From Leopold to Lumumba to "Blood Minerals": The Place of DR Congo in Global Human Rights Discourses
- Human Rights Research Center
- 4 days ago
- 12 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Author: Thomas Shacklock
April 11, 2025
For decades, the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have endured some of the most serious and neglected human rights abuses in the world. While the plight of Congolese people features in some human rights discourses, its complex crises are often misunderstood by the outside world. Common social media posts and certain human rights campaigns have included phrases such as “Free Congo” along with “Free Sudan” and “Free Palestine”, representing attempts to group these causes together as interrelated struggles against neocolonialism, imperialism, and capitalist exploitation. While human rights abuses in these contexts are sustained by the roles of powerful outside actors, such posts and campaigns can be considered simplistic. Instead, it is crucial to understand the specific local and national dynamics of each context. This article demonstrates that, while popular narratives highlight the severity of human rights crises in DRC, they often oversimplify these crises by reducing them to fit a global perspective while overlooking certain human rights abuses.
The “conflict minerals” and “blood minerals” lens
Today, human rights abuses in the DRC often include violence and conflicts linked to resource extraction. The main actors responsible for these conflicts include numerous militias that control mining areas or profit from taxing or trading minerals in a context of poor governance in eastern DRC. From the early 2000s, international activists started applying the term “conflict minerals” to the extraction of minerals said to fuel conflict in DRC. These resources have included gold and the “three Ts” (tin, tantalum, and tungsten), which have also earned the label “blood minerals” and have been in high demand for the global production of technological products. Conflict in this region has, directly or indirectly, resulted in as many as 6 million deaths since the Congo Wars (1996-2003), though this number has been contested. Hence, certain media sources, campaigns, and social media posts reinforce a single narrative in line with some Congolese activists: the DRC is facing a silent genocide fueled by militias, international companies, and global powers extracting resources.
Though this narrative does not determine that the actors involved overall possess genocidal intent, it encapsulates a constellation of serious human rights crises implicating various actors with differing agendas. Nevertheless, this narrative is not supported by rigorous analysis and demonstrates a major misunderstanding of the different crises in DRC. Discourses often conflate conflict-linked minerals with other minerals like cobalt, which is needed for electric cars and batteries to support the global transition to a “green economy”. Cobalt is connected to separate human rights abuses, including forced evictions, dangerous working conditions, environmental destruction, and child labor. However, it is mainly found in the southeastern Copperbelt area of the former Katanga province, which has not recently been affected by major conflicts, despite some tensions and violent atrocities in parts of the region. Either way, discourses highlighting these issues reflect an attempt to evoke sympathy for Congolese victims while demonstrating the risk of misinformation created by underreporting. Moreover, such discourses also frame the DRC as an epicenter of the tension between human rights and existing approaches to the green economy transition.
The “blood minerals” label has notably been associated with the Rwandan-backed M23 insurgency (March 23 Movement), which has transferred resources to Rwanda to then be sold internationally. Rwanda’s historical interventions in DRC have particularly created anger among the Congolese people. Meanwhile, one notable businessman who has gained financially from mining in the DRC is an Israeli billionaire accused of corruption, while Chinese companies dominate the country’s cobalt mines. The exploitation of Congolese people can be framed to fit political or media narratives that focus on critiquing states like China, Israel, or Rwanda as well as any multinational organizations involved. However, these framings insufficiently address the structural factors enabling various actors to harm Congolese civilians.
“Conflict minerals” activism has also prompted governments and international organizations, including the U.S. and the E.U., to introduce regulations reassuring consumers that their technological devices are conflict-free. These regulations have received criticism for marginalizing artisanal miners, and minerals from conflict-linked mines in DRC still end up being mixed with corporate “conflict-free” minerals along the supply chain. Furthermore, “conflict minerals” activism has failed to address a complex interplay of various structural conflict drivers in eastern DRC, including geopolitics, domestic politics, and identity-based grievances. Moreover, though minerals help perpetuate violence by allowing armed groups to create revenue to purchase weapons, their role in conflict is often assumed, and they are overall not the main cause of the DRC’s multiple conflicts.
