Host: Ezgi Toper
Guests: Grace Kuria Kanja, Christian Fazili Miyo

Producer: Ezgi Toper
Craft Editor: Nasrullah Yilmaz
Supervising Editor: Burak Bayram
Production Team: Afzal Ahmed, Mucteba Samil Olmez, Khaled Selim
Executive Producer: Nasra Omar Bwana

Transcript

GRACE: In most places around the world, around the globe, where there are conflicts, it stems from the minerals. Most of the times because there is competition within and without for these minerals. So, minerals is one of the things that has led to this conflict that has spanned for decades.

EZGI: You’re listening to “In The Newsroom”, a TRT Global Podcasts Production. My name is Ezgi Toper, and in this show, I take you around our newsroom as I chat with my colleagues and go beyond the headlines.

Nearly seven million people have died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1996, that’s according to the International Rescue Committee (IRC). It’s one of the deadliest conflicts since World War II but it’s a war that many rarely hear about. And today, it’s also the scene of one of the world’s biggest displacement crises, with nearly eight million people forced from their homes.

The DRC is facing a perfect storm of health disasters. It’s battling cholera and measles outbreaks, deadly new strains of malaria, the flu and it's now the global epicentre of the Mpox virus. On top of that, nearly 30 million people are going hungry and close to five million children under five years old are malnourished, according to the WFP. 

But despite these concerning figures, human rights defender Christian Fazili Miyo tells us, the world just isn’t paying attention

FAZILI: As someone from the eastern DRC, I may say that the conflict in the DRC receives dramatically less media attention and diplomatic agents than Gaza or Ukraine despite the similar or the worst humanitarian metrics. We can say for instance, there is no high level sanction on aggressors, there is minimal coverage in international outlets, there are rare statements made from Western leaders, and this reflects a troubling hierarchy of empathy and visibility in international diplomacy. 

EZGI: Fazili was born and raised in Goma city in eastern DRC, which he says is currently under the occupation of the M23 rebels. He is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Goma. He reminds us that while the conflict in DRC is often labelled and reduced down to a “civil” or “tribal war”, it’s actually much more complex. It’s a multinational battle over land, minerals and influence. 

FAZILI: So, people think that this is a conflict with the ethnicity of minority, while we know that it's economic. Especially the economic reason why the DRC government has been advocating for the recognition of “genocost” because it seems that the real conflict is not a tribe conflict but economic conflict. The DRC, as I stated, failed to ignore the role of external actors and multinational cooperation.

We also have regional actors including Rwanda, which has been accused of supporting M23, Uganda, Burundi, and the regional bloc like the East African Community (EAC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC). We also have international stakeholders including the United States, the European Union, China, and multinational cooperation with the stakes in mining.

EZGI: So, while local lives are lost, global profits are made. To expand more on this, I spoke to Grace Kuria Kanja, senior producer and news anchor at TRT World. We discuss how the conflict in the DRC is not a failed state story, it’s a success story for extractive global capitalism.

GRACE: The conflict is on the eastern side, which actually happens to be the part of the country where there's so many minerals because Africa in itself is rich. I mean we hold about 30 percent of the world's mineral reserves. DRC for instance holds 70 percent of the global production of cobalt. DRC is rich in minerals. It has gold. It has cobalt. It has coltan. It has tin. It has tungsten, it has tantalum. We're gonna talk about this when we get deeper into this but my observation, and not just in the DRC, but in most places around the world, around the globe, where there are conflicts, is it stems from the minerals. Most of the times because there is competition within and without these minerals.

EZGI: Who are the key players involved in this conflict?

GRACE: Of course we have the M23. We have the Congolese forces themselves. We have the FDLR, which is very important. That's the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, and inevitably we have Rwanda itself. We have to go back to the 1994, when the genocide against the Tutsis happened in Rwanda. So, this genocide was perpetrated by the Hutus.

EZGI: To understand who is fighting who in the DRC, Grace takes us back to 1994 Rwanda. In just 100 days, an estimated 800,000 to 1 million people were killed – these were mostly a minority ethnicity in Rwanda called the Tutsis. The genocide against the Tutsis was the result of decades of ethnic tensions between them and the ethnic majority the Hutus. Extremist Hutus carried out the genocide against the Tutsis. But it ended when a Tutsi-rebel group led by Paul Kagame seized power.

