The Mountain That Swallows Men.

The mountain did not collapse by accident. It failed predictably.

At the Rubaya mining complex in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the hillside known as Kasasa gave way once again in early March, burying more than 200 people beneath a slurry of mud, rock, and unregulated extraction. Local civil society groups now estimate the combined death toll from successive collapses in January and March may exceed 400 miners, many of them children.

“We were digging when we heard the sound, like thunder coming from inside the mountain,” said David Kasereka, an artisanal miner who survived. “The earth swallowed many people. There was no warning.”

There never is.

Rubaya is not a conventional mine. It is a sprawling, anarchic extraction zone, thousands of hand-dug shafts plunging deep into unstable earth, worked by men and boys earning as little as five dollars a day. There are no structural reinforcements, no safety systems, no emergency response mechanisms. Only risk.

“We know we can die,” said one miner, Michel, weeks before the January collapse. “But what else can we do?”

The answer, increasingly, is nothing.

Rubaya produces between 15 and 30% of the world’s coltan, the ore used to make tantalum, an essential component in smartphones, electric vehicles, and advanced military systems. What is extracted here feeds the global economy. What is lost here is human life.

Following the M23 rebel takeover of the area in 2024, backed, according to UN experts, by thousands of Rwandan troops, the mine became both an economic engine and a battlefield asset. Rebels tax production, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly while smuggling coltan across the border into Rwanda.

“Every phone, every battery, every drone, they are connected to places like Rubaya,” said a Congolese mining rights activist in Goma. “But the people here are treated as disposable.”

The Deal: Mineral Rights For Military Power.

On 4 December 2025, President Félix Tshisekedi signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement with the United States under Donald Trump’s administration, framed as a peace-building and economic development initiative.

In reality, critics argue, it is a minerals-for-security pact.

The agreement grants American firms preferential access to Congo’s critical mineral reserves, including coltan and cobalt, in exchange for military cooperation and security assistance aimed at stabilising the conflict-ridden east.

Trump himself dispensed with diplomatic language:

“We’re going to take out some of the rare earth and the assets… and everybody’s going to make a lot of money.”

But in Kinshasa, the deal is facing a constitutional crisis.

On 21 January 2026, Congolese lawyers and human rights defenders filed a petition arguing the agreement violates Article 214 of the constitution, which requires parliamentary approval, and possibly a referendum, for international agreements of this magnitude.

Maurice Carney, executive director of Friends of the Congo, warned:

“This agreement was never presented to parliament… yet it commits Congo to changes in fiscal policy, mining law, and potentially constitutional arrangements.”

Under its terms, Congo may even be required to report economic policy decisions to US representatives, effectively externalising elements of its sovereignty.

“There are serious questions,” Carney added, “about whether Congo is surrendering control over its own resources.”

War For Access: The Battle For Rubaya.

Within days of Rubaya being designated a strategic asset under the agreement, the Congolese army launched an offensive to reclaim it from M23 control.

The timing was not coincidental.

Backed by newly enhanced drone capabilities and reportedly supported by foreign military contractors, government forces struck rebel positions with unprecedented precision. One drone strike killed senior M23 figures, including spokesperson Willy Ngoma.

Security sources and regional analysts point to the involvement of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military firm Blackwater, who signed a deal with Kinshasa in 2025 to secure mining operations and curb smuggling.

By early 2026, Prince was reportedly recruiting contractors for deployment in eastern Congo.

“The militarisation of mining zones is accelerating,” said a regional security analyst in Nairobi. “This is no longer just a civil conflict; it is becoming a resource war shaped by global demand.”

M23 has responded in kind, deploying drones and launching counterattacks. Fighting has intensified around Rubaya and beyond, displacing civilians and expanding the conflict’s geographic scope.

The so-called peace agreement has not ended the war. It has restructured it around mineral control.

Corporate Extraction, Who Profits?

Behind the rhetoric of development lies a network of corporate and financial interests poised to benefit.

A February 2026 policy brief by Congolese civil society organisations identified a constellation of actors:

• KoBold Metals, backed by billionaires including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, is advancing lithium extraction projects
• Rio Tinto, in talks over major deposits despite a history of environmental destruction
• Glencore, previously convicted of corruption linked to its Congo operations
• Ivanhoe Mines, accused of forced evictions and labour abuses
• Investment groups tied to Trump allies, including Gentry Beach’s America First Global

Meanwhile, tech giants such as Tesla remain dependent on Congolese cobalt supply chains, long criticised for links to child labour.

The pattern is familiar.

“Resources leave. Profits leave. The people remain poor,” said a Congolese economist at the University of Kinshasa. “This is not development, it is extraction.”

Even as billions in investment are pledged, reportedly $3.8 billion through US financing mechanisms, there is little evidence of safeguards for labour rights, environmental protection, or community consent.

“No one asked the communities,” Maurice Carney noted. “There is no prior informed consent. That is a violation of international standards.”

Voices From The Ground:

Warnings came early and have gone largely unheeded.

Dr. Denis Mukwege, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, cautioned that the deal risked:

“Rewarding aggression, legitimising the plundering of Congolese resources, and forcing the victim to sacrifice justice for a fragile peace.”

A coalition of 80 Congolese organisations under MOSSAC rejected the agreement outright, calling it “hasty” and “ill-conceived,” warning it would entrench impunity and fail to benefit ordinary citizens.

Following the Rubaya collapse, Global Witness issued a stark statement:

“This tragedy is a reminder that minerals from this region carry a high risk of fuelling conflict and human rights abuses. Extraction must never come at the cost of human lives.”

