Tensions between the two neighboring African countries, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda, have escalated in recent months.

The DRC accuses the Rwandan government of supporting militias in the neighboring Kivu provinces to the east of the DRC, which for decades have been seizing raw materials on a large scale and smuggling them to Rwanda.

In recent months and weeks, armed forces of the so-called ‘M23’ group, with the direct support of soldiers of the Rwandan armed forces, have seized large parts of the Kivu provinces, causing countless residents to flee the region.

Germany’s and the EU’s decades-long support for Rwanda has led to growing protests over the country’s role in the war in eastern DRC.

The Federal Republic of Germany has long cooperated closely with Rwanda, a former colony of the German Empire and a country that is also regarded in Berlin as an outsource for asylum procedures in remote parts of the world.

Last year, the EU also signed an agreement with Kigali for the supply of important raw materials.

German companies are very interested in Rwanda

Germany, other Western countries, and the EU have been cooperating closely for years with Rwanda, which was a colony of the German Empire from 1884 to 1916.

Berlin pays large sums to Kigali from its development budget; most recently in October 2022, it committed a sum of 93.6 million euros for a period of three years, two-thirds of which it called financial cooperation to promote investments.

Rwanda is one of the countries included by Germany in the Compact with Africa project, which aims to improve the framework conditions for foreign investment in participating African countries.

A German Business Desk has also been set up in Kigali to promote investments. In 2019, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development opened a digital center there, which, according to official statements, is intended to ‘act as a bridge’ between companies and research institutions in Germany and Rwanda.

Since 2018, Volkswagen has had a factory in the capital, Kigali, and the German vaccine manufacturer BioNTech has also been represented there since 2023.

Are M23 militias looting DRC’s minerals and smuggling them out of Rwanda?

Rwanda is also of great importance as a supplier of raw materials. For decades, observers have been pointing out in German Foreign Policy that Rwanda has been exporting much larger quantities than it produces on its own territory.

Much of this export surplus allegedly comes from the neighboring regions of the DRC, especially the provinces of North and South Kivu on its eastern border, which are extremely rich in raw materials.

Since the outbreak of the Great War in eastern DRC in 1996, Kigali has been supporting militias, especially in North Kivu, which illegally transport a significant part of the mineral resources from there across the border into Rwanda.

This means that Kinshasa is losing a lot of money: In 2023, DRC’s Minister of Finance Nicolas Kazadi estimated that this amounted to ‘a billion dollars a year.

The DRC argues that the militias, particularly those supported by Rwanda, are enabling the war in eastern DRC to continue, with Kigali’s sponsorship.

Human rights organizations draw attention to coltan among the smuggled raw materials. The mineral, used in the manufacture of mobile phones, is mined in North Kivu, often under the worst working conditions, smuggled to Rwanda, and exported from there.

M23 benefits from mineral exploitation and trade. For example, the rebels who seized the Rubaya mine (one of the world’s largest coltan deposits) last year earn about $800,000 a month in taxes, according to UN estimates.

The DRC accused Apple of profiting from looting

Indeed, last year the DRC accused Apple of using minerals illegally exported from the war-torn east of the country, challenging claims that the iPhone maker carefully verifies the origins of materials in its devices.

In a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook dated April 22, Congolese government lawyers posed a series of questions.

In the letter, lawyers for the DRC, based in France and the US, say Apple’s iPhones, Mac computers, and other accessories are ‘stained with the blood of the Congolese people.’

The EU is allegedly covering up Rwanda’s crimes in the DRC

For years, campaigns against the supply of Eastern DRC’s ‘blood minerals’ through Rwanda have regularly failed, allegedly because the Western states supplying the raw materials are in close cooperation with Kigali and thus effectively cover up smuggling and attacks by Rwandan-backed militias in Eastern DRC.

In February last year, the EU even signed a memorandum of understanding with the Rwandan government for close cooperation in the extraction and processing of natural resources.

The focus was on so-called critical raw materials, which are indispensable for energy transition technologies. The European Commission clearly emphasizes that Rwanda exports, among other things, large quantities of tantalum, especially from coltan.

Human rights organizations warn that there is a high risk of ‘blood minerals’ entering the EU on the basis of the Memorandum of Understanding. Brussels says it has put in place control mechanisms to ensure that this is not the case, but experts point out that the daily smuggling from eastern DRC to Rwanda has long been circumvented by all sorts of tricks, so they are essentially ineffective.

Rwandan support for M23 in UN report

In 2022, United Nations experts stated that they had evidence that the M23 organization not only possessed unusually modern weapons but was also supported by troops from the Rwandan armed forces directly on the territory of the DRC.

With their help, the M23 took control of growing areas, including new raw material deposits. Operations continued even after the signing of a formal ceasefire between DRC and Rwanda in July 2024.

At the beginning of this year, UN experts assumed that between 3,000 and 4,000 soldiers from the official Rwandan armed forces were now stationed in North Kivu, and that M23 militias were participating in attacks there.

At the end of January, they succeeded in jointly capturing Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu. After a brief ceasefire, the militias resumed their attacks on Tuesday, and countless people have been killed since then.

More than 2,000 people were allegedly burned to death in Goma following the M23 invasion last week.

According to the UN, the number of refugees in the Kivu provinces, many of them living in squalid conditions, is approaching five million.

DRC proposes ‘green corridor’ to the EU

Rwanda’s attack and occupation of large parts of Kivu province comes at a time when the DRC has offered the EU cooperation on raw material reserves in eastern DRC.

Kambale Musavuli of the Congo-Kinshasa Research Centre points this out. At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, the President of the DRC, Félix Tshisekedi, presented the new Green Corridor initiative, which envisages numerous development measures along a large strip of land along the Congo River, from renewable energy production to the promotion of agriculture and the creation of transport infrastructure.

In the long term, the Green Corridor is intended to connect the eastern Congolese provinces of Kivu to the capital Kinshasa, thus rivaling the traditional transport and smuggling route from the Kivu provinces to Kenya via Rwanda and Uganda, Kambale Musavuli reports.

The EU Commission has recently confirmed that it wants to support the creation of the Green Corridor and the associated construction of transport infrastructure.

After all, up to one million tonnes of agricultural products can be transported from the Kivu provinces to Kinshasa via the Green Corridor every year, and this also applies to raw materials.

Western countries in DRC face growing resentment

Protests are mounting against the war in Kivu province, the occupation of large parts of the region by M23 militias and Rwandan troops, and the authorization of these actions by Western states.

At the end of January, angry demonstrators in the capital Kinshasa attacked the embassies of Rwanda, the US, France, and Belgium, among others. Since then, protests have also been organized in other cities in the DRC.

Activists are calling for a demonstration in Berlin this Saturday. The protest is also aimed at Germany’s de facto endorsement of the Rwandan war in eastern DRC.