THE AFRICAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN
London, United Kingdom
africanrightscampaign@gmail.com
Representing the Peoples of the African Great Lakes Region
2 March 2026
President Donald J. Trump
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20500
United States of America
OPEN LETTER OF GRATITUDE TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
For Historic Sanctions Against Rwanda in Defence of the Congolese People
Dear President Trump, Members of the United States Congress, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent,
On behalf of the millions of men, women, and children of the African Great Lakes region whose lives have been shattered by three decades of war, occupation, displacement, and silence from the world, The African Rights Campaign writes today with a message that our communities have long waited to be able to send: thank you.
The decision of the United States government, announced on 2 March 2026, to impose formal sanctions against the Rwanda Defence Force and four of its most senior commanders represents the most significant act of international accountability for the conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo that the world has yet seen. For the first time, a major global power has not merely expressed concern. It has not issued a carefully worded statement calling on 'all parties' to exercise restraint. It has acted. It has named the responsible party, documented the crimes, and imposed consequences. That is not a small thing. For the people of the Great Lakes, it is historic.
The human cost of this conflict defies easy comprehension. More than seven million Congolese citizens are internally displaced — one of the largest displacement crises on earth. Since January 2025 alone, more than three thousand people have been killed and nearly half a million newly displaced. Over twenty-three million men, women, and children in eastern Congo face acute food insecurity. Women and girls have been subjected to systematic sexual violence used deliberately as a weapon of war and territorial control. Children have grown up knowing nothing but the presence of armed men, the sound of artillery, and the experience of flight. These numbers are not abstractions. Behind each statistic is a family destroyed, a community erased, a future denied.
The United States has now formally confirmed what the people of this region have known and documented for years: that the Rwanda Defence Force crossed an international border, provided direct military support to the M23 rebel movement, engaged in extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, and torture, attacked soldiers of the United Nations and the Southern African Development Community, and systematically seized mineral-rich territories for economic exploitation. These are not allegations from interested parties. They are findings confirmed by the United States Department of the Treasury, the United States Department of State, successive reports of the United Nations Group of Experts, Human Rights Watch, and the International Crisis Group.
We note, with particular significance, that the government of Rwanda has not denied these specific findings. When presented with formal designations documenting killings, displacements, sexual violence, and mineral pillage, Kigali's official response complained that the sanctions were 'unjust' and 'targeted only one party.' It did not say the killings did not happen. It did not say the displacements were fabricated. It did not say Rwandan troops were not in the Congo. A government that is truly innocent of the charges laid against it denies the facts. Rwanda did not deny the facts. It contested the fairness of being held accountable. The distinction matters enormously, and the United States government recognised it.
We wish to acknowledge the particular courage it has taken to reach this decision. Rwanda has cultivated, with considerable skill and considerable resources, an international image as a model of post-conflict transformation, development, and stability. Its government has invested heavily in lobbying, in relationships with Western governments, and in the narrative of the genocide as a perpetual moral shield that places its conduct beyond ordinary scrutiny. Reports have revealed that President Kagame personally contacted senior American officials as the sanctions were being prepared, seeking to prevent them. Despite that pressure, the evidence was too clear and the violations too grave. The United States government acted anyway. That is leadership.
We also express our profound gratitude to President Donald Trump for the decisive role of his administration in brokering the Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity in December 2025 and for following through with these sanctions when those Accords were violated within days of their signing. The willingness of the Trump administration to hold all parties to their commitments, regardless of political relationships or strategic convenience, sends a message of incalculable importance to conflict zones across the African continent: that agreements made in Washington carry real weight, and that the price of violating them is real.
Beyond the immediate imperative of accountability, the Trump administration's engagement with the Great Lakes region carries a dimension of profound economic significance that the people of this region recognise and welcome. The Democratic Republic of Congo sits atop one of the most extraordinary concentrations of natural wealth on earth — coltan, cobalt, gold, lithium, tin, tungsten, and timber among them. These are not merely commodities. They are the foundational materials of the global clean energy transition, the digital economy, and the advanced technologies on which the prosperity of the twenty-first century will be built. For too long, these resources have been extracted under conditions of conflict, occupation, and illegality, generating wealth for armed actors and their international enablers while the Congolese people themselves have remained among the poorest on the planet.
