After Ukraine deal, US turns its critical minerals gaze to Africa | The political momentum is building towards a potential peace deal between Congo and Rwanda as soon as this month, to be accompanied by bilateral minerals deals between both countries and the United States
Posted by ONETRILLIONAMERICANS
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# Big picture
>Away from the headlines around the minerals deal with Ukraine, the United States has pursued a potentially even more significant critical metals deal in the Great Lakes region of Africa.
>The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo reached out to the Donald Trump administration with a Ukrainian-style proposal in February in response to the rapid advance of the Rwandan-backed M23 rebel group in the east of the country,
>The political momentum is building towards a potential peace deal between Congo and Rwanda as soon as May, to be accompanied by bilateral minerals deals between both countries and the United States.
>At stake are the mineral riches of North and South Kivu provinces, a major but highly problematic source of metals such as tin, tungsten and coltan.
# Deets
>Researchers from The International Peace Information Service have mapped over 2,800 sites in eastern Congo since 2009 and collected information from 829 active sites that it estimated employed some 132,000 miners between 2021 and 2023. Of the sites surveyed, 85% were mining gold and most of the rest digging for the 3T minerals – tin, tungsten and tantalum, the latter occurring as coltan ore.
>The IPIS estimates that 61% of miners at these sites were affected by “armed interference”, defined as coercive rent-taking, from one of the many armed groups operating in the region, not least the Congolese army.
>The M23 rebels themselves are involved in the minerals trade. Artisanal producers of coltan in the town of Rubaya pay a 15% tax to the group, Reuters journalists found on a visit to rebel-controlled areas.
>Congo is also one of the world’s richest sources of copper and cobalt, which are produced far away from the Great Lakes region in the southern province of Katanga.
>This part of Congo’s mineral wealth is largely controlled by Chinese operators, which ship both raw materials and finished metal back to China.
!ping COMMODITIES&AFRICA&FOREIGN-POLICY
Is it neo-colonialism? Probably a little, but I think it’s also probably the best realistic outcome for all 3 parties.
Luckily the EU would never sign such an agreement with Rwanda for example, hahahaha right?
I would love a peace deal in the region.
*However,* I do not believe that the utterly hollowed-out state department, intelligence community, and trade/development agencies—to say nothing of the grander rapidly-shittifying diplomatic/economic/military heft of the US—are capable of helping these two hold it together at all. This region has been at war for *how* long so far?
Charlatans and grifters, thieves and pillagers, come to the proverbial goldmine of Africa—the most infamously brutally colonized portion of Africa at that—and are poised to brazenly colonize it all over again. I hope they don’t, but I can’t fool myself into being too optimistic.