Every Human Life is Sacred

More than 200 movements, unions, and political parties from across the globe have united in a powerful condemnation of the ongoing imperialist violence against the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This joint statement, organized by the Progressive International, expresses unwavering solidarity with the Congolese people in their struggle for dignity, sovereignty, and liberation. Signatories include groups ranging from Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa to the Kuwaiti Progressive Movement and India’s National Alliance of Peoples Movements.

This collective call to action follows recent escalations by the M23 militia, backed by Rwandan forces, in the North and South Kivu provinces. According to the United Nations (UN), the Rwandan army exerts “de facto control” over M23 operations. Rwanda, acting as a Western proxy in the mineral-rich Great Lakes region, is militarily armed by the United States, United Kingdom, France, and the European Union. Furthermore, its intelligence and military apparatus benefit from Israeli-made spyware and weapons. Despite these violations, Rwandan President Paul Kagame remains a key ally of the West, even as his government engages in systematic repression, including surveillance, imprisonment, torture, enforced disappearances, and political assassinations.

The humanitarian toll of this conflict is staggering. Over 400,000 Congolese have been displaced since the beginning of the year, adding to an already dire situation where seven million people have been forcibly uprooted from their homes. The silence of the global community in the face of this suffering is both deafening and complicit.

From Kinshasa to Bukavu, tens of thousands of Congolese have taken to the streets, denouncing foreign incursions and calling for an end to the violence. Protestors have specifically targeted Western embassies, holding them accountable for their role in enabling Rwanda’s military aggression.

The Congo is one of the wealthiest countries on Earth—not just in terms of minerals but also in arable land, forests, rivers, and hydroelectric potential. It possesses vast reserves of beryl, bauxite, copper, cadmium, gold, germanium, manganese, and monazite. It also supplies over 70% of the world’s cobalt, an essential mineral for the global tech economy. Yet, this wealth has made it a target for perpetual exploitation by foreign powers.

For centuries, the Congo has been ravaged by imperial plunder. In 1885, Belgium’s King Leopold II seized the country as his personal possession, unleashing a reign of terror that led to the deaths of 10 million Congolese in one of history’s forgotten holocausts. The cycle of exploitation continued into the Cold War era, when the CIA orchestrated the assassination of Congo’s first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, in 1961. This paved the way for the corrupt rule of Mobutu Sese Seko, ensuring unfettered Western access to the country’s riches.

Today, the chain of suffering extends from the toxic mines of the Congo, where children are forced into labor under the barrel of a gun, to the pristine boardrooms of Silicon Valley, where minerals like cobalt and coltan fuel the so-called “green economy.” Yet, despite this immense wealth, nearly three in four Congolese live in extreme poverty.

In 1222, the Mandé Charter, one of Africa’s oldest declarations of human rights, proclaimed that “every human life is a life.” But to imperialist powers, African lives remain expendable. The deaths of five million people in the wars that followed Mobutu’s fall received little attention in Western media. When mentioned at all, they were dismissed with colonial-era tropes of “tribalism” rather than acknowledged as the result of systemic Western exploitation.

Today, as Rwanda invades the Congo to loot its resources for Western benefit, the same narrative of “regional instability” is used to mask the true nature of the crisis. This framing erases the role of imperialism in driving the violence, portraying African suffering as inevitable rather than a direct consequence of neocolonial plunder.

We reject this erasure. As voices of conscience, we—the Islamic Economist, political movements, labor unions, and civil society organizations worldwide—stand with the Congolese people in their just struggle for self-determination. The world must recognize that Rwanda, much like Israel, serves as an extension of imperial power in Africa and must be held accountable for its actions. The international community must act decisively to end the cycle of exploitation and demand that the imperialist backers of violence retreat from African soil.

The Congo’s fight is the fight of all oppressed peoples. It is a moral imperative that we break the chains of imperial plunder and reaffirm the fundamental truth: every human life is sacred.