HRW, M23, and the Washington Accords: What the Documentation of Systematic Abuses Means for the DRC Peace Architecture
On June 10, 2026, Human Rights Watch published a 78-page report titled “Death Was Everywhere”: Arbitrary Detention, Killings, and Forced Recruitment by the M23 and the Rwanda Defence Force. The report documents a campaign of forced recruitment and abusive detention of thousands of captured combatants and civilians in eastern DRC. M23 and Rwandan forces conducted large-scale roundups and arrests, subjecting thousands of soldiers and civilians to brutal conditions at the Rumangabo and Tshanzu training centres in North Kivu. The June 10 report follows a May 14 HRW report on the occupation of Uvira, South Kivu’s second-largest city. That report documented M23 fighters and Rwandan forces shooting fleeing civilians, summarily executing more than 50 people during door-to-door searches, raping at least eight women, and forcibly disappearing at least 12 people during a month-long occupation from December 10, 2025, to January 17, 2026. Both reports are grounded in field research, survivor interviews, and site visits, including visits to Makala prison in Kinshasa where dozens of civilian detainees, including children, described their treatment after surrender to Congolese forces.
The timing matters. The Uvira occupation began on December 10, 2025, just days after the signing of the Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity, a US-brokered agreement signed on June 27, 2025 and ratified by presidents Tshisekedi and Kagame in Washington on December 4, 2025. The accord promised troop withdrawals, ceasefires, and a framework for economic cooperation on critical minerals. M23 and Rwandan forces capturing Uvira within days of the ratification ceremony was not an ambiguous signal about the accord’s immediate enforcement capacity. The United States drew a direct institutional conclusion: on March 2, 2026, the State Department sanctioned the Rwanda Defence Force and four senior RDF officers for direct operational support to M23, stating that the Rwanda-backed group had captured Uvira in clear violation of the Washington Accords just days after President Trump presided over the signing ceremony.
Rwanda rejected the HRW characterisation. The Rwandan government’s Office of the Government Spokesperson dismissed the June 10 report as selective scrutiny that downplayed abuses by Congolese forces and their allies, and rejected what it described as HRW’s attempt to collapse M23 and the RDF into a single actor, stating that alleged M23 conduct cannot be treated as RDF conduct. Rwanda’s own communications framed the continuing fighting as a response to violations by the Congolese army and Burundian forces, and called for a return to full implementation of the Washington Accords, specifically citing systematic bombing of civilian villages near the Rwandan border by DRC-backed forces. Both sets of accusations are in the public record. The pattern of mutual violations and counter-accusations has been consistent since the accord’s ratification.
The implementation record after six months is documented through official channels. On March 17 to 18, 2026, representatives from DRC and Rwanda met in Washington and agreed to concrete steps to further implementation of the agreement, including a mutual commitment to sovereignty and territorial integrity, scheduled disengagement of Rwanda’s forces in defined DRC areas, and time-bound efforts by DRC to neutralise the FDLR. On April 23, 2026, the fifth meeting of the Joint Oversight Committee convened, with the US, Qatar, Togo as AU mediator, and the AU Commission, to assess implementation progress and receive a Qatar update on the parallel DRC-AFC/M23 Doha negotiations. The diplomatic machinery is running. What it has not produced is a meaningful withdrawal of Rwandan forces or a halt to M23 territorial control over mineral-producing areas. The Washington Accords have stalled amid mutual accusations of violations. M23 maintains control over vast areas of mineral-rich territories. M23 fighters left Uvira in January but no meaningful withdrawal of Rwandan forces has occurred beyond that, and attacks on civilians in North and South Kivu provinces persist.
The structural design flaw in the Washington Accords has been documented by multiple analysts. The M23 was not a party to the agreement, which was signed between DRC and Rwanda as states. Separate negotiations between DRC and AFC/M23 took place in Doha under Qatari mediation but had not produced a comprehensive agreement at the time of ratification. An accord between two governments that does not bind the non-state armed group conducting operations on the ground is not a ceasefire. It is a framework for a ceasefire, conditional on the parties most responsible for the violence agreeing to terms they were not asked to sign. Multiple prior ceasefire agreements, including the 2009 Goma agreement and subsequent frameworks, have collapsed for the same structural reason. Each agreement has been reached without enforceable disarmament mechanisms or credible troop withdrawal verification.
The critical minerals dimension of the Washington Accords is where the conflict’s international political economy becomes most legible. The December 2025 ratification ceremony linked peace explicitly to mineral extraction access for US firms, with Trump emphasising economic potential and mineral profits at the signing. UN experts have documented that M23 continues to expand control over mines producing gold, tin, coltan, and other minerals in North and South Kivu and to smuggle resources to Rwanda for export. The Rubaya coltan field, which supplies an estimated 15% of global mined coltan output, has been under M23 control since April 2024 and was the site of a landslide killing more than 200 people in January 2026. The M23 collects an estimated $800,000 per month taxing coltan, tin, tungsten, and manganese from its controlled territories. The peace process is designed to transfer mineral access to US-linked firms. The armed group whose territorial control generates that access was not a signatory to the transfer agreement. The Ebola outbreak documented in this series compounds this picture: the same provinces where M23 controls mineral extraction are now also the epicentre of a Bundibugyo outbreak with no approved vaccine, under conditions where healthcare workers have been attacked and humanitarian access is constrained by active armed group presence.
HRW has urged Rwanda’s international partners, including the UN, the African Union, the European Union, and the United States, to publicly address the cycle of abuses and to review military assistance to Rwanda. The US sanctioned RDF in March 2026 while simultaneously maintaining the Washington Accords framework as the primary diplomatic instrument. These positions are in tension. Sanctioning the military force of a peace partner for violating the terms of an agreement you brokered is an extraordinary step. Continuing to use that same agreement as the framework for mineral access cooperation while the sanctioned force continues operations is a coherent policy choice only if the mineral access objective is weighted above the human rights enforcement objective. The June 10 HRW report makes that weighting explicit as a question, without predetermining the answer.
The DRC constitutional crisis documented in this series adds the final layer. The June 9 referendum bill creating a third-term path for Tshisekedi passed 289 to 1 in Kinshasa. The government in Kinshasa that signed the Washington Accords, committed to FDLR neutralisation, and is engaged in the Doha process with M23 is simultaneously managing a domestic constitutional confrontation that absorbs political attention and that HRW has noted creates governance instability at the moment when eastern DRC requires precisely the opposite. The most documented single country in this series is also, six months into the peace accord that was supposed to stabilise it, generating its most consequential set of overlapping crises: constitutional, epidemic, conflict, and mineral supply chain, all operating simultaneously in the same geography.