EU under pressure to freeze its controversial minerals deal with Rwanda over involvement in DRC conflict

Belgium is leading the calls for the suspension of an EU’s controversial minerals deal with Kigali after Rwanda-backed rebels captured the city of Goma last week amid the escalating decade-long conflict in the volatile eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Diplomatic sources say the European Union is under mounting pressure to freeze the wide-ranging 2024 minerals deal with Rwanda that is now widely blamed for fueling the conflict. Belgium’s foreign minister Bernard Quintin said recently that he had urged his European counterparts to take action. “We have levers and we have to decide how to use them,” he told reporters, referring to the deal intended to secure the flow of critical raw materials for Europe’s microchips and electric car batteries. Belgium, the former colonial power in Rwanda and the DRC, has already tabled the suspension of the EU minerals agreement, Euronews has reported.
The EU executive must send a “clear message” to Rwandan president Paul Kagame by suspending its agreement until “Rwanda proves it is ceasing its interference,” Hilde Vautmans, the chair of the European Parliament’s Africa delegation, said. The ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ that Brussels and Kigali signed in February 2024 was hailed as a key step in ensuring a “sustainable supply of raw materials” for the bloc, in exchange for providing the necessary funding to develop Rwanda’s mineral supply chains and infrastructure. But critics now say the deal is enabling ‘conflict minerals’ to enter global and European supply chains, generating funds to help finance the armed groups responsible for the escalating conflict in DRC’s resource-rich east.