Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Fighting ramps up in eastern Congo as peace talks fall through, Mali’s junta arrests generals and a French national over an alleged destabilization plot, and a toxic spill at a Zambian copper mine may be much worse than previously reported.
Abuses Mount in Congo
Despite a Qatari-facilitated cease-fire and U.S.-brokered peace agreement, fighting has intensified in recent weeks in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where more than 100 armed groups are vying for control of vast mineral deposits.
Earlier this month, Rwandan-backed M23 rebels launched an offensive around the town of Mulamba in South Kivu province, violating a cease-fire brokered in Doha in mid-July. M23 and Congo also agreed to secure a permanent peace deal by Aug. 18, but the deadline was missed on Monday when M23 walked away from the talks, accusing the Congolese government of continued attacks against the territories the group had seized.
Meanwhile, another rebel group, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), began a series of attacks last week that killed more than 50 people in eastern Congo’s North Kivu province. The ADF also took at least 100 hostages and burned and looted homes and shops.
The ADF is a Ugandan rebel group that emerged in the mid-1990s over domestic grievances against long-serving President Yoweri Museveni. Amid pressure from the Ugandan army in 2001, the group fled to North Kivu and, in 2018, aligned itself with the Islamic State.
The ADF attacks have compounded eastern Congo’s multifaceted challenges. Fighting in the region escalated rapidly at the beginning of this year, when M23 rebels launched a major offensive after a period of relative inactivity. The group has seized large swaths of land this year, including Goma and Bukavu, eastern Congo’s largest cities.
Since taking control, M23 has “instilled a climate of fear and vicious reprisals among the local population,” said Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty International’s regional director for east and southern Africa. Media outlets and United Nations experts have reported on human rights abuses and “horrific” sexual violence carried out by M23 and other parties in the conflict. According to the U.N., children comprise nearly 40 percent of survivors of sexual and gender-based violence.
The peace deal that Congo and Rwanda signed in Washington in June did little to ease fighting. More than 300 people were killed by M23, aided by members of the Rwandan military, between July 9 and 21 in North Kivu, according to accounts received by the U.N. human rights office.
Congolese army spokesperson Sylvain Ekenge recently said in a statement that M23 is launching “almost daily” attacks. Meanwhile, M23 spokesperson Lawrence Kanyuka accused Kinshasa of “offensive military maneuvers aimed at full-scale war” last week.
“So far, there has been little change in conflict dynamics on the ground, and there is no realistic plan for dismantling the Rwandan-backed rebel group M23,” Sasha Lezhnev and John Prendergast wrote in Foreign Policy earlier this month.
Meanwhile, Ugandan troops have expanded their footprint in North Kivu, citing security concerns from the ADF. But a U.N. report recently alleged that Uganda also benefits from Congo’s illegal mineral trade.
Security experts suggest that all actors involved in the fighting need to be held accountable for orchestrating violence against civilians in Congo. The latest attacks underscore the reality that a long-lasting peace plan must involve more than just a select few of the parties to the conflict.
The Week Ahead
Wednesday, Aug. 20, to Friday, Aug. 22: The Tokyo International Conference on African Development is held in Yokohama, Japan.
Thursday, Aug. 21: The U.N. Security Council discusses the U.N. Support Mission in Libya and sanctions against the country.
Monday, Aug. 25: Health ministers convene for the 75th session of the World Health Organization’s Regional Committee for Africa, held in Lusaka, Zambia.
What We’re Watching
Malian plot. Mali’s military leadership said Thursday that it had arrested several people, including two Malian army generals and a French national, for allegedly plotting to destabilize the government.
Authorities claimed that French citizen Yann Vezilier was working “on behalf of the French intelligence service” and that “fringe elements of the Malian armed security forces” were detained for trying to “destabilize the institutions of the republic.” France’s foreign ministry said the allegations against Vezilier were “unfounded” and that he is an embassy worker in Bamako, Mali’s capital.
