo. Rwanda’s gold exports climbed from $344 million in 2021 to $1.5 billion last year; Kigali denies that this increase relates to its efforts in Congo, but six successive reports by a United Nations sanctions monitoring group have shown that minerals are being smuggled from eastern Congo into Rwanda. “
The authors mention a list of policies the US could apply in case of a Rwandan non-compliance with the peace negotiations, amongst which using pressure through multinationals. Here the Foreign Affairs article cites as an example a tin mine based in North Kivu (and majority owned, at the time, by the U.S.- and British-based energy investment firm Denham Capital) that had shuttered its operations as the M23 closed in on the area. Boulos’s pressure on Rwanda led the M23 to withdraw and on 9 April the mine announced that it would resume operations. However, this tin mine example recalls the illegal contracts signed by western multinationals as the AFDL (Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo) was advancing and had not yet reached Kinshasa in 1996-97. These commercial transactions and mining contacts were later dubbed as illegal, signed while the country was at war. Canadian author Alain Denault a Noir Canada has extensively documented the multinationals fueling the first two Congo Wars, as has Patrick Mbeko in Le Canada dans les guerres en Afrique centrale: génocides et pillages des ressources minières du Congo par le Rwanda interposé et Le Canada et le Pouvoir Tutsi du Rwanda: Deux décennies de complicité criminelle en Afrique centrale (Canada in the wars in Central Africa: genocide and the plundering of Congo’s mineral resources by proxy Rwanda and Canada and the Tutsi Power of Rwanda: Two Decades of Criminal Complicity in Central Africa).
Other tools Joshua Z. Walker, Reagan Miviri, and Jason K. Stearns list are : the withdrawal of World Bank funding and Rwanda’s UN peacekeeping status; the EU sanctions towards Gasabo Gold, “a refinery owned by the Rwandan Defense Ministry, while the United Kingdom has suspended some aid. If the U.S. Treasury Department followed the EU’s lead and sanctioned Gasabo Gold, it would effectively kneecap Rwanda’s main earner of foreign currency.”
Halting whitewashing operations and diplomatic cover-up for Rwanda was also high on their list of possible effective policies the US could use as leverage: “ if both Republicans and Democrats spoke more often and more publicly about Rwanda’s damaging role in the region, that might discourage celebrities such as Idris Elba and Ellen DeGeneres—who have visited Rwanda and participated in promotional activities for the Rwandan government—and sports ventures such as the NBA and Arsenal Football Club from associating with the country’s brand. “
Also, a 3 July 2025 United States Institute of Peace article What the DRC-Rwanda Peace Deal Means for the U.S. and Africa’s Mineral-Rich Great Lakes Region by Cecily Brewer and Kent Brokenshire recalls the recent US administration sanctions when the M23 did not comply to the ceasefire : “ the cease-fire collapsed in December 2024 and the Rwandan-backed armed group M23 embarked on a devastating rampage through eastern DRC. While the cease-fire agreement had not included “built in” consequences for violation of the agreement, the United States did impose sanctions on Rwandan and M23 officials in response to these actions.”
Perhaps strong built in consequences should thus be addressed in the next step of the accords. Trump answering a journalists’ question during the press conference on the enforcement mechanism of the peace accord alluded to the policy of halting trade as a leverage tool to use with countries that pursue war.
An independent Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the DRC should be appointed by the United Nations as of July this year to accompany the peace process also in view of the recent halting, a first in UN history, of a human rights inquiry. Internal DRC-led investigations should also be put in place as the April 2021 inquiry which was subsequently discontinued.
Another severe shortcoming is the omission in the main text of the accord the Rwandan occupation and crime of aggression in the DRC which is instead described as “ a legitimate defensive measure on the part of Rwanda.”
However, Rwanda’s crime of aggression is underscored in the Washington peace accord as it twice refers to the UNSC Resolution 2773 of 21 February 2025: this resolution clearly condemns the M23’s military advancement since January 2025 (Reiterating its deep concern regarding the rapidly deteriorating security and humanitarian crisis in eastern DRC due to the ongoing offensive in North-Kivu and South-Kivu, including the control of Masisi center on 4 January 2025, of Sake on 23 January 2025, of Goma on 28 January 2025, of Nyabibwe on 5 February and of Bukavu on 14 February by the 23 March Movement (M23) with the direct support and participation of the Rwanda Defense Forces (RDF),) and calls for their immediate withdrawal, as well as an end to the parallel administrative systems put in place. (Decides that the M23 shall immediately cease hostilities, withdraw from Goma, Bukavu and all controlled areas, including land and lake routes, and fully reverse the establishment of illegitimate parallel administrations in the DRC territory, and that this withdrawal shall not be impeded).
According to the Washington peace accord” the Parties commit to advance the implementation of UNSC resolution 2773 (2025) and other relevant UNSC resolutions.” Thus, at the heart of the accord is a mutual commitment to respect Congolese territorial integrity and an immediate end to the hostilities.
