Africa's World War: Stealth Conflict

I guess my last post establishes my foreign policy position: Anything But War. I justified it on religious grounds, but I think it stands on purely Earthly logic as well. War is simply too destructive to have a net positive effect. The Iraq war strengthened my conviction: If war is to be avoided, pre-emptive war is the worst kind of folly and injustice: folly because of the precedent it sets for other nations, injustice because the grounds for the pre-emptive action are always speculative. But here I am in Congo, learning as much as a reluctant student of history can; and I'm confronted with the realization that the deadliest war since WWII has been going on for nine years and I barely knew about it: Four million conflict-relateed deaths since August, 1998. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and eight foreign countries are directly involved, thus "Africa's World War", the first part of my title, not my coin, but a name you can find on Wikipedia. The other part of my title, "Stealth Conflict," is not my term, either. I think I would have said "Ignored Conflict", or "Neglected Conflict," because the leaders of the violence did not deliberately try to conceal their actions; on the contrary, the media, academics and leaders of Western powers knew of them but did not choose to project the information onto the public consciousness. "Stealth" is Virgil Hawkins' term, writing in the Journal of Humanitarian Assistance: "Stealth Conflicts: Africa’s World War in the DRC and International Consciousness." Read it at http://www.jha.ac/articles/a126.htm. I found it very readable. But if you don't want to read the whole thing (20 pages), here are some key ideas: "Africa has produced more than 90% of the conflict-related deaths since the end of the Cold War [for you young'uns, that's around 1991] . Despite the scale of the human suffering, it seems that Western-centric consciousness (and outrage) ends at the Suez Canal. Nowhere is this more painfully clear than in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which, from the perspective of media, public, policy and academic agendas outside the region, almost does not exist. In reality, it is a humanitarian catastrophe of virtually unfathomable proportions, caused by a war that has raged across more than half of a country almost the size of Western Europe, and has seen the direct military involvement of eight foreign countries." Is this a "forgotten" or "orphan" conflict? No, says Hawkins, these words imply that someone would once have paid attention to it. He continues: "Like the stealth bomber, the conflict in the DRC has caused a huge amount of death and destruction, while somehow remaining undetected on the international community’s radar screens. Those waging the war have not necessarily been deliberately secretive: the conflict simply hasn’t been noticed by the outside world. The term can also be considered appropriate in the sense that the majority of those who have died in the war have been killed by stealth. They were not killed by noisy gunshots or explosions, but by starvation and/or preventable and treatable diseases directly resulting from people fleeing their homes and farms, the destruction of infrastructure, and the breakdown of agriculture, public services and supply lines." Hawkins notes that "more than 60 of the world’s countries have populations less than 3.3 million," the estimated number of deaths at the time he wrote (Jan 2004). "What makes the DRC unique, however, is the scale (absolutely unparalleled in recent history) of death and suffering." I recommend clicking on the link to his article just to see the stunning bar graph comparing the death toll in the DRC with the conflicts that do make it to our TV screens. So, what's going on? Why the deafening silence? "In terms of conflict, the media, policymakers, the public, and even academics have shown that collectively, they are only able to consciously process one or two conflicts at a time." That is, one or two per year, with other "peripheral" conflicts mentioned from time to time. But there are two to three dozen conflicts per year! Here are the most recent ones that "made it" to our consciousness, according to Hawkins: 1999 - Kosovo, then East Timor 2000 - Israel-Palestine 2001 - the 9/11 attacks, then Afghanistan 2002, 2003 - Iraq The DRC wasn't even among the "peripherals." Just a few more tidbits from this article, before this post gets too long (apologies to the author for savagely pruning and emphasizing) :

• A 2002 study shows that CNN allotted 32 times more air time to the small-scale clashes in Israel and Palestine than to the catastrophe in the DRC.
• The 180 million raised in humanitarian assistance for tiny East Timor in less than one year was more than the amount raised for the DRC in any year – it was fifteen times that raised for the DRC in 2000.
• In a simple questionnaire survey, 37 Australian university students taking a course on war and peace were asked to name the three deadliest conflicts in the world: only one person could name the DRC; and an astonishing 21 (more than half) thought that, in terms of humanitarian suffering, [the Israel-Palestine] conflict was the most in need of a solution.
• With very few exceptions, Western periodicals that deal with international affairs have failed to devote even a single article to analysis of the DRC.
• A considerable amount of credit must go to organisations such as the International Crisis Group (ICG) and the International Rescue Committee (IRC), for being some of the very few organisations attempting to draw attention to the conflict, by providing analysis, a record of history, and a record of the number of deaths.

Hawkins sums up:

"Most African conflicts are geographically and economically removed from Western strategic interests, are not easily accessible, are highly complex, do not involve white people, and are not followed by powerful diasporas in the West [Sam adds: and have no constituency in Western countries]. These are the key factors that leave almost all African conflicts in the unfortunate status of stealth conflicts... the DRC should not be one of them"

P.S. I have a special connection to the International Rescue Committee: it was founded during WWII as the Emergency Rescue Committee, the group of New York artists and intellectuals who sent Varian Fry to Marseille with a stack of cash and a secret list of artists and intellectuals fleeing the Nazi invasion of Paris. Varian Fry ended up staying a lot longer than planned, and rescuing many more than planned including non-artists and non-intellectuals (he failed to rescue a few on his list who believed they were safe in Marseille). When we were posted in Marseille, one of these, now near 80, came to see the Consul General (Sam) to ask him to support the Varian Fry Foundation, an educational foundation that distributes educational materials to schools in the U.S. and now France. Varian Fry has been called the American Schindler, the Artists' Schindler. I translated the American website into French, but now I google in vain, it's not there. Wonder what my friends at the Association Varian Fry did with it?

So, this is Life in the Foreign Service: there are connections, weak and strong, between one post and the next.