Afterwards, Kagame became president of Rwanda, and still is today. In the aftermath of the genocide, over 2 million Hutus fled to neighbouring countries like the DRC, sparking “Africa’s World Wars” as Grace explains.

GRACE: It led to what we or people call the African World Wars because perhaps many people do not know that, but we did have a form of world wars on the continent. We had the first Congo War in 1996 that happened when Rwandan-led forces invaded the eastern DRC, arguing that the Hutu militia who were responsible for the genocide in Rwanda against the Tutsis were regrouping in Congo. So that sparked the first Congo war with Rwandan allies, such as Uganda, Eritrea, Angola, Burundi — all entering the conflict.

And then we had the Second Congo war that happened in 1998 when then DRC President Joseph Kabila fell out with Rwanda's Paul Kagame. Kabila started to force out Rwandan troops from the DRC, so that's basically the history of it, but what people know now, or what people relate to now, is the M23 rebels who've been fighting for years.

EZGI: The M23 is one of the most prominent armed groups in the DRC today. They were formed in April 2012 by former members of a Tutsi-dominated rebel group. Their name comes from a peace agreement signed on March 23, 2009, that they say was never honoured. They’ve been fighting the Congolese army for decades, allegedly defending the rights of marginalised Tutsi communities. 

In late 2013, it was declared that the group was militarily defeated by the Congolese army, and many of its leaders fled to Uganda and Rwanda. But it re-emerged in late 2021 with a renewed insurgency. Their attacks escalated significantly through 2022 to 2025 – with major advances this year.

GRACE: And they've been seizing ground, seizing some cities in the DRC, and all along they've had to withdraw because of international intervention and all of that. Now, we saw what happened in this year, 2025, when they seized Goma and they went ahead to seize Bukavu and at some point it looked like they're actually in control of eastern DRC.

EZGI: There are a lot of allegations that Rwanda backs the M23 and that is also part of their involvement in this. I was hoping you could kind of elaborate on that link for us as well.

GRACE: Rwanda has always denied that it backs the M23. The media would say that Rwanda backs M23 because according to the United Nations group of experts, there is evidence. And actually this evidence did not start right now in 2025-2024. It goes back to 2002. A 44 page UN report showed that indeed there is a presence of Rwandan troops in the DRC and that Rwanda is actually backing the M23 rebels – again this is a UN group of experts report. They back this up by showing evidence in terms of satellite images, pictures that show the Rwandan troops in the DRC. They say that they back them in terms of finances and weapons and all of that. I actually had an interview with the Rwandan Foreign Minister at the Antalya Diplomacy Forum, and I asked him this question, and he said, no, we are not in the DRC and we are not supporting the M23.

EZGI: The UN, US, UK, and France have all accused Rwanda of backing M23 with troops and resources. But Rwanda says it’s only defending its borders from the FDLR, a Hutu militia linked to the 1994 genocide.

GRACE: After the genocide, so many people fled Rwanda to neighboring countries. So many civilians. Among them, the Hutu militias who perpetrated the genocide against the Tutsis. Now when they went to the DRC, they regrouped and thus formed the FDLR. Now this is actually Rwanda's problem because most of the time if you listen to Paul Kagame, Rwandan president, he would always say that in order to address this conflict, we have to look at the root, the key cause of this conflict, which to him is why are the FDLR, why are they still in existence in DRC. And so this group is also part of the key players.

EZGI: How have the people of the DRC been affected by this conflict? How are they shaping their lives accordingly? I mean, it's been decades for them.

GRACE: They have been greatly affected. I mean, the world's largest displacement crisis is Sudan, but the DRC is also home to one of the largest populations of displaced people in the world. Between November 2024 and January 2025 alone, that's like how many months, 3 months, 780,000 people were displaced. That's UN statistics.

EZGI: That’s crazy.

GRACE: Of course, they've fled to neighbouring countries, Burundi, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania. There's also the issue of food insecurity. Because again, according to IPC, that's the integrated food security phase, about 25.6 million people, that's nearly a quarter of the population was pushed into acute food insecurity. So you can see the consequences of this war, the consequences of people not agreeing, not shaking hands and actually implementing.

Unfortunately, when these things happen, women and children are usually the most affected ones. So it broke my heart to see women crossing a river called Ruzizi to Burundi, and some of them did not make it. And so, you're fleeing conflict, you're hungry, you've trekked for God knows how many kilometres, and then you don't make it crossing a river. That's terrible, and you don't even know where you're going on the other side in Burundi, which opened its doors for these refugees from the DRC.