Thus, the link between conflict in the DRC and minerals in technology sold worldwide represents a problem that consumers may feel distantly connected to and passively guilty about, but which is too obscure to understand or address. The criticisms of the “conflict minerals” and “blood minerals” framings further reflect a tension between activists seeking to highlight the suffering of Congolese communities and experts concerned that such framings reinforce harmful colonial-era stereotypes about Africa as a helpless place that needs to be saved. These stereotypes were once exploited to rationalize the most brutal cases of violence by colonial powers claiming to “civilize” Africa.
The Anticolonial Struggle from Leopold to Lumumba
The current trajectory of injustices in DRC can be traced back to 1885 when European colonial powers agreed to “carve up” Africa among themselves. The territory known today as DRC became the private property of King Leopold II of Belgium, who deceivingly named it the “Congo Free State”. During this period, Congolese people suffered from widespread abuse, exploitation, and death as part of a systematic effort to maximize the extraction of the country’s natural resources, namely rubber. For example, amputation and murder were used as punishment if laborers did not collect enough rubber. Overall, as many as 10 million Congolese people were killed during this period, leading some historians to debate whether these atrocities constituted genocide. Though King Leopold and his associated companies may not have explicitly possessed genocidal intent, this systematic murder was the product of extreme levels of dehumanization and brutalization.
The atrocities of the Congo Free State were eventually averted by a global photographic human rights campaign. An English missionary and photographer shared with the outside world a photo depicting a laborer, Nsala, looking down at the severed hand and foot of his 5-year-old daughter. The extreme brutality exposed by this photo caused outrage globally. King Leopold was forced to hand the Congo over to the Belgian government and has since remained a symbol of the most extreme cases of imperial atrocities. Meanwhile, the continued repression and divide-and-rule tactics experienced under the post-1908 Belgian colonial authorities have negatively impacted intercommunity relations in DR Congo today.
After Congo gained independence in 1960, the CIA and Belgium played a significant role in the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the country's first postcolonial Prime Minister, which has been considered a decisive moment in triggering the country's chain of perpetual crises. The U.S. and Belgium wanted to remove Lumumba because he was considered too friendly with the Soviet Union, despite his more neutral position during the Cold War. Lumumba’s army chief of general staff, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, led a CIA-backed coup and had Lumumba transferred to the short-lived Belgian-backed secessionist regime in Katanga, where he was murdered by a firing squad.
After becoming president himself (1965-97), Mobutu renamed the country “Zaire” and ruled over a repressive U.S.-backed, anti-communist dictatorship and a fragmented, corrupt state that eventually deteriorated into economic collapse and cyclical violence by the 1990s. Thus, Lumumba, who is inaccurately upheld in some international discourses as a left-wing icon, is widely seen as a figure of short-lived national unity and optimism in a country that has mostly been led by corrupt, divisive rulers. His assassination is argued to have robbed the Congolese people of their right to self-determination while symbolizing the place of Africa as a Cold War battlefield.
Towards a Comprehensive Perspective on Human Rights
The state of conflict in the DRC today cannot be understood without considering the context of the Congo Wars. During the years building up to the First Congo War (1996-97), multiple ethnic community-based militias started to emerge, filling the power vacuums resulting from the absent state, particularly in the eastern provinces. Many of these militias would later become known as “Mai-Mai”. Mobutu was eventually overthrown in the first war. By the end of the Second Congo War (1998-2003), which involved numerous African countries and was known as “Africa’s World War”, natural minerals had become linked to perpetual conflict in the eastern provinces of what had been renamed DRC.
