The next day, as he accepted the “FIFA Peace Prize,” President Trump cited the Rwanda and DRC agreement as an example of his having saved “millions of lives,” saying, “The Congo as an example, over 10 million people killed, and it was heading for another 10 million very quickly.”
It could have been a new day for Africa. But there was a problem.
The March 23 Movement, or M23, also known as the Congolese Revolutionary Army, is a Rwanda-backed, Congolese paramilitary group operating in the mineral-rich eastern regions of the DRC. They were not at the negotiating table. As the Presidents were in Washington talking, M23 was advancing on key cities in the region, with the backing of Rwandan troops and equipment.
Three days after the Washington Accord was ratified, M23 pushed into and captured the strategic town of Luvungi near the border of Burundi, and several surrounding villages. They then advanced to and captured Uvira, a strategic city in South Kivu that housed a military base and regional government offices. At least 74 people were killed. 200,000 people fled the area, including Congolese soldiers, who fled to neighboring Burundi. On December 12, 2025, one week after the signing ceremony in Washington, International President of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) addressed the UN Security Council, recounting “staggering levels” of violence, displacement, and deprivation in the region, bombed villages, extreme brutality, and widespread sexual violence on both sides. “The gap between political signaling and the lived reality of millions,” he said, “is widening. In fact, the ink has barely dried on the agreement signed in Washington, and M23 has already launched a sweeping offensive on Uvira, driving an estimated 200,000 people from their homes … stark evidence that the promise of peace is masking a landscape of persistent, large-scale violence.”
The Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity obliges Rwanda to stop backing the M23 rebels. It demands the withdrawal of Rwandan Defense Forces from DRC within 90 days from the June 27 signing. That deadline was last September. When President Trump hosted the signing in December, no Rwandan troops had been removed. After the M23 attack on Uvari in December, US Representative to the UN Mike Walz said that Rwanda “had at least 5,000 to 7,000 troops deployed in the eastern DRC as of early December,” and that the Rwandan army (RDF) “directly participated in the Uvira offensive and increasingly used artillery and suicide drones in combat alongside M23… including surface-to-air missiles and signal jammers, in support of M23 in recent months.”
None of this should have been a surprise. In some ways, none of it was new.
At risk of giving an overly brief history of the two nations, to understand what is going on in the DRC, we have to start with the Rwanda genocide, and two ethnic groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis. Between April and July 1994, more than 800,000 Rwandans, primarily ethnic Tutsi but also including moderate Hutus, were slaughtered in a campaign of mass murder designed by extremist ethnic Hutus in the government. (I cover how it was set up and executed in more detail in Sowing Hate and Chaos: How Propaganda is Used to Destroy Democracy).
The other thing to know is that underlying, driving, and in part funding the ongoing battles in DRC is mineral wealth. By some estimates, the minerals under Congolese soil exceed $24 trillion in value. According to the World Bank, Congo has “80 million hectares [approximately 300,000 square miles] of arable land and over 1,100 minerals and precious minerals.”
The DRC is Africa’s largest producer of copper; China, the UAE, and India are its primary customers. It is also rich in tin, tungsten, gold, diamonds, uranium, and coltan and tantalum, which are critical for high-tech electronics, including capacitors in phone and computers, and aerospace and defense, including in jet engines and rockets. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, more than 70% of the world’s cobalt, a key component in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles, come from the DRC. As demand for electric vehicles grows globally, the demand for cobalt is expected to grow fourfold by 2030. North and South Kivu, the territories we are talking about, are among the richest.
By 2008, after 14 years of conflict, one militia was emerging as the dominant military force in the eastern region of Congo. The National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), a Rwanda-backed Tutsi rebel group led by warlord Laurent Nkunda, had become the principal actor in the battle for control. The CNDP was running its own illicit mineral extraction operations in the region. It had weathered at least 7 “peace making deals” between the DRC and Rwanda, and had set up its own illicit mining operations.
On March 23, 2009, the Congolese government arrived at a peace deal directly with the CNDP. It included an amnesty for war acts, release of prisoners, and commitments to national reconciliation. The CNDP fighters would be integrated into the Congolese military, CNDP would transform into a political party, and CNDP personnel would be incorporated into government roles.
It didn’t happen as it was planned at the negotiating table. After three years of waiting, on May 6 2012, former members of the CNDP mutinied and formed M23, named after the failed March 23 peace accord. A UN report found that M23 had been created by the Rwandan government. The group, and its Rwandan support, have been stopped and started a few times since.
In January 2025, M23 launched a new offensive against the Congolese security forces, capturing Goma, the capital and largest city of North Kivu. It continued to make advances through 2025. By September, three months after the initial signing of the Washington Accords, M23 had expanded its control outside the cities and over the region, with 9000 newly trained recruits, including hundreds of surrendered Congolese national police officers. With virtually no external military threat to its control of the region, the group was effectively establishing a parallel state in the mineral-rich areas.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame has denied providing troops and support to M23, while also saying that “any action taken in the conflict is to protect its territory.” Drone footage has shown the movement of troops across the borders, and reports of both troops and Rwandan military equipment in the region have been verified by UN Security Council members including the US, France, and the United Kingdom.
A UN report on July 4, 2025, noted that M23 is smuggling minerals out of DRC and into Rwanda, where they are mixed with production of Rwandan origin and exported downstream. The smuggling of coltan, it says, from M23-controlled territories has, in recent months, reached “unprecedented levels.”
So why would the new push by the M23 and the taking of new territories three days after the Accords were signed come as much of a surprise? The DRC has no control over them. Rwanda still doesn’t admit they do have control over M23, while they are enriched by their actions. And no one was talking to the leaders of the people with the guns in their hands.
There is another effort which may actually have an impact on resolving the Rwanda-Congo conflict. While the talks were going on in Washington, M23 was negotiating separately with officials in Doha, mediated by the government of Qatar.
On December 17, M23 unilaterally withdrew from Uvira, citing the withdrawal as a unilateral confidence-building measure intended to support the Doha peace process. On January 19, 2026, Congolese soldiers and a pro-government militia returned to Uvira and reoccupied the government’s military base there. Fighting, however, has intensified again in January, both in the region of Uvira and Masisi in the North Kivu Province.
On January 17, African leaders meeting in Togo put their faith in the Doha talks, reaffirming their support and calling for them to resume without delay.
The Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity never brought Rwanda and the DRC even close to peace. If anything, the conflicts have escalated since its signing. But perhaps it was never about that.
The Washington Accords agreement establish, and link US security commitments to, an economic framework opening up Congo’s minerals reserves to Western investors seeking critical minerals. Written into the accord is the agreement on the part of the DRC of offer a “right of first offer” on critical minerals destined for export, “to U.S. persons and aligned persons on commercially comparable terms that guarantee such minerals shall be directed for use by the U.S. market.”
The day after the agreement was signed, the United States’ development lender, U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), announced plans to take a stake in a new partnership to market Congo’s minerals to US end users. The DFC, it said, is “facilitating financing to help U.S. companies secure access to critical minerals.” It is extending a $553 million loan to modernize the Lobito Atlantic Railway for the exportation of minerals through Angola to create a “Western-only” logistics route, and is “targeting upwards of $1 billion in investments for critical mineral mining projects” and “reviewing a list of projects for potential development.”
As it turns out, the “glorious triumph” part of the accords for the United States had everything to do with making wealthy Americans wealthier, and very little to do with peace at all.