Setting the historical record straight is a sine qua no, an essential condition, for moving towards genuine peace. A hilarious short comic strip video1 on this peace accord highlights the absurdity of calling this a peace accord when it does not even identify the main aggressor : in fact, there is no direct mention of Rwanda’s decades-long invasion, via countless proxies, since the first and second Congolese wars which began in 1996 and continue to this day, proxy militias rebranded with a new acronym throughout the decades: AFDL, RCD-Goma, CNDP, M23, ADF. That Rwandan soldiers are present on Congolese territory since then has been documented by numerous NGOs, UN expert reports, as well as geopolitical and historical research.
Executive Director and co-founder of Friends of the Congo Maurice Carney commenting on the accord and its lack of historical depth wrote: “ Should one accept Donald Trump’s narrative, US citizens would never know that the United States was the major foreign force responsible for trapping the Congolese masses in perpetual wars, instability, and abject poverty.” Carney also points out other shortcomings amongst which the lack of punishment or accountability on the part of Rwanda for its crimes in the Congo, which means no justice for the Congolese victims of Rwanda’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Human rights activist and Nobel laureate Denis Mukwege has described the deal as “vague” and tilted in Rwanda’s favor. After details of the draft agreement were announced last week, he posted a statement on X criticizing it for failing to recognize “Rwanda’s aggression against the DRC,” which he wrote, “suggests the peace accord benefits the unsanctioned aggressor, who will thus see its past and present crimes whitewashed as ‘economic cooperation.’”
Mukwege added: “In its current state, the emerging agreement would amount to granting a reward for aggression, legitimizing the plundering of Congolese natural resources, and forcing the victim to alienate their national heritage by sacrificing justice in order to ensure a precarious and fragile peace.”
The comic strip video on this peace accord has the Congolese diplomat saying:“ This is not peace, it’s the formalization of an occupation, you have turned plunder into policy and called it regional cooperation.” “After invading the land they sit on I get to manage the Congolese parks and minerals”, says the Rwandan diplomat in the cartoon, reflecting the widely-held opinion that the accord awards Rwanda, as it whitewashes its crimes.
Congolese geopolitical analyst Patrick Mbeko sees the peace process as it stands now as a capitulation on the part of the Congo, the conflict is taken out of its geopolitical context and there is no immediate plan to halt the effective Rwandan occupation of eastern Congo- although the UNSC resolution 2773 (2025) is cited in the accord and should prompt an immediate withdrawal.
As intelligence sources provided details on Rwanda’s overt and covert objectives including providing military, logistical and intelligence support to AFC/M23, the country must face the consequences of having carried out an illegal international agression.
The modalities of the mineral and other natural resources exploitation for the region have not yet been fixed. Attention to halting the illegal exploitation should be at the center of the forthcoming peace talks.
False FDLR pretext
Many branded as indisputable truths are actually public myths and need urgent addressing. One such myth is Rwanda’s denial of any military involvement in eastern Congo, although in an interview with CNN on 3 February, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame said he did not know whether his troops were in eastern DRC.
Another such myth is that the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda) FDLR are former Rwandan genocidaires (those that committed a genocide in 1994 in Rwanda).
The Archbishop of Bukavu Monsignor Christophe Munzihirwa, who was assassinated in October 1996, had warned of a new Palestinian problem that the plight of these Rwandan refugees could be compared to, as Rwanda and Uganda were preparing an invasion which ultimately overthrew Mobutu Sese Seko. In that war up to 800,000 Rwandan refugees were killed or died. It is to this day an unspoken historical tragedy.
Over 1.5 million Rwandan refugees, fleeing the advancement of the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), crossed the border into Congo (then known as Zaire) in 1994. Between 1996 and 1997 over 800,000 of these Rwandans were killed or perished in the forest as they fled the RPF advancement in Zaire according to a former UNHCR field officer Lino Bordin. Nowhere in the world has a population, the millions of Rwandans that fled the RPF, been so stigmatized, persecuted and executed in silence. UNHCR evacuated its staff as Rwanda bombed the refugee camps housing hundreds of thousands of civilians ; later UNHCR would claim that many had returned to Rwanda and the rest could not be found. When Bordin wrote his reports from the field he was menaced by Rwandan officials who had been instructed by the British embassy in Kigali to halt his reporting on the mass massacres he was documenting.
Considering geography, according to International Crisis Group expert Richard Moncrieff in a Q & A The DR Congo-Rwanda Deal: Now Comes the Hard Part published on 4 July 2025 the FDLR is a pretext for Rwandan’s involvement in eastern Congo : “Congolese authorities and many observers view this demand as pre-textual, since the M23 and Rwandan troops have extended their campaign far beyond the FDLR’s areas of influence. The condition also fails to take into account the reality that M23 now controls many of the areas where the FDLR is active – making it difficult for Kinshasa to even try to clear out the FDLR unless the M23 units withdraw first.” Thus logistically speaking the M23 units need to withdraw first, before any FDLR refugee issue can be addressed.