Discourses and media reports on DRC largely overlook human rights violations targeting the country’s most vulnerable minority communities amid complex dynamics of violence. The Belgian colonial authorities spread the myth that the Tutsi and Banyamulenge minority communities were outsiders, contributing to their marginalization, which was exacerbated by Mobutu’s divide-and-rule tactics. The First Congo War erupted when persecuted Tutsi and Banyamulenge fighters joined an insurgency backed by post-genocide Rwanda, which was seeking to neutralize exiled Rwandan genocide perpetrators from the Hutu ethnic group but massacred tens of thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees who had also fled to Zaire. Since the wars ended, Tutsi and Banyamulenge have remained unfairly associated with Rwanda’s historical invasions and human rights abuses and have continued to face violent persecution and often genocidal hate speech. Though downplayed by international observers, these experiences have informed the claims that militias have targeted the Banyamulenge and, more recently, the Tutsi with ethnic cleansing and genocide. The historical persecution of the Banyamulenge is also indirectly linked to Lumumba’s assassination, which triggered the mobilization of anti-imperialist “Simba-Mulele” rebels, some of whom attacked Banyamulenge, who were overall less enthusiastic about a nationalist rebellion.
The M23 insurgency is a symptom and exacerbating factor of anti-Tutsi persecution. While claiming to protect Tutsi, it has also reinforced anti-Tutsi hostilities, perpetrated human rights abuses, and caused mass displacement. Rwanda exploits Tutsi grievances to serve its own complex economic and security interests, including the presence of remaining Rwandan Hutu extremists, who also target Tutsi in eastern DRC. Meanwhile, as global discourses and media framings often oversimplify the objectives of Rwanda and M23 as being primarily about mineral exploitation, they fail to inform holistic solutions to this conflict that address the grievances of minorities. To truly show solidarity with vulnerable communities in DRC, human rights discourses must also address abuses against other minorities, including the militia-perpetrated genocidal ethnic cleansing of the Hema in Ituri and attempt to “eliminate” Luba and Lulua in Kasai province as well as the state-sponsored, internationally funded “purge” of the Batwa forest people from areas designated as national parks. All this violence has intersected with other human rights abuses affecting many communities, including the widespread problem of sexual violence, which has been reduced to a problematic trope portraying the DRC as the “rape capital of the world”.
Media and activism discourses often rightly demonstrate that, from King Leopold’s brutal rule to Lumumba’s assassination to the link between minerals and conflict today, some of the world’s most extreme human rights abuses have occurred in DRC. However, to foster more comprehensive narratives and solutions to these various issues in DRC, such discourses and reports should not simply reinforce how external actors perceive the suffering of Congolese people or frame this suffering as emblematic of other global causes. Instead, they should be rigorously and accurately framed to do the Congolese people justice, reflect their diverse struggles, and empower them with the agency to offer bottom-up solutions.
Glossary
Artisanal: made in a traditional way by someone who is skilled with their hands. [Source (quoted): Cambridge Dictionary online]
Atrocity: an extremely cruel, violent, or shocking act. [Source (quoted): Cambridge Dictionary online]
Belgian Congo: the name of today’s DRC when it was a colony of Belgium from 1908 to 1960, replacing the “Congo Free State”. [Source: Britannica]
Brutalize: To treat someone in a cruel and violent way. [Source (quoted): Cambridge Dictionary online]
Capitalist: based on the system of capitalism (= an economic and political system in which property, business, and industry are controlled by private owners rather than by the state, with the purpose of making a profit). [Source (quoted): Cambridge Dictionary online]
CIA (Central Intelligence Agency): The government organization in the United States that collects secret information about other countries. [Source (quoted): Collins Online Dictionary]
Child labor: the use of children to do work that should be done by adults. [Source (quoted): Cambridge Dictionary online]
Cobalt: a hard, gray chemical element that is a metal and is used in making paint and alloys (= mixtures of metals). [Source (quoted): Cambridge Dictionary online]
Cold War: an extremely unfriendly relationship between countries, which is expressed not through fighting but through political pressure and threats. The expression usually refers to the relationship between the US and the Soviet Union after the Second World War. [Source (quoted): Cambridge Dictionary online]
Colonialism: the practice by which a powerful country directly controls less powerful countries and uses their resources to increase its own power and wealth; the practice of establishing colonies to extend a state's control over other peoples or territories; the control or governing influence of a nation over a dependent country, territory, or people. [Source (quoted): Collins Online Dictionary]
