By: Sophia von Seebach 

 Europeans love their smartphones, solar panels and electric cars. But behind the shiny surface of such luxury goods, lies a darker story of abuse and exploitation, in which the European Union is implicated. 

To produce this technology, high-tech companies need certain minerals that are often sourced in central Africa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). 

And the mining of these raw materials goes hand in hand with mass abuses in the DRC, human rights groups report. Organizations such as the United Nations and Global Witness have documented large-scale violence, rape and child labor in relation to the extraction of minerals. They report that the abuses are inflicted by neighboring Rwanda, the European Union’s main supplier of tin, tungsten, cobalt and other so-called conflict minerals. 

“Rwanda sends the military into Congo, they rape women, they displace villages, they kill people, then [the EU] start business with them under these conditions,” Alphonse Muambi, lobbyist for the DRC government, tells The Glass Room. 

The EU is openly doing business with Rwandan mineral suppliers. This was formalized in a Memorandum of Understanding, or MoU, between Brussels and the Kigali government in February this year. 

The agreement asserted that the two parties are committed to building sustainable supply chains for the sourcing of the needed minerals. 

But critics of the EU’s move are not hard to find. 

“This is playing to the gallery,” says freelance West Africa journalist and author Bram Posthumus. “You put this language in to make it palatable to the usual groups of environmentalists and pro-democracy human rights activists.” 

Often the mineral mining-related violence in the DRC is carried out by the rebel group M23, which receives military and tactile support from Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF), reports the United Nations Security Council. 

According to Posthumus, the MoU does not do much to change the actual mining practices or stop the smuggling, especially since the mineral trade between the EU and Rwanda has been in place for years. He calls it “classic european union double talk” due to the fact that the EU Commission published a condemnation of Rwandan presence in the Congo last year. “The European Union knew, full well, that Rwanda was looting these minerals from the Congo,” said Posthumus. 

The reason for this ‘double talk’ is likely linked to the EU’s energy transition policies, which require mineral sourcing. “The point is to make sure that the EU can execute its policy to go into green energy, for which they need things like tungsten, tantalum, coltan,” said Posthumus. “What prevails is the EU’s self-interest and, in this case, it is securing those minerals and basically- to be very blunt- damn the rest.” 

According to Filip Reyntjens, academic of central and east Africa, the Congo is difficult to defend due to extreme state weakness, making the exploitation of the resource rich land a certainty. Since many parties, including the EU, the United States and China, are heavily involved in technology production, there is a higher demand for the minerals that are being mined in the DRC. 

“The minerals come here [europe] so that people can have their iPhone 16, TV, and they can use it for computers, energy, electric cars,” Muambi said.