Buried in the back of the New York Times of Friday’s issue is an international report that thousands of refugees have been fleeing an area in eastern Congo near the Rwandan border. The article claims that this has caused “heightening fears that the Congo war…may be erupting once more.”
If one actually knew of the widespread conflicts plaguing this region, such a report would be viewed as a gross understatement. I have personally been conducting rigorous research this fall on African politics; my results have been disturbing, to put it lightly. The Congo war, which “officially” began in 1998 and “officially” ended early last year, is about as over as the Iraq war was in May 2003 when we declared “mission accomplished.” The ongoing conflict includes troops and citizens of Uganda, Rwanda, and Tanzania clashes between numorous ethnic groups, whose intolerance for each others’ differences have caused increased tension in the country. Rebels and government soldiers alike murder men, rape women, kidnap children to use as soldiers and sex slaves, and committ autocracies that would make Saddam Hussein look unoriginal and merciful. The most generous of estimates predict that over three million people have died in the battles in Congo.
Once again we see how systematic killings in Africa, a continent completely neglected by the international community and U.S. policies, fail to stir any public outrage within the global village or its media. Eastern Africa not only represents mass terrorism of the worst kind; it’s instability threatens to become a breeding ground for terrorist activity. Combine Congo with the genocide in Sudan, which has claimed anywhere from 50,000 to 70,000 lives, with the “genocidal occurances” instigated by the Lord’s Resistance Army against citizens in Uganda (which has witnessed 200-300 innocents killed in one day) and you have much more of a chaotic catastrophe than we thought we ever had in the Middle East, and as much an imminent threat to international stability as the notorious “axis of evil.” I wonder what statistical body count would make Congo, Uganda, and Sudan worthy of an effective global response. Or would one of the nomadic militias have to acquire a nuclear weapon first?