By only mentioning in the core text of the accord the M23 two times and the FDLR over 40 times, for someone unfamiliar with the war one has the impression that the main protagonist causing insecurity in eastern Congo is the FDLR- which is nowhere in the text defined, nor given voice to.
Most people living in the occupied area in eastern Congo mention the M23 occupation as the roots of the violence committed in the region, and not the FDLR. Thus, framing the conflict in such a way is misleading and obfuscates the actual patterns of violence on the ground.
A 2 July 2025 letter published by FDLR representative Lt Gen Victor Byiringiro congratulates President Donald Trump for the peace initiative that his movement fully endorses, yet warns that President Paul Kagame’s depiction of the FDLR as a genocidal or a terrorist organization is far from reality. Byiringiro reminds the US administration of the numerous peace initiatives in which the FDLR took part throughout the years and also the five joint military operations targeting it from 2009 to 2015 which it had to face. The FDLR, born in 2002 to protect the remaining Rwandan refugees in Congo, insist on the need for an inclusive political dialogue to resolve the persistent conflicts in the region.
We hope the FDLR grievances raised in this letter and these refugee voices will be heard within the Washington peace accords. A representative for the FDLR could join the Joint Security Coordination Mechanism (“JSCM”) mandated to implement the Washington peace accord.
No economic deals without peace first
Colette Braeckman in Rwanda-RD Congo. Le deal à la Trump written on 4 July 2025 is also pessimistic:“The deal was a stark reminder of a reality that the latest report by UN experts has just highlighted: President Paul Kagame considers eastern DR Congo to be a conquered zone.”
The reintegration of non-state military actors in the Congo’s national army is a very problematic facet and needs to be addressed further. Hopefully the case-by-case reintegration policy of demobilized soldiers mentioned in the accord will be more transparent and thus move beyond the brassage and mixage policies which have destroyed the Congolese national army from within, by creating parallel militias within it that defected and relaunched attacks.
Another aspect which needs urgent attention in the next phases of the accord is the forced population displacement that is being recorded in the region. Here UNHCR needs to step in with its reporting capacities and the Congolese state with protection officers.
AFC, the Alliance Fleuve Congo, the political arm of the M23 militia, has called for regime change in Kinshasa, which is not a viable stance towards a diplomatic solution. The future accords should thus acknowledge this stance as unlawful on the part of this movement and ask it to articulate legal and viable grievances.
US mining interests in the region are mentioned in a 27 June 2025 Financial Times article Donald Trump ally seeks to snap up DR Congo mine as US brokers peace deal by east Africa correspondent William Wallis. He cites Gentry Beach, a former hedge fund manager, with his America First Global, acting as part of a consortium including the Swiss commodities group Mercuria, that hopes to develop the Rubaya coltan mine in a joint venture with Congolese state miner Sakima.
Transparency of these future contracts should be a priority and only finalized in peace time. Perhaps the definition of how to handle the economic interests should follow a long term peace settlement, making the halt of violence the priority, as well as reestablishing the Democratic Republic of Congo’s territorial integrity. No economic deals should be considered without peace first.
Further details given in this Financial Times article however seem to reward Rwanda and its illegal mineral exploitation: “Longer term, some of the coltan mined at the (Rubaya) site would be exported legally through Rwanda and processed for export at a new smelter in Kigali. The smelter would be built by a separate consortium made up of Mercuria, Beach’s America First Global and Rwandan state investor Ngali Holdings, according to people familiar with the negotiations.” This economic set-up relegates Congo to the colonial role of exporting primary resources to a country which has pillaged its resources illegally for 30 years. This is problematic as the planned economic deal envisioned by this consortium does award a genocidal aggressor.
The Democratic Republic of Congo should prohibit up to 90 % of the refining of all its minerals outside its own country. Only small percentages should be exported that are not refined in loco. Such a policy would bring long-term investments for refineries directly into the DRC.
So far, the peace agreement only mentions critical minerals once. U.S. officials largely framed this agreement as part of the president’s wider interest in the pursuit of peace by referencing his other peace efforts related to Iran and Israel, Pakistan and India, and Russia and Ukraine.
The on-going international war of aggression must be acknowledged further and sanctioned. The Parties agreed in the Washington accord to refrain from any acts of aggression.
Will Rwanda this time respect its side of the accord signed and will the international community react with serious country-wide sanctions including asset freezes, trade embargos, and restrictions on financial transactions and other creative punitive measures against Rwanda if it fails to comply?
Note
1 I would like to credit the excellent, to the point and harsh criticism of the video cartoon on the Washington accord from which I took some images for this article, but the authors are not mentioned. The video can be watched here cartoon film .
Source: Nicoletta Fagiolo
Image: Taken from an animated short film about the Washington agreement.
“Notre Invité” welcomes Congolese geopolitical expert and writer Patrick Mbeko (La Nouvelle Chaîne Africaine, 10.07.2025)