So basically, these people are suffering. They've been suffering for decades. We need to see these people go back to their homes at the end of the day, what these people want is peace, so. Whoever the blame lies on, whether it's the M23, whether it's the FDLR, whether it's the Congolese forces, whether it's Rwanda, at the end of the day, what these people want is peace. What these people want is an environment that's conducive for them to grow, an environment that's conducive for their children to go to school, that's conducive for them to reach their goals and their dreams and their aspirations.

EZGI: On June 27, Rwanda and the DRC signed a peace deal in Washington. Then on July 19, the DRC and M23 rebels agreed to a ceasefire and more talks in Doha, in what's known as the Doha Declaration. But attempts to broker peace in the region are not new. There’s a long history of regional and international efforts. Before the current deals brokered in the US and Qatar, Grace explains what’s been tried before, and why those efforts have largely failed.

GRACE: So, we had the Lusaka Agreement that was made between six main countries that's the DRC Rwanda again, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia to end hostilities within the DRC in 2000, the United Nations established MONUSCO in the DRC because that was triggered to monitor the peace or this a form of stabilisation mission in the DRC to monitor the peace process after that agreement was made, the Lusaka Agreement. In 2002, again, the DRC and Rwanda signed a peace deal that was between then DRC President Joseph Kabila and current president Paul Kagame. The deal was signed in South Africa and Rwanda agreed to withdraw its troops from the DRC and Kabila agreed to disarm the Hutu fighters in the region.

So I mean, we've had talks, we've had agreements, but we've never really had substance, material substance to help the people again because we're talking about the people here. We've had several processes launched on the African continent. We had the Nairobi process that was launched in April 2022. That's in Nairobi, Kenya, of course. We have the Luanda process that's in Angola that was relaunched in early 2024. Matter of fact, a permanent ceasefire had been agreed between the two countries, DRC and Rwanda, last year July 30, 2024. But it was broken almost immediately after, so we've had the EAC, that's the East African Community, and the SADC also leading peace talks.

These ones are actually still on to date even now as I speak and in fact even after the Washington agreement was signed in July we did have the DRC and the M23 themselves sign a ceasefire deal in Doha and then of course we have the most recent one: the Washington agreement brokered by the US. But again it's minerals for peace, sort of like deal because well we are facilitating peace in your countries or country but then we need our fair share because I mean we all know Donald Trump, US president, his America first policy, nothing goes for free with him and so it's a give and take. Give us your minerals and then we're going to support you to make peace and critics have poked holes into this peace deal because Trump definitely says this is a step towards peace but people see it as a race, as a global competition, as always between the United States and China because it's important to mention that in 2008 China did sign a minerals for infrastructure deal with the DRC. That definitely means China does the infrastructure job in the DRC and gets minerals in return. But this is now competition between the two. So you signed yours in 2008 and I signed mine in 2025 and we see where it takes us.

EZGI: As Grace points out, the deal signed in Washington has an economic dimension. So much so that the Human Rights Watch labelled it a “minerals deal first, and a peace deal second.” It potentially grants the US lucrative access to the region's mineral wealth. While the conflict rages, the DRC has accused Rwanda and M23 of looting resources like gold and coltan. And the UN also says the M23 exports 120 tonnes of coltan to Rwanda every four weeks.

GRACE: Definitely this is an attraction for Western investment to a region that's reaching all the mineral sources that I mentioned tantalum gold cobalt, copper so definitely this helps the DRC itself and in fact there's a time where Rwanda is also separately pursuing a minerals deal with the United States. So at the end of the day, I mean these agreements, these deals are good for the countries as well. The DRC being rich should be able to benefit from its own minerals. I hate to say this but it’s one of the poorest nations on the continent and that shouldn’t be the case. You can’t have gold beneath your surface, you can’t have reserves – these reserves that I’m talking about – and you’re poor. Anytime we’re talking about the genesis of this conflict, we’re going to go back to Rwanda, the genocide against the Tutsis. But this conversation about these minerals needs to happen and the conflict minerals and the blood minerals and all of that. I'm gonna quote President Felix Sakadi – if I could actually just read that out – he said these minerals are obtained by using violence against our populations, forcing them to leave the areas where these minerals are found.

