The agreement signed on June 27, 2025, between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda under U.S.A auspices is a step in the right direction toward peace. However, the urgency now lies in securing a ceasefire and a binding commitment from all warring parties.
This would not only reassure the Congolese people but also clearly outline each party’s responsibilities without illusions, and establish practical, well-known mechanisms for implementing the agreement.
Such a framework would help unify existing peace efforts from the ECCAS, SADC, AU, Doha, CENCO, ECC, and the U.S. True peace in the DRC and the Great Lakes region must revolve around the minerals leveraging them to uplift the socio-economic living standards of some of the world’s poorest populations.
This begins with the liberalization of the mineral trade, making Congolese resources accessible not just to the Congolese themselves but to the entire Great Lakes region, Africa, the EU, and the USA in exchange for a Marshall Plan aimed at rebuilding both rural and urban infrastructure in the DRC.
Such an approach could finally offer a sustainable solution to conflict: end armed groups through job creation, facilitate the flow of agricultural products, and eradicate hunger by allowing men and women to farm and flood the markets free from threats or displacement by militias.
This would reduce dependency on organizations like the WFP, FAO, and Action Against Hunger, which continue distributing food even in urban areas of this exceptionally fertile country, where people still take turns eating a disgrace in the 21st century.
Today, the EU and the U.S. spend enormous amounts tracking Congolese minerals resources they don’t help exploit for local benefit.
It often feels like their systems are designed to preserve poverty, when those same funds could instead rebuild Congo’s crumbling roads and public infrastructure.
Congolese people have the right to create wealth from the minerals buried in their ancestral lands without conditions, sanctions, restrictions, or directives from the EU or U.S.A targeting mining companies or job creators in the DRC and the region, especially when they pose no threat to national or international security.
Such interference increasingly resembles an embargo, unjustly denying Congolese their right to freely trade what nature and God gave them and to build wealth as a means to fight the poverty that fuels armed groups.
Other nations like Venezuela or Saudi Arabia sell their oil freely to improve their peoples’ livelihoods, without international meddling. Therefore, in addition to liberalizing the mineral trade, we call for the lifting of all sanctions, restrictions, costly compliance measures, and directives from the EU and U.S. on Congolese minerals.
In exchange for a DRC reconstruction plan, another crucial step would be financing regional integration projects across the Great Lakes countries.
This would foster real harmony and peace between communities because peace on paper is not the same as peace on the ground or peace in the hearts of people.
Finally, signing the agreement in the DRC or Rwanda would have sent a stronger symbolic message strengthening the ownership and emotional buy in of the people directly affected, and laying a firmer foundation for the agreement’s implementation.
Maître Joseph DUNIA
(Lawyer and former President of the North Kivu Bar Association, 2013–2016. Writer, civil society member, and member of the NGO PDH Promotion of Democracy and Human Rights, based in Goma)