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Sanctions, at their most effective, derive power from consistency. When the United States recently announced measures against Rwanda-based mineral companies—including Gasabo Gold Refinery Ltd. and several affiliated trading entities—Washington framed them as enforcement of the Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity.
According to the U.S. Department of State, the sanctions aim to disrupt networks allegedly involved in smuggling conflict minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to support the M23 armed group, while reinforcing transparent, traceable, and fully licit mineral supply chains.
On the surface, this aligns with long-standing objectives of promoting accountability and responsible mineral governance. Viewed against the diplomatic trajectory of the past eighteen months, however, the sanctions reveal something more complex: a deepening tension in U.S. policy between its role as regional mediator and its emerging posture as a strategic economic actor with differentiated interests.
The central question is no longer whether sanctions are a legitimate policy tool. It is whether their application remains consistent with the broader political and economic architecture the United States itself helped design.
From Regional Integration to Strategic Leverage
The Washington Peace Agreement, signed in December 2025, alongside its Regional Economic Integration Framework, was grounded in a clear premise: durable peace in the Great Lakes requires not only security commitments but economic interdependence. The framework promoted cooperation in infrastructure, transport corridors, trade facilitation, and critical mineral value chains. While it did not prescribe where processing should occur, it envisaged a regional ecosystem in which both the DRC and Rwanda could participate as complementary actors.
The timing of the sanctions cuts against that logic. They coincide with an expanding bilateral U.S.–DRC critical minerals partnership that places greater weight on direct engagement with Kinshasa than on the regional integration architecture embedded in the peace framework. Whether by design or consequence, Rwanda’s position within that architecture now appears structurally constrained.
This shift is unfolding alongside rising regional tensions. The DRC and Burundi have strengthened military cooperation against the AFC/M23 alliance and publicly accused Rwanda of supporting M23. Rhetoric from both Bujumbura and Kinshasa has at times moved beyond diplomatic language, further destabilising an already fragile security environment.
Compounding this is the question of reciprocal obligations. Although Rwanda has been linked to M23, the DRC has long faced allegations of insufficient action against the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR)—a genocidal armed group whose individuals participated in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.
In recent remarks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio highlighted Rwanda’s alleged links to M23. The parallel issue of the FDLR’s operational presence in eastern DRC received considerably less attention in public diplomatic framing. Whether this reflects evidentiary thresholds, legal distinctions, or strategic prioritisation, the asymmetry is politically consequential.
The resulting policy contradiction is difficult to ignore: how does Washington simultaneously promote regional mineral integration while imposing sanctions on commercial actors embedded in that same regional economy? Some policymakers and regional observers go further, questioning whether the sanctions are primarily intended to enforce the peace framework or whether they risk constraining Rwanda’s capacity to respond to what it perceives as evolving security threats on multiple fronts.
Whatever the intent, asymmetric pressure risks generating mistrust rather than transparency among signatories of a fragile agreement. Two competing logics—regional economic integration and coercive economic enforcement—have become difficult to reconcile within a single coherent framework.
Traceability, Mediation, and the Question of Credibility
One of the central paradoxes in the current sanctions debate lies in the issue of mineral traceability. For more than a decade, Rwanda has been recognised by institutions such as the OECD and the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR) as an early adopter of formal mineral traceability systems. Through mechanisms such as the iTSCi tagging programme and the ICGLR Regional Certification Mechanism, Rwanda developed chain-of-custody systems intended to track coltan, cassiterite, and wolframite from extraction to export. These frameworks were widely promoted as models for formalising a sector historically affected by informal trade and cross-border leakage.
It is therefore significant that some supply chains now affected by sanctions operate within systems that were previously recognised as examples of responsible mineral governance. This points to a broader shift: traceability alone may no longer be sufficient as a basis for commercial legitimacy when geopolitical and security considerations shape enforcement decisions.
The Washington Peace Agreement assigns reciprocal obligations. Rwanda committed to implementing agreed security measures; the DRC committed to progress on disarming the FDLR. The credibility of the agreement rests on the perception that these obligations are enforced in a balanced and predictable manner.
Implementation tells a different story. Successive rounds of sanctions have been directed at Rwanda—initially targeting individuals, later extending to military structures, and now reaching commercial actors in the mineral sector. The FDLR issue, by contrast, continues to be addressed through diplomatic and security channels rather than comparable economic measures.
From Kigali’s perspective, this pattern is asymmetrical. Meanwhile, Kinshasa deepens its strategic and commercial engagement with Washington, particularly in the critical minerals sector—a divergence that contributes to a growing perception that the United States is no longer operating solely as an impartial guarantor of the peace framework, but as a strategic actor with differentiated priorities.
Perception is central to mediation. Agreements of this nature depend not only on legal commitments, but on confidence that enforcement mechanisms reflect the spirit of reciprocity. Once that confidence erodes, compliance becomes politically contested.
Credibility and the Future of the Peace Process
The competing interpretations of the sanctions across the region lay bare this challenge. In Kinshasa, the measures are widely read as validation of longstanding concerns about cross-border mineral exploitation and insecurity in eastern DRC. In Kigali, they are more likely interpreted as evidence that economic instruments are being deployed in ways that disproportionately affect Rwanda, while broader regional security obligations remain unevenly enforced.
These narratives reflect a deeper fragmentation of the shared strategic framework that originally underpinned the Washington Peace Agreement. Rather than operating within a unified regional logic, the agreement is being interpreted through national lenses shaped by enforcement patterns—and where enforcement is perceived as uneven, the foundation of trust begins to weaken.
The irony should not be lost. A diplomatic initiative designed to transform minerals from a source of conflict into a platform for regional integration now risks becoming another axis of political competition in the Great Lakes.
For Washington, the challenge is not simply enforcement. It is alignment—ensuring that commercial interests, diplomatic commitments, and mediation roles remain strategically coherent. A peace architecture that is seen to serve one party’s interests more than another’s will not hold. The greatest casualty of selective enforcement would not be any single actor or sector. It would be confidence in the peace process itself—and once lost, that is the hardest thing to rebuild.
Sylivanus M. Karemera is Station Manager, KT Radio 96.7FM, which is under Kigali Today Ltd
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