During the 19th century’s Scramble for Africa, European countries raced to secure territory and wealth across the continent. Now, African powers are grabbing resources from a neighbor crippled by infighting and ill-equipped to defend itself.
Caught in the middle is the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country the size of Western Europe whose forests conceal a wealth of gold, diamonds and coltan, a key component in smartphones and computers. These mineral riches are turning what was already a region plagued by militia violence into a battleground, as Rwanda and its local allies seize coltan supplies while Uganda and its proxies move to take over gold mines to the northeast, according to United Nations and Ugandan officials.
The officials say Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and Rwandan President Paul Kagame are pouring troops and weapons into Congo, while their Congolese allies, who control strategic border crossings, secure smuggling routes to move more minerals to the global markets.
The influx began three years ago, when Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi invited Ugandan troops into Congo to fight an Islamic State-aligned rebel group based in woodlands straddling the border between the two countries. Uganda’s military is considered among the most competent in Africa and, at the time, Tshisekedi thought Museveni’s forces would help him achieve the “rapid and robust” solution to the region’s long-running insurgencies he promised when he assumed office in 2019.
Instead, the deployment prompted Rwanda to launch its own 2022 incursion, using a once-sleepy Congolese rebel group known as M23 as deniable cover, and the situation quickly escalated.
Uganda supplemented its 1,700-strong force in Congo with another 2,300 troops. Ugandan bulldozers constructed dirt roads to rebel hideouts, including mining areas. Ugandan instructors trained fighters loyal to a warlord controlling gold mines, where armed groups make as much as $140 million a year from illegal mining, according to U.N. investigators.
Last year, Rwanda-backed M23 rebels seized the coltan-mining town of Rubaya, where fighters bring in around $800,000 each month by taxing traders. Rebel fighters have doubled diggers’ wages to encourage them to keep working, and they rely on forced labor to widen roads to accommodate trucks transporting coltan into Rwanda along with gold. According to the U.N., some 4,000 Rwandan soldiers are fighting inside Congo, a report that Rwandan authorities have denied.
A Rwandan government spokeswoman has previously denied accusations that Rwanda steals Congolese minerals, describing them as Kinshasa’s “scapegoating strategy” to cover up its security failures. The spokeswoman didn’t respond to messages seeking further comment.
A spokeswoman for Uganda’s energy and minerals ministry said it has put in place new measures, including efforts to crackdown on falsified documentation, to stem the export of smuggled minerals. She said that while the ministry believes that most of the gold exported from Uganda is produced domestically, a lack of tighter checks along its porous, 545-mile-long border with Congo makes smuggling hard to control.
The race to control Congo’s minerals and smuggling routes, analysts say, is propelled in part by surging demand. Gold prices rose above $3,000 a troy ounce in March, leaving the vast country and its beleaguered president in a difficult position to resist neighboring countries’ growing interest.
“Tshisekedi turned to desperate measures to solve a desperate situation,” said Richard Moncrieff, regional analyst with Brussels-based International Crisis Group. “He is now struggling to respond to the humiliating turn of events.”
In February, the Congolese leader proposed a deal to the Trump administration offering the U.S. access to critical minerals such as coltan in return for its help in defeating the M23 rebels, The Wall Street Journal reported. A White House official said it doesn’t comment on the president’s private correspondence.
Rwanda doesn’t have significant domestic production of coltan, but still earned $1.1 billion in 2023 from minerals commonly mined in eastern Congo, a 43% jump from the previous year, according to official data. Likewise, Uganda doesn’t have a large domestic gold-mining industry. But its gold exports hit a record $3.4 billion last year, according to Ugandan central-bank data, and surpassed coffee as the country’s top foreign-exchange earner.
U.N. investigators and human-rights groups say minerals smuggled out of Congo account for the surge in both Rwanda’s and Uganda’s overseas sales. Congolese gold bars are usually concealed beneath truck cabs and in battery compartments and car trunks to be smuggled into Uganda. Once across the border, traffickers purchase falsified documents in Kampala to disguise the gold’s origin before it enters the global market, according to Ugandan traders and The Sentry, a Washington-based nonprofit investigative group.
Toward the south, the extraction effort tends to revolve more around violence. In January, M23—backed by 4,000 Rwandan troops, according to U.N. peacekeeping chief Jean-Pierre Lacroix—batted aside Congolese and U.N. soldiers and swept into Goma, the largest city in eastern Congo. Soon after, the rebels took Bukavu, another urban center on the shores of Lake Kivu.
The clashes have resulted in the deaths of about 7,000 Congolese since the start of the year, according to the country’s health ministry.
Jason Stearns, an assistant professor at Canada’s Simon Fraser University and former U.N. investigator, says Rwanda’s decision to augment support for M23 was a reaction to Uganda’s advances in gold-mining areas.
Tshisekedi has even accused Apple of being complicit in crimes taking place in Congo by using Rwandan-sourced coltan in its smartphones.
“iPhones made by Apple are tainted with the blood of Congolese victims,” he said in a recent speech.
Apple denies such allegations. An Apple spokesman said the company told its suppliers to stop purchasing minerals from Congo and Rwanda last June as the conflict escalated.
“We took this action because we were concerned it was no longer possible for independent auditors or industry certification mechanisms to perform the due diligence required to meet our high standards,” the spokesman said.
The European Union, a major destination for the region’s mineral exports, has imposed sanctions on several Rwandan officials for their support of the M23 rebels.
“The cumulative effect of the European Union’s recent actions is likely to reduce the volume of gold exports,” said Nigel Green, chief executive of DeVere Group, a global financial consulting firm. “This contraction in supply could exert upward pressure on global gold prices.”
Coltan prices are also rising, as are those for tin after Canadian miner Alphamin Resources evacuated staff and closed operations at Congo’s largest tin mine earlier in March when M23 fighters captured the nearby town of Walikale.
Congo is ill-prepared to tackle the worsening incursions, which appear set to continue. The skirmishing for natural resources can be attributed in part to a longstanding ethnic rivalry dating from the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which ethnic Hutus slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis.
Kagame, the Rwandan president and a Tutsi himself, has denied arming or backing M23, whose commanders are largely Tutsis. But he has accused the Congolese government of abusing Tutsis and said Rwanda is acting to protect its ethnic kinsmen. “The M23 rebel movement exists because its fighters have been denied their rights in their own country,” Kagame said earlier this year.
Riding high on its battlefield victories, the group now plans to try to topple Tshisekedi, instead of negotiating a peace, an M23 spokesman said.