The death toll in the city on the border with Rwanda has distant roots, but an increasingly urgent motive: the competition for critical raw materials.
Following a rapid military offensive that began on 26 January and continued for several days, the militias of the March 23 Movement, known by the acronym "M23", seized control of the Congolese city of Goma, located in the northeastern province of North Kivu. This major centre of over one million inhabitants – many of them displaced – sits on the border with Rwanda and is rich in mineral resources, especially the so-called critical raw materials that are essential for the technology industry and the ecological transition. Partly for this reason, it is no stranger to rebel violence: the first fall of Goma dates back to November 2012, a moment that marked the near-total loss of territorial control by the military of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The collapse of state authority encouraged the emergence of hundreds of armed groups, often fighting one another, and left room for the penetration of foreign armies seeking to impose their own control over the region, as in the case of Rwanda and Uganda. Years of low-intensity conflict and the rapid deterioration of the situation in recent days have worsened the severe ongoing humanitarian crisis which, beyond the harrowing scenes of death on the streets in recent days, has over the years caused hundreds of thousands of displaced people and thousands of deaths. The reigniting of local violence also raises a broader question, linked to the strategic interests of China and the West – led by a Trump who showed little interest in Africa during his first presidential term – in the region. Perhaps the ruthless urgency of this new scramble for raw materials, crucial to the transition, could even force the occupant of the White House to change his tune on climate, distancing himself, in practice, from the denialism of his own propaganda.
The March 23 Movement is a paramilitary group active in the province of North Kivu. The origin of the name can be traced back to the peace agreement signed on 23 March 2009 between the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) – the rebel group that was M23's forerunner – and the Congolese army, which temporarily put an end to the internal conflict in the Kivu region. M23 has always been considered a pro-Rwandan movement, as it is composed predominantly of Tutsi soldiers, who along with the Hutu make up Rwanda's two main ethnic groups. The Tutsi were victims of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, carried out by the Hutu-led government and the Hutu paramilitary groups Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi.
M23 officially formed as a temporary force to defend Congolese Tutsi from attacks by numerous armed groups, particularly the Hutu, but is today regarded as the military arm through which Kigali seeks to extend its influence across the border. The United Nations has long documented a channel of direct support from the government led by Paul Kagame to the militias based in Congo, despite Kigali's denial of any involvement. The UN also maintains that there are currently between 3,000 and 4,000 Rwandan soldiers present in the area.
Every diplomatic effort aimed at reducing tensions in the region has so far proved fruitless. On 15 December 2024, peace talks collapsed after the Congolese government rejected Rwanda's demands to negotiate directly with M23. Congolese president Felix Tshisekedi and his officials labelled M23 a terrorist group and refused to legitimise it through direct dialogue. Since then, violence has escalated in North Kivu and the northern areas of South Kivu. The rebels had moved to capture the port city of Minova on 21 January, cutting off the flow of goods and military equipment to Goma from the south, and then Sake on 23 January. A series of operations that isolated Goma, until the final assault that forced both the Congolese army and the UN peacekeepers stationed in North Kivu to withdraw.
Even before the latest attacks, Goma was hosting nearly 600,000 displaced people, but the rapid deterioration of events at the start of the year pushed that figure to around one million. Today Goma is estimated to have between 2 and 3 million inhabitants, half of whom are children, according to data from Save the Children. During a press conference held a few days ago, Adelheid Marschang, envoy of the World Health Organization (WHO) and numerous humanitarian agencies reported that hospitals in Goma were overwhelmed and "hundreds of patients are being treated for gunshot, mortar and shrapnel wounds, while many bodies lie in the streets". On Wednesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross announced that its hospital had received more than 100 wounded in just 24 hours.
Goma is the provincial capital of North Kivu, as well as a vital economic centre and commercial hub with Rwanda. The city is situated on the border separating the two states and is adjacent to Gisenyi, a town known for its tourist attractions on the Rwandan side of Lake Kivu. Numerous Congolese and international companies, non-governmental organisations and media outlets have offices in Goma. As far back as 2012, rebel militias had taken control of the city with the participation of the Rwanda Defence Forces (RDF), first seizing the international airport and the national radio headquarters. At the time, the clashes engulfed many areas of Goma, as the DRC's armed forces fought alongside numerous armed groups that had emerged in at least 13 city neighbourhoods. Due to the general instability of the region, the Congolese government had also appointed military leadership to govern the province, but Major General Peter Cirimwami was killed in a clash with M23 on 23 January.
