"We don't care about any peace deals in Washington", says Corneille Nangaa

In the heart of Africa, in the mineral-rich eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, new recruits are being trained for battle.

The scores of militia groups that have fought for three decades in one of the most protracted and complex conflicts in the world are still engaging in deadly fighting, and US President Donald Trump’s claimed peace deal for the nation feels like a distant dream.

The deal, portrayed as a “wonderful treaty” by Trump, was signed by the foreign ministers of Rwanda and DR Congo in Washington on June 27.

However, it has yet to end the wider bloodshed that began after the 1994 Rwandan genocide and is estimated to have killed 6 million people.

“Our aim is to go to Kinshasa,” says Corneille Nangaa, a former election-chief-turned-rebel-leader, in an interview with CNN inside the rebel-held city of Goma.

Nangaa’s rebel coalition Alliance Fleuve Congo (AFC), of which M23 is a key member, plans to go to Kinshasa, the country’s capital, to overthrow his one-time ally President Felix Tshisekedi, whom he considers illegitimate.

“We need to liberate our country. We need to take away this corrupted regime, and then we need to build the state,” said Nangaa, who heads AFC-M23’s political wing.

M23, which is allegedly backed by Rwanda, took control of eastern DR Congo’s two largest cities – Goma and Bukavu – in a lightning offensive at the start of this year.

According to DR Congo’s government, some 7,000 people have died in fighting in the eastern Congo since January. 

The ethnic Tutsi-led M23 claims to defend the interest of minority Rwandophone communities there, including the Tutsi.

Crucially, neither the AFC nor M23 is party to the US-brokered peace process.

However, Trump is heralding the US-brokered peace agreement as one of the several conflicts his administration has “settled.” He is expected to host the two country’s presidents soon for a ceremonial signing of the deal.

“We settled the Congo with Rwanda, that was going on, and that was a machete war. That was a gruesome war, many people, close to 10 million people killed. We got that,” Trump told reporters at a press conference in the United Kingdom alongside British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Thursday. Most of the wars “were not thought to be settleable,” he added. Experts say his claims to have “solved seven wars” are debatable.

M23 says that peace deals since have not done enough to protect the Tutsi minority in DR Congo; critics say this is a pretext and that the Rwandan-backed rebels are seeking to exploit the region’s mineral wealth.

“I reject all those reports because they are propaganda from Kinshasa,” Nangaa told CNN when asked about the allegations of severe human rights abuses and war crimes leveled at M23 in the reports by the UN and HRW. He claimed that the findings were invented to raise donor funding, calling them all lies.

He also denied the group is backed by Rwanda. “We have our own soldiers,” he said. “We don’t benefit anything from Rwanda, and we don’t need it.”

Trump signaled his interests in a US-brokered peace treaty before hosting the signatories in the Oval Office in June, telling reporters that the accord would allow the US to get “a lot of the mineral rights from the Congo.”

However, previous truce agreements have failed to bring lasting peace between M23 and the Congolese armed forces. Parallel peace negotiations are currently ongoing, namely a Qatar-led process, which have yet to bring concrete results.

Nangaa told CNN that Trump has been fooled if he thinks DR Congo’s president can offer him minerals in return for peace.

“All the minerals we are talking about, they are mostly in Katanga and also in Kivu. Those minerals belong to the people, so he has to discuss with those people. Tshisekedi doesn’t have any mining sites,” Nangaa said, referring to two provinces in eastern DRC – far from the capital Kinsasha, in the west of the country.

M23 this year seized areas where mining sites are concentrated, including the so-called “coltan capital” of Rubaya. But Nangaa denied the suggestion that M23’s fight is about minerals, claiming he had not seen any minerals himself.

“The mineral is for you guys, for Chinese, for Americans, for the Europeans who are using that raw materials,” he said. “We are fighting for corns, for cassava, for rice.”

The militias’ fight is about “bad governance, political problems and identity problems,” he added.

“The root causes of the conflict, is not discussed in Washington… I’m afraid that even if they sign, nothing is going to happen here, because we are in Goma, we are Congolese. We are not going to go in exile. We are staying. We are home and we are going to stay.” (CNN)