On the ground, the anger is more direct.

“They fight for minerals, not for us,” said a displaced resident near Rubaya. “We are the ones who die.”

The New Scramble: US vs China.

Washington frames its intervention as a strategic necessity to counter China’s dominance in critical minerals.

China controls vast portions of global supply chains, particularly in processing and refining, and has invested heavily in Congo over the past two decades.

But critics argue the US approach differs less than it claims.

“China is ahead because it invested earlier,” said Carney. “The US is now trying to catch up, not by changing the system, but by inserting itself into it.”

Indeed, Chinese firms already control significant stakes in Congo’s mining sector. The US strategy, therefore, is not replacing Chinese influence but competing alongside it, often through joint ventures.

“The risk,” said a policy analyst in Brussels, “is that Congo becomes the battleground for a new geopolitical scramble, one that again ignores the people who live there.”

Collapse, Resistance, And Continuity:

Despite official declarations, the conflict is not subsiding.

M23 continues to hold territory. Congolese forces continue offensives. Civilians continue to flee. And miners continue to dig.

Even after the government declared Rubaya a “red zone,” extraction has not stopped.

Because it cannot.

“There is no alternative,” said a miner in North Kivu. “If we don’t dig, we don’t eat.”

The only interruption to production in recent months has come not from diplomacy, but from disaster.

The collapses that killed hundreds were not anomalies. They were the logical outcome of an unregulated, militarised extraction system driven by global demand.

Conclusion: Extraction Without End, Empire By Another Name.

What is unfolding in eastern Congo is not a peace process. It is a reconfiguration of power, one that fuses military force, corporate ambition, and geopolitical rivalry into a single extractive system.

The United States cannot legally “own” Congo’s minerals. But through this agreement, it has secured something arguably more powerful: preferential access backed by military influence.

Stripped of its diplomatic framing, this is not a partnership; it is leverage.

And its consequences are no longer theoretical. They are already visible:

• Intensified conflict around mineral-rich territories like Rubaya
• A growing constitutional crisis within Congo itself
• The expansion of foreign military and private security involvement
• Continued corporate impunity despite documented abuses
• And a rising death toll among the poorest workers, buried in the earth, they are forced to excavate

At the same time, the contradiction at the heart of the deal is becoming impossible to ignore. Even as the agreement invokes stabilisation and references international peacekeeping frameworks, the Trump administration has moved to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to UN peacekeeping missions, undermining the very mechanisms it claims to support.

This is not a coherent peace strategy. It is a fragmented, interest and corporate-driven intervention.

The United States has not entered the Congo to end the conflict. It has entered to manage and secure supply chains, to stabilise extraction, not society. Violence is not being eliminated; it is being reorganised around strategic assets.

More critically, Congolese civil society groups warn that the structure of the agreement risks locking the country into a form of economic dependency, where key fiscal, trade, and resource decisions are shaped, or constrained, by external actors. In this view, the deal does not simply open markets; it restructures them in ways that privilege foreign capital and geopolitical interests.

Some activists and analysts go further, arguing that the alignment of US strategic policy with networks of allied corporate and security actors risks entrenching a political and economic order that disproportionately benefits a narrow transnational elite, rather than the Congolese population. Whether framed as influence, alignment, or dominance, the concern is the same: that governance and resource control could increasingly serve external priorities over domestic needs.

The constitutional challenge in Kinshasa reflects this anxiety. A sovereign state, potentially bound to external oversight. A government negotiating access to national wealth without a transparent democratic mandate. A population excluded from decisions that will shape generations.

And on the ground, the reality remains unchanged.

Miners continue to descend into collapsing tunnels, fully aware of the risks, because the global economy has left them no alternative. Armed groups continue to fight, not simply for territory, but for control over the revenues that minerals generate. Foreign actors continue to intervene, not as neutral peace brokers, but as stakeholders in a militarised marketplace.

This is the critical truth:

The violence is not incidental to the system; it is functional and strategic to it.

Every collapsed shaft, every militia checkpoint, every displaced family is part of a supply chain that begins in places like Rubaya and ends in boardrooms, stock exchanges, and defence contracts far beyond Congo’s borders. The minerals extracted from beneath the dead will still move, through traders, through refiners, into the technologies that power modern life.

There is no rupture in this system, only continuity.

Even the framing of a US–China rivalry obscures the deeper reality. What is described as competition is, in practice, convergence: rival powers pursuing the same resources, through the same extractive logic, with similarly limited accountability to the people who live above them. Congo is not being developed. It is being contested.

And the cost of that contest is counted in bodies.

At its core, the deal raises a fundamental question:

Who is security for?

• It is not for the miners buried beneath Rubaya.
• It is not for the communities displaced by fighting.
• It is not for the families who continue to risk everything for five dollars a day.
• Contrary to what might be expected, the security militias are not deployed with the intention of ensuring the safety of the residents or advocating for their welfare.

Instead, as one Congolese activist put it:

“This deal is not about peace. It is about power, and who controls the resources that the world depends on.”

The miners of Rubaya are not beneficiaries of this arrangement. They are its foundation, unpaid, unprotected, and, when necessary, expendable. Their deaths are not anomalies; they are predictable outcomes of a system designed to prioritise access over accountability.

The most damning truth is not that this deal has failed to deliver peace.

It is that peace was never its primary function.

In Washington, investors prepare for returns.

In Rubaya, the digging continues.

And the mountain, as ever, waits.

Source: Multiple News Agencies