Yet what all the forces in the field — military and paramilitary, state and non-state — are after is not just the main city, but the entire province of North Kivu and, above all, what lies beneath it. Its rocks hold vast quantities of gold, which has been mined for decades, but in recent years the number of sites prospecting for so-called critical raw materials — named as such because they are indispensable to the functioning of the digital devices we use every day and to the ecological transition — has been multiplying rapidly. It is estimated that more than 70 per cent of the world's cobalt is produced in the DRC, with a share ranging between 15 and 30 per cent attributed to so-called artisanal (informal) and small-scale mining activities.
Since 2009, the International Peace Information Service (Ipis), an independent research organisation specialising in the collection and analysis of data on natural resources in sub-Saharan Africa, has conducted nearly 7,000 field visits to map these specific sites in eastern DRC, building a database and interactive maps that can be consulted online. The data currently runs up to 2023, with Ipis noting that "the mining context in the DRC changes rapidly in terms of the number of machines used in extraction, the presence of armed groups, etc." Of the 3,409 mining sites mapped, 64 per cent concern gold, followed by 22 per cent — over 700 sites — of areas dedicated to the prospecting and exploitation of cassiterite, the primary mineral ore of tin. Although it receives less attention than other critical minerals, tin is a key component in the coating of solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and solder used in a wide range of electronic products. In the first six months of 2024, the price of tin had risen by 29 per cent, with Brazil leading the way among the main exporting countries. Coltan, with over 200 sites mapped, represents the third entry on this list. Here too, it is a mineral of great value to the technology industry, as it is capable of optimising the consumption of electrical current in chips — the true constitutive atom of every digital device — allowing them to save energy. M23 derives significant revenue from the smuggling of natural resources such as cobalt and from taxing miners and road users through checkpoints in the region. At the same time, the Rwandan government has been accused of backing M23 in order to gain control of Congolese mineral resources, including gold and tin, as well as tantalum — also used in smartphone microchips — and tungsten, an extremely dense and hard material capable of withstanding very high temperatures, and therefore used in the production of anti-tank missiles.
In these mines, human rights violations are systematically perpetrated, yet they also serve as an economic and political lever for numerous armed groups, which, by controlling extraction and production, secure wealth and regional influence — and beyond. The stability and security of Africa thus remain inextricably tied to a ruthless competition for raw materials that is intensifying, even outpacing that for hydrocarbons. A competition that is not merely local, as evidenced both by the involvement of the Rwandan and Ugandan armies and by the converging interests of Beijing and Washington in the region.
It has been clear for years that China is seeking to extend its influence across Africa, deepening its international relationships through bilateral agreements based largely on an exchange of infrastructure for commercial access. According to the document "China and Africa in the new era: a partnership of equals", published by the State Council of the People's Republic in 2021, in the preceding 25 years Chinese companies helped African countries build or upgrade more than 10,000 kilometres of railways, nearly 100,000 kilometres of motorways, around 1,000 bridges, nearly 100 ports and 66,000 kilometres of power transmission and distribution networks. Furthermore, Chinese companies contributed to building an installed power generation capacity of 120 million kilowatts (kW), a communications backbone network of 150,000 kilometres and a network service covering nearly 700 million user terminals.
When it comes to the mining sector, relations between China and the DRC are extremely close. With regard to Congolese cobalt, China is today the largest foreign investor: it owns approximately 72 per cent of the country's active cobalt and copper mines, including the Tenke Fungurume mine, the fifth-largest copper mine in the world and the second-largest cobalt mine in the world. The Chinese group Cmoc Group Limited is the world's leading cobalt mining company. It could produce up to 70,000 tonnes, thanks to the Kisanfu mine acquired in the southern province of Lualaba. According to data from the International Energy Agency
