By Salvador Pimentel Roja
Madrid, 09 de abril de 2026
From Kinshasa to the volcanic hills of Goma, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) endures a tragedy that its own leaders, scholars, and civil society organizations have named with stark clarity and pain: Genocost. It is not an extermination driven by ethnic hatred, but a genocide fueled purely by profitability. The term, coined in 2013 by the Congolese Action Youth Platform (CAYP) and later adopted in official state discourse, combines “geno” (genocide) and “cost”: the systematic destruction of entire communities to ensure that the extraction of their natural resources never stops.
On August 2, 2025, DRC authorities inaugurated the Genocost Memorial in Kinshasa, a site featuring 93 stelae and an eternal flame in memory of the victims. During the ceremony, the government urged Parliament to formally recognize “the genocide committed on our territory for economic interests.” Since the conflicts of the 1990s, more than six million Congolese have lost their lives. This figure, cited by UN agencies and various research centers, reflects the devastating cumulative toll of wars, displacement, famine, and the collapse of healthcare systems. What remains undeniable is the common denominator: violence driven by greed for gold, diamonds, coltan, cobalt, cassiterite, and copper—minerals that ultimately end up in our smartphones, electric vehicle batteries, and the so-called global energy transition.
On april 2026, Goma remains under pressure from the M23 rebel coalition, which entered the city in January 2025 following an offensive that left thousands dead and displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians. The coltan mines of Rubaya, accounting for approximately 15 percent of global production, remain under the influence of armed actors who finance their war through this plunder. Kigali denies any support, yet reports from the UN Group of Experts and Congolese customs records document systematic flows of minerals into Rwanda. Meanwhile, tensions persist, with renewed offensives and displacement further exacerbating daily suffering.
What pains observers the most is the scale of human tragedy contrasted with its limited visibility—quite the opposite of what is typically seen in conflicts that dominate the international agenda. While other wars command headlines and debate, the massacre in the Congo is relegated to the margins, almost as if it were “just another African problem.” This indifference is not accidental; it reflects a complicit silence that benefits those who profit from these resources. Because this is not just another war. It is a permanent war.
For centuries, from the rubber and ivory exploitation under King Leopold II of Belgium (1885) to today’s coltan and cobalt, foreign powers and external elites have viewed the DRC as an inexhaustible trove. The wealth beneath its soil has always been the true driver: whoever controls the mines controls the money, and whoever controls the money is willing to ignore the human cost.
This reality has recently received an important intellectual impetus. I was particularly inspired by the work of Gabriel Zagabe Muzusa, published in the scientific journal Micro Espacios de Investigación, titled “From Cry to Law – Toward the Legal Recognition of GENOCOST as an Economic Crime Against Humanity.” In it, he conceptualizes Genocost as a new legal category within public international law, aimed at sanctioning systemic economic crimes against peoples. It is not merely about naming the horror, but about filling a normative gap in order to prevent it, prosecute it, and provide reparations.
In my view, global attention must also turn toward the DRC and openly support not only its sovereign right to exploit its own resources, but—above all—the urgent need to control the violence and ecocide stemming from competition over strategic deposits. This is not a tribal conflict. It is a disguised economic invasion, in which M23 acts as one of the armed extensions of networks that prioritize minerals over human life.
Peace in the Congo will not come through paper agreements or international missions lacking real enforcement power. It will come when the DRC consolidates sovereignty over its resources, strengthens its institutions, and demands long-overdue moral and economic reparations—especially in a context where the victims themselves are racialized in ways that seem to diminish global urgency.
Does this affect us all? I would argue that it does. The gold we admire, the diamonds we cherish, the coltan vibrating in our pockets, and the cobalt powering “green mobility” all carry a trace of complicit silence. Indifference is an act of selfishness—a profoundly inhuman and, at its core, racist response.
Recognizing Genocost and advancing toward its legal acknowledgment is not an exercise in victimhood, but the first step toward real, material justice. The DRC must rebuild its state, protect its territories, and negotiate from the dignity of a nation that understands the true value of its land. Only then will this economic slaughter cease—only then will there no longer be an “acceptable cost” for the development of others.
Human dignity has no price—no “cost.” The Congolese people deserve peace with justice. And that peace inevitably requires reclaiming what has been taken from them for centuries: their wealth, their autonomy, and their future.