A stable, sovereign, and peaceful Democratic Republic of Congo, with enforceable territorial integrity and a functioning state, is not merely a humanitarian objective. It is the precondition for legitimate, transparent, and mutually beneficial investment in the region's extraordinary resource base. The Washington Accords' commitment to creating a regional economic integration framework and expanding foreign trade and investment derived from regional critical mineral supply chains is exactly the kind of long-term vision that can transform the Great Lakes region from a theatre of conflict into an engine of continental prosperity. American investment, American trade relationships, and American industrial demand for the minerals of the Congo can, under conditions of peace and rule of law, offer the peoples of this region the economic partnership they have never been given and that they deserve.
The scale of mineral theft from the DRC under Rwandan military occupation must be understood for what it is: one of the most consequential acts of economic plunder taking place anywhere in the world today. The United Nations Group of Experts has documented in successive annual reports how coltan, gold, cassiterite, and wolframite extracted from territories controlled by the Rwanda Defence Force and M23 are transported across the border into Rwanda, laundered through Rwandan export certification systems, and sold to private companies in Europe, the United States, the Gulf, and Asia at prices that reflect neither the true market value of the minerals nor any share of the proceeds returning to the Congolese state or the Congolese communities from whose land they are taken. Rwanda, which produces virtually none of these minerals domestically, has in recent years become one of the world's leading exporters of coltan and gold. The explanation is not geology. It is occupation.
These minerals leave the Congo as contraband and arrive on international markets as certified Rwandan exports. They are purchased cheaply — because occupied territories produce under coercion, not market conditions — and sold at global prices, with the margin captured by the military and commercial networks that control the supply chain. The Congolese state receives no royalties. Congolese communities receive no development. Congolese workers, where they are used at all, are paid at rates that amount to forced or near-forced labour. The private companies that purchase these minerals, many of them incorporated in jurisdictions with nominally strong human rights due diligence obligations, have for years benefited from a supply chain whose origins they have chosen not to examine too closely.
The sanctions of 2 March 2026 begin to break this system. By designating the Rwanda Defence Force and its commanders, the United States has formally identified the military structure that underpins the smuggling architecture. The withdrawal of Rwandan forces from the DRC that the Washington Accords demand — and that the sanctions enforce — would, for the first time, return control of these mineral territories to the sovereign Congolese state. The coltan of North Kivu, the gold of South Kivu, the cobalt of Katanga, and the vast mineral endowment of the Congo basin would become available for legitimate investment, transparent extraction, fair royalty arrangements, and genuine economic development for the Congolese people, rather than for the enrichment of a neighbouring military and its private international commercial partners.
President Trump's administration has understood what many of its predecessors did not: that peace and prosperity in the Great Lakes are not competing priorities but inseparable ones. Mineral wealth extracted through military occupation and funnelled through sanctioned armies enriches no one except the occupiers and their intermediaries. The same mineral wealth, extracted through legitimate investment, fair trade, and sovereign Congolese governance, can generate employment, revenue, and development for millions of Congolese citizens and anchor a new era of economic partnership between the United States and the African Great Lakes region. By imposing sanctions that demand the withdrawal of foreign military forces from Congolese territory, the Trump administration is not acting against American economic interests in the region. It is creating the conditions under which those interests, and the interests of the Congolese people, can be pursued legitimately, transparently, and to the lasting benefit of both.
The Great Lakes region does not ask for charity. We ask for fairness. We ask for the same standard of accountability to be applied here as it is applied in every other conflict in the world where one nation crosses the border of another, kills its civilians, displaces its people, and extracts its resources by force. The people of eastern Congo are not less deserving of that standard because they are African, because their country is poor, or because the perpetrator has been a useful partner in other contexts. The United States has now affirmed, through the force of law, that they are not.
We call on the governments of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the European Union to follow the lead of the United States without further delay. The legal authorities are in place. The evidence is documented. The humanitarian need is urgent. Every week of additional inaction is measured not in diplomatic disappointment but in lives lost, communities destroyed, and children growing up under an occupation the world has not yet found the courage to name for what it is.
A Specific and Urgent Appeal: The United Nations Mapping Report and the Question of Justice Before the International Criminal Court
President Trump, there is a deeper layer of accountability that the sanctions of 2 March 2026, as historic as they are, do not yet address. We write to you today not only to express gratitude for what has been done, but to urge decisive leadership on what remains undone.
