In recent years, more people around the world have begun to encounter images of Congo’s suffering on their phones: a child emerging from a cobalt mine, a collapsed tunnel, families fleeing violence. Viral clips of displaced communities and reports of mass killings circulate across our screens. Yet even as this visibility grows, what remains almost entirely invisible is the full scale of the crisis and the direct connection between that violence and the very devices through which we witness it.

Congo’s devastation is not a local failure, but the logical outcome of a global economic system that profits from extraction, militarization, and silence. The world may be watching Congo more than before, but it still refuses to see itself in the story.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), located at the heart of Africa, is the continent’s second-largest country and among the richest in natural resources. Yet for decades its people have endured relentless violence, mass displacement, poverty, and environmental devastation. Since colonial rule, Congo’s mineral wealth has been systematically exploited by foreign powers and corporate interests, with independence reshaping—but never dismantling—these extractive structures. Today’s crisis is therefore the continuation of a long history of plunder. Resource extraction for global markets remains a central driver of instability, drawing local, regional, and international actors into competition over control. More than 100 armed groups now operate in eastern Congo, many financed through illegal mineral trade, turning the country’s immense wealth into a weapon against its own people.

The current crisis

The contradiction between technological progress and human devastation is not incidental. It defines the present crisis in the DRC. Currently, the DRC provides the world with many natural resources, such as copper, cobalt, coltan, lithium, gold, and diamonds, many of which are used in electronics, electric vehicles, batteries, and green-energy technologies. AI data centers are increasing demand for cobalt and other minerals even more. Controlling these resources is therefore crucial: the DRC holds 70% of the world’s coltan reserves and over 50% of cobalt, meaning whoever dominates Congo dominates the future of technology.

Rather than delivering prosperity, Congo’s extraordinary mineral wealth has produced a “resource curse.” Competition for coltan, cobalt, gold, and diamonds drives violent conflict, forcing miners, often children, into brutal, unsafe conditions while forests are cleared and rivers contaminated in the scramble for profit. In November 2025, dozens were killed when a bridge at a mine collapsed, a tragedy that illustrates how extraction proceeds with total disregard for human life. Because the richest deposits lie in the eastern provinces, these territories have become the epicentre of militarization, where armed groups, militias, and even state forces battle for control while communities are displaced and terrorized.

The environmental destruction deepens the crisis: forests are cleared to reach mineral deposits, mining releases vast amounts of carbon and nitrogen dioxide, and toxic mining waste poisons rivers and lakes, wiping out agriculture and fishing, the very means by which people survive.

The humanitarian consequences are catastrophic. By 2025, there are over 6.9 million people internally displaced, the highest number in Africa, 1.2 million refugees in neighbouring countries, and 28 million people suffering from malnutrition. Furthermore, more than 3 million people in eastern Congo are in the emergency phase of hunger. Children as young as five work in dangerous artisanal mines, digging by hand, inhaling toxic dust and risking suffocation or burial in tunnel collapses. Conflict-related sexual violence affects thousands, with almost 40% of sexual violence survivors being children. Armed groups are committing gang rapes, abductions, attacks on hospitals, and unlawful detentions, abuses that may constitute war crimes. This is not simply a story of conflict happening near minerals; it is a system in which minerals fund the conflict, and conflict makes the minerals easier to steal.

Global Complicity

To understand why this violence persists, it is necessary to look beyond Congo’s borders. What unfolds in the DRC is not merely a local or regional conflict, but a transnational project sustained by states, corporations, and markets far beyond its borders.

Regional Involvement: Neighbouring countries remain central players in the ongoing conflict in eastern DRC, driving both strategic military interventions and illegal resource extraction. According to a 2025 report from UN experts, Rwanda exerts “de facto direction and effective control” over the armed group M23. The recruits are trained under Rwandan supervision and supported by high-tech Rwandan weaponry, rendering the Rwandan state liable for the group’s actions, including territorial seizure and mineral looting. Interestingly, Rwanda is often presented as the supplier of minerals while having very few reserves of its own. Many reports show that minerals, especially coltan and other critical resources, are frequently smuggled into Rwanda, laundered into upstream supply chains, and re-exported as “Rwandan” origin.

Moreover, Uganda has leveraged cross-border smuggling networks to profit from gold and other minerals, often entwined with militia trafficking routes. UN experts state Uganda has also supplied weapons, hosted rebel leaders and allowed cross-border movements of M23 fighters. Moreover, the Ugandan-led Allied Democratic Forces, killed at least 40 people, most of them hacked to death, at a funeral ceremony in September. This is just a small sample of what has recently been documented.

Burundi is involved in a similar way. A UN report demonstrates that gold was also being smuggled from the DRC to Burundi. Moreover, the Burundi National Defense Force was also deployed into the DRC even though it was denied by the DRC military headquarters. A different UN report also warned that Burundi’s military was involved with the Congolese army fighting against the M23 and Rwandan soldiers, exacerbating regional tensions.

Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi have all turned Congo’s minerals into cash, and in doing so, turned its borders into corridors of violence.

Israel and the diamond industry: external actors beyond Africa also profit from Congolese exploitation. Israel has one of the largest diamond industries in the world, despite having no domestic reserves. Its polishing sector relies heavily on rough diamonds from African countries like the DRC. The profits of the extraction of these diamonds directly enable the occupation and genocide in Palestine since they finance for example drones, bomb and spyware used on Palestinians. In this sense, the profits from Congolese resources become entangled in wider structures of occupation and repression.