The arrests come shortly after Mali’s interim president, Gen. Assimi Goïta—who seized power in a 2020 coup—was granted a five-year term in July, renewable “as many times as necessary” without election. The junta also suspended political parties in May despite earlier promises to return the country to civilian rule by March 2024.
Trump’s refugee cap. The Trump administration is considering a refugee admissions cap of 40,000 people next year, with around 30,000 of those slots reserved for white South Africans, according to a Reuters report based on an internal email and interviews with two anonymous U.S. officials.
On his first day in office in January, U.S. President Donald Trump suspended the country’s refugee admissions program. Since then, his administration has offered refugee status to white Afrikaners on the basis of alleged “racial persecution” in South Africa—claims that the country’s government denies.
Zambia’s unsafe river. Six months after an acid spill at a Chinese-owned copper mine in Zambia, an independent audit has found that the disaster released around 30 times more toxic sludge than the 50,000 tons reported by the company and the Zambian government.
The spill occurred when a tailings dam partially collapsed at a mine run by Sino-Metals Leach, a subsidiary of the state-run China Nonferrous Mining Corp. According to Drizit Zambia, the company hired by Sino-Metals to evaluate the accident, at least 1.5 million tons of toxic material spilled, contaminating the Mwambashi River, which flows into the Kafue River. (Sino-Metals questioned Drizit’s methodology and has terminated its contract with the firm.)
Around 60 percent of Zambia’s 20 million people live in the Kafue River basin, and the river supplies drinking water to around 5 million people, including residents of the capital, Lusaka.
The disaster may be one of the global mining industry’s worst ecological disasters to date. According to Bloomberg, Michael Gonzales, the U.S. ambassador to Zambia, wrote in an Aug. 6 email to staff that the disaster appeared to be the sixth-worst in history.
Libya’s municipal elections. Libyans voted in local elections on Saturday in areas controlled by the U.N.-recognized government in Tripoli. Elections were scheduled in 63 municipalities, but polls were suspended in 11 of them, mostly areas in the east that are under a rival administration controlled by military strongman Khalifa Haftar.
In addition, arson attacks the Friday before the elections destroyed electoral documents in the northwestern city of Zawiyah and nearby Sahel al-Gharbi, leading to the postponement of elections in seven additional municipalities until Aug. 23.
“These criminal assaults aimed to deprive Libyans of their right to choose their representatives,” said Abdel Hakim al-Shaab, a board member of Libya’s electoral commission.
This Week in Infrastructure
Last week, the Nigerian government, De-Sadel Nigeria, and China Liancai Petroleum Investment Holdings announced that they are set to begin construction of a 2,500-mile high-speed rail network. The project will connect Lagos to Port Harcourt via Abuja and Kano and will take an estimated three years to build.
The first phase of the $60 billion project is being financed by the Asian Development Investment Bank, which is backed by China. The project also involves converting some of Nigeria’s diesel-powered trains to run on liquefied natural gas.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- Trump Has No Idea How to Do Diplomacy With Putin or Europe by Stephen M. Walt
- Key Takeaways From Trump’s Meeting With Zelensky by Rishi Iyengar
- The Next Israel-Iran War Is Coming by Trita Parsi
What We’re Reading
Sudan’s foreign-driven war. In the Continent, Eisa Dafallah argues that more than two years of civil war have turned Sudan into a “patchwork of overlapping military, administrative, and economic zones, where local dynamics intersect with regional interests and financial imperatives.”
The United Arab Emirates and Egypt have particularly heavy stakes in the conflict. “Before the war, most Sudanese gold was exported to the UAE,” Dafallah writes. But “data shows that in 2024, 100% of Sudan’s declared gold exports went to Egypt.”
Language of power. In the Guardian, an excerpt from the late Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s recently published book, Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas, explores the importance of preserving African languages amid “the unequal power relationships between languages.”
“A variation of the Irish situation, where even after independence, the intellectuals express themselves more fluently in the language of imperial conquest than in the languages from their own country, is present in every postcolonial situation,” Ngũgĩ writes. “In the case of Africa, you even hear the identity of the continent being described in terms of Europhonity: anglophone, francophone and lusophone.”