In October 2010, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights published what has since become one of the most important and most ignored documents in modern international law: the Report of the Mapping Exercise Documenting the Most Serious Violations of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Committed Within the Territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Between March 1993 and June 2003. This 550-page report documented 617 separate violent incidents, each substantiated by at least two independent sources and verified against a gravity threshold that excluded anything short of grave mass atrocity. More than 1,280 witnesses were interviewed. Over 1,500 documents were gathered and analysed. The findings were, in the words of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, descriptions of atrocities that 'no report can adequately describe.'
Among the most consequential findings of the Mapping Report is its documentation of the conduct of the Rwandan armed forces and their Congolese allies during the First and Second Congo Wars, from 1996 onwards. The Report documents that the apparent systematic nature of attacks on Hutu civilians — including men, women, and children who had fled into the forests and were sheltering in refugee camps — could, if proven before a competent court, constitute acts of genocide under the definition set out in Article 6 of the Rome Statute and the 1948 Genocide Convention. The Report was careful to reserve legal conclusions for a court. But it was equally clear that the evidence warranted precisely such a judicial process. Sixteen years later, that process has not taken place. No international criminal tribunal has been established for the Congo. No individual has been prosecuted for the mass killings documented between 1996 and 2003. The perpetrators, including senior military figures whose names are held in a confidential United Nations database in Geneva, continue to live, govern, and command armies in complete impunity.
The Mapping Report did not go unchallenged. The government of Rwanda threatened to withdraw its 3,000 peacekeeping troops from the African Union–United Nations mission in Darfur if the language of genocide was not removed from the document before publication. The United Nations resisted that pressure. The Report was published in full. President Kagame subsequently backed away from the threat. But the pressure was sufficient to ensure that the Report, once published, was largely set aside by the international community, which preferred the political convenience of Rwanda's cooperation to the legal and moral obligation of pursuing accountability. It is one of the most damaging failures of international justice in the post-Cold War era.
The International Criminal Court has jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed on Congolese territory after 1 July 2002. The DRC government referred its situation to the Court in April 2004. The legal pathway for an ICC investigation into the conduct of Rwandan forces in the DRC is not theoretical. It exists. What has been absent is the political will of powerful states to advocate for it. The United States — which is not itself a party to the Rome Statute but exercises profound influence over the international institutions that shape ICC referrals, including the United Nations Security Council — is uniquely positioned to change that.
We therefore urge the United States government to use its influence at the United Nations Security Council, in its bilateral relationship with the International Criminal Court's member states, and through its direct diplomatic weight to ensure that the ICC opens a full formal investigation into the conduct of Rwandan forces in the DRC from 1996 to the present day. The crimes documented in the UN Mapping Report — mass killings of civilians, systematic sexual violence, the pursuit and slaughter of refugees in forests and camps, and the apparent systematic targeting of an ethnic group — are not historical curiosities. They are the foundation of a pattern of impunity that has made every subsequent Rwandan military intervention in the Congo easier to execute and harder to stop. Without justice for what happened between 1996 and 2003, there is no credible deterrent against what is happening now. And without accountability for what is happening now, there will be a third chapter, and a fourth.
The people of the Democratic Republic of Congo have waited thirty years for a court to hear their case. They have been told repeatedly that their suffering is too complex, too political, too inconvenient. The United Nations has documented the crimes. The evidence is preserved. The database of alleged perpetrators is held in Geneva. What is needed now is a government with sufficient standing and sufficient courage to say: these cases must be heard. The United States is that government. We urge you to act.
To the people of the United States, we say this: your government has done something today that governments rarely do. It has looked at a powerful, well-connected, well-resourced actor and said, clearly and formally, that what it has done is wrong, that it cannot continue, and that there are consequences. In the Great Lakes region — where for thirty years the international community has watched, expressed concern, convened summits, and done very little — that clarity is not taken for granted. It is received with deep and genuine gratitude.
The suffering of the Congolese people has been long. The silence of the world around it has been longer. The sanctions of 2 March 2026 are the beginning of an end to that silence. The African Rights Campaign stands with the United States in demanding full compliance with the Washington Accords, the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all Rwandan forces from Congolese territory, and an end to the support that has sustained one of the most devastating and most overlooked conflicts of our time.
With the deepest respect and gratitude,
The African Rights Campaign
On Behalf of the Peoples of the African Great Lakes Region
London, United Kingdom
africanrightscampaign@gmail.com
2 March 2026
This open letter is issued for public circulation and may be reproduced in full with attribution to The African Rights Campaign, London, United Kingdom.
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