Israeli-linked businessmen have played a significant role in this sector, most notably Dan Gertler, who secured extensive mining and diamond concessions in the DRC through what U.S. sanctions describe as “hundreds of millions of dollars” in corruption and political bribery, depriving the Congolese state of over $1.36 billion in public revenue. Israel’s longstanding reliance on African rough diamonds and its economic partnerships, especially through the UAE which is now the world’s largest rough-diamond trading hub, create financial links between the exploitation of the Congo and the occupation of Palestine. Moreover, what appear to be Israeli-made arms have been found among multiple armed groups in the DRC.

Western complicity: Western governments and international financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank also sustain structures that enable resource exploitation. Through trade deals, investment guarantees, security cooperation, and aid packages, they stabilize extractive regimes. Trade deals and arms sales concentrate wealth in the Global North while distributing death in the Global South. Policies framed as “good governance” often become neoliberal reforms, dismantling public services and opening local markets to foreign extraction.

Moreover, the EU has a mineral deal with Rwanda, and are therefore knowingly allowing Rwanda and the M23 to benefit from illegally exploiting minerals in the DRC. The EU and its member states also sell arms to Rwanda, which may end up aiding Rwanda’s military operations in the Congo making the EU complicit.

The U.S.-brokered “peace deal” in June 2025 between DRC and Rwanda is a mineral deal first, and a possible opportunity for peace second. Again, prioritizing profit over the lives of millions of Congolese.

Multinational corporations: local and regional armed groups would not operate in the DRC without access to international markets. Multinational corporations and global markets supply goods and services, provide market outlets, pay taxes, licensing fees, and “protection” payments providing rebels and warlords with the money to sustain the violence. Corporations have treated militia-held territories as de facto sovereign states, using local commanders as conduits for illicit trade, undermining Congolese sovereignty while strengthening the rebels’ grip on territory.

Global Witness reports that European commodities trader Traxys purchased hundreds of tonnes of coltan in 2024 traced to conflict-controlled mines in eastern Congo, funneled through Rwanda’s smuggling networks. These corporate arrangements, contracts, deals, logistical support, and export channels, serve to finance and entrench the very actors driving violence. Because so many companies operate in the DRC, embedded in vast and deliberately opaque global supply chains, it is nearly impossible to map every link in the chain. Yet the effect is unmistakable: corporations make war profitable while hiding behind opacity, providing the capital, markets, and infrastructure that allow armed groups to continue extracting, killing, and ruling.

End consumers: at the final end of this global chain sit millions of consumers whose everyday purchases link them, however inadvertently, to Congolese suffering. Smartphones, laptops, electric vehicles, solar panels, and aerospace technologies all rely on cobalt, coltan, tin, and gold, minerals extracted in eastern Congo under conditions of extreme violence. These consumers, often unaware of the origins of raw materials, become participants in a system where human rights abuses, environmental degradation, forced labour, and mass violence are embedded in globalized supply chains.

When society celebrates the latest tech innovations or clean-energy breakthroughs, it often overlooks the grim reality behind the materials that make them possible. Unless there is serious demand for transparency, ethical sourcing, and supply-chain accountability, consumption in the Global North will continue to perpetuate and profit from the suffering of communities in the Global South.

Beyond Congo: A Global Pattern

The Congo is not an isolated case. Every nation suffering extreme conflict or genocide possesses resources coveted by the Global North: Congo has cobalt and coltan, Gaza has offshore gas reserves, Sudan has gold and oil, West Papua has copper and crude oil. These conflicts are not isolated “ethnic” struggles, despite how Western media often likes to portray them. They are direct expressions structural violence of global capitalism, which constantly needs to expand, exploit, and destroy to maintain profit.

The crises in the DRC, Sudan, and Palestine are therefore part of a shared global system, not separate tragedies. In all cases, the lives of people in the Global South are subordinated to the profitability of capital in the Global North. Borders, weapons, and sanctions function as tools that protect wealth while distributing death. Although the European Union and the United States present themselves as defenders of democracy and human rights, they remain deeply complicit in ongoing genocides and mass atrocities: financing authoritarian regimes, selling weapons, signing extractive contracts, and enforcing migration policies that punish the very victims of the violence they help produce. New regional powers, including Gulf states, operate as emerging imperialist powers, buying governments and militias to secure access to resources, while institutions like the IMF and World Bank impose neoliberal reforms and reinforce poverty and inequality. Together, these forces form a global machinery of domination that transforms the suffering of millions of people into the engine of capitalist accumulation.

From Congo to Gaza, Sudan to West Papua, the same logic of resource-driven exploitation and violence prevails — a world order in which entire peoples are sacrificed so corporations and states can gorge on what lies beneath their land.

The DRC’s crisis is thus not a distant tragedy but a central pillar of the modern global economy. The minerals extracted through violence, child labour, and ecological destruction power the technologies and green-energy transitions celebrated as progress in the Global North. This system did not end with colonialism; it evolved into a global network of states, corporations, and markets that continue to treat Congolese lives as expendable.

And the cruellest irony is this: many of us will finish reading about Congo’s horrors on the very devices built from the minerals that sustain those horrors. We watch the suffering of Congolese people through screens powered by their exploitation.

Until this contradiction is confronted, until people are placed before profit, nothing will change. Congo will remain the hidden foundation of a global system that calls itself progress, while millions continue to pay for that progress with their lives.

The post Global Complicity: Who Kills in the Congo? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Laura Wittebroek.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.