Conflict minerals: A term referring to minerals from politically unstable areas, where armed groups are said to sell minerals such as tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold (often mined using forced labour) to fund their activities and buy weapons. Such minerals may end up in mobile phones, cars or jewellery. [Source: European Commission - Trade and Economic Security]
Congo Free State: The name of today’s DRC from the 1880s to 1908, when it was the private property of European investors headed by King Leopold II of Belgium. It was replaced by the Belgian Congo. [Source: Britannica]
Discourse: discussion or debate (= formal or political argument), or an example of this; spoken or written discussion. [Source (quoted): Cambridge Dictionary online]
Ethnic cleansing: the forced removal of an ethnic group from a territory. [...] Unlike crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes, ethnic cleansing is not recognized as a standalone crime under international law. [Source (quoted): US Holocaust Memorial Museum]
Genocide: An internationally recognized crime where acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. [Source (quoted): US Holocaust Memorial Museum]
Grievance: a complaint or a strong feeling that you have been treated unfairly. [Source (quoted): Cambridge Dictionary online]
Dehumanize: to deprive (someone or something) of human qualities, personality, or dignity. [Source (quoted): Merriam-Webster Dictionary online]
Divide and rule: a way of keeping yourself in a position of power by causing disagreements among other people so that they are unable to oppose you. [Source (quoted): Cambridge Dictionary online]
Green economy: A green economy is defined as low carbon, resource efficient and socially inclusive. In a green economy, growth in employment and income are driven by public and private investment into such economic activities, infrastructure and assets that allow reduced carbon emissions and pollution, enhanced energy and resource efficiency, and prevention of the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. [Source (quoted): United Nations Environment Programme]
Imperialism: a system in which a rich and powerful country controls other countries, or a desire for control over other countries. [Source (quoted): Collins Online Dictionary]
Marginalization: the act of treating someone or something as if they are not important. [Source (quoted): Cambridge Dictionary online]
Militia: an organization that operates like an army but whose members are not professional soldiers. [Source (quoted): Collins Online Dictionary]
Minoritize: to consider people as a minority (= any small group in society that is different from others because of their race, religion, political beliefs, etc.) or make them feel as though they are a minority, in a way that is harmful or unfair. [Source (quoted): Cambridge Dictionary online]
Minority: any small group in society that is different from the rest because of their race, religion, or political beliefs, or a person who belongs to such a group. [Source (quoted): Cambridge Dictionary online]
Missionary: a person who has been sent to a foreign country to teach their religion to the people who live there. [Source (quoted): Cambridge Dictionary online]
M23 (March 23 Movement): One of over 100 armed groups active in eastern DRC, M23 is a Rwandan-backed rebel group that claims to protect the interests of ethnic Tutsi. It is named after a peace agreement signed with the DRC government on March 23, 2009. The rebellion first appeared 2012-13, claiming that the abovementioned agreement was not upheld, and fully reemerged in 2021. (Source: Judith Verweijen & Koen Vlassenroot, Egmont Institute)
Narrative: a way of presenting or understanding a situation or series of events that reflects and promotes a particular point of view or set of values. [Source (quoted): Merriam-Webster Dictionary online]
Neocolonialism: the control of less-developed countries by developed countries through indirect means. [Source (quoted): Britannica]
Persecution: cruel and unfair treatment of a person or group, especially because of their religious or political beliefs, or their race. [Source (quoted): Collins Online Dictionary]
Resource extraction: The withdrawing of materials from the environment for human use, including fossil fuels (oil, gas, and coal), rocks and minerals, biomass via deforestation and fishing and hunting, and water. [Source (quoted): Understanding Global Change, University of Berkeley)
Secessionist: relating to or supporting secession (= the act of becoming independent and no longer part of a country, area, organization, etc.). [Source (quoted): Cambridge Dictionary online]
Soviet Union: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formally established as a state in 1922. The Soviet Union—as it is often called—was a communist dictatorship based in Moscow. [...] Soviet territory included the countries of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (Belorussia), among others. [Source (quoted): US Holocaust Memorial Museum]
Zaire: The name of the DRC from 1971 to 1997 (officially the Republic of Zaire), meaning “great river” in local languages, referring to the Congo River. [Source: Britannica]