The DRC Minister of Foreign Affairs Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, before the agreement, said that the introduction of an embargo on Rwanda's illicit exploitation and exploitation of mineral resources resources in the DRC will stem. The financing of this aggression we have Rwandan president himself, Paul Kagame, who some time back, he said that some people come from Congo where they smuggle or go through the right channels. They bring the minerals, most of it goes through here, that's Rwanda, but does not stay here. Then he mentioned the countries where these minerals go. 

KAGAME: But most of it goes through here. It does not stay here. It goes to Dubai, it goes to Brussels, it goes to Tel Aviv, it goes to Russia. It goes everywhere. So I was asking you: are you on the list of those who are stealing minerals from the Congo? Because these things they end up with you.

GRACE: So are you on the list of those who are stealing minerals from Congo? Are you part of those people that are perpetrating this conflict? And you know what, perhaps the phone you're using, the jewelry you're wearing right now, it's probably from Congo, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC did file criminal complaints against tech giant Apple subsidiaries in France and Belgium over the use of conflict minerals. And so, basically they accused the company of using deceptive commercial practices to assure consumers that the tech giant supply chains are clean. And so, of course, Apple did come and defend itself and at some point posted the usage of these resources to sort of like create the supplies.

EZGI: Mhm. You touched on a very good point there because it's easy to feel distant to a conflict that's far away, that you're not as informed about, but putting it in that sense makes it very real to see how people all over the world could be connected to this conflict, unknowingly contributing to the continuation of it. That also brings me to another point. Currently, we have conflicts in Gaza, in Sudan, in Ukraine. I mean, there is so much dominating media attention. How would you compare the media attention that DRC has been getting with these conflicts and also the diplomatic response?

GRACE: The media in general, a lot more needs to be done. Seeing these things on TV, on television, on social media, they evoke these emotions and they are a call to action. And so imagine what would happen if we had more stories of what's happening in the DRC, of what's happening in Sudan, and it's not just that. The Sahel region also as well, on the African continent, which is rarely spoken about, and if it happens it's usually one day, two days, and then we forget about it. 

EZGI: Something that's been interesting that we've observed in the news right now is that even as this conflict is continuing, the DRC has just recently signed a football partnership with Barcelona. So there was a bit of a buzz about this. I mean, what do you think this move signals?

GRACE: This is a strategy to reposition DRC as a leader in tourism and investment opportunities and well, that does happen because if we could talk about Rwanda a bit. I mean we all know they have that partnership with Arsenal since 2018. And anytime Arsenal is playing, we'll see their shirts it says “visit Rwanda.” I mean, so definitely anyone and everyone will want to visit Rwanda. And of course DRC again says it will boost tourism in the country but it's faced criticism as you would expect because people are questioning the timing of this and the priority. At a time when people have been displaced, at a time when these monies could have been used for other uses, for other purposes rather. There's a line I picked in my research that talks about DRC's own football league being plagued by chronic underfunding for years and so again priorities. The DRC says it's going to help raise the profile of the country. You know, make sure your people are well, make sure your people are fed, they have everything, the basic needs and beyond the basic needs.

EZGI: Looking forward now, what are some key developments that we should keep our eyes peeled for?

GRACE: Quite some semblance of progress has been made, yeah. But what to look out for, what to watch out for is the implementation, like I've been saying. Because it's useless to have agreements on paper, it's useless to see people shaking hands. We have seen many hands shaken over the years, not just in DRC, but across the continent, across the globe. But at the end of the day it's about the implementation of what was agreed on and perhaps a handshake between Felix Shiakedi, Rhondda I mean DRC president and Rwandan President Paul Kagame, because what we've seen thus far is the foreign ministers from both countries. I mean they're the ones who signed the Washington agreement deal, of course with the blessings of their presidents, but it would be more meaningful. Because visuals have a way of speaking to us and and cementing that confidence. So it would be great if we saw the two leaders agree, you know, permanent peace and a permanent solution for all of this.

EZGI: Thank you so much for joining us on the show and for your insights.

GRACE: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

EZGI: The eastern DRC has faced a conflict for over 30 years but so much of what we hear about it is framed as tribal and internal. But as we’ve discussed today, this is a global battle fuelled by competition over rich mineral resources used in our phones, our cars, our tech.

But this story isn’t just about a country in crisis. It’s about the price of minerals and the cost of silence. As Grace reminds us, what the people of the DRC are asking for is not another piece of paper. They’re asking for peace that lasts.

Thanks for tuning in. Until next time, I’m Ezgi Toper, and this was “In the Newsroom”.