ert Mugabe is busy turning Zimbabwe into a terror state, with starvation used as a political weapon. There’s the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Togo. There’s slavery still in Mauritania, Niger, Mali, Chad. The AIDS crisis is ongoing. And then there’s the tragedy of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, which could easily be the subject of an equivalent article, on why we’ve paid so little attention in the West to the massive loss of life and brutalisation of a whole country: a country that a couple of decades ago looked so hopeful after the Idi Amin nightmare.
Of all these, Darfur and Zimbabwe probably generate the most news stories, for the excellent reason that we can see what the problem is, and what a solution might look like. In Darfur, we know that the Sudanese government is directly implicated, and that the international community needs to get tough with them. In Zimbabwe, we can see Mugabe’s descent into tyranny. But the Congo? What might an answer look like there? Who could even begin to provide a coherent account of what’s been going on? Let’s see….after the Rwandan genocide, the UN set up camps over the Congolese border, which were swiftly taken over by the Hutus responsible for the genocide, so the new Rwandan government sent troops in after them, then Zimbabwe and Uganda and Angola sent in troops, and then….well, it all degenerated into civil war, and that’s about when I lost the plot, and I suspect I’m not alone. I think there’s a Kabila father and son in there somewhere. As for a solution, all you can do is suggest weakly that this must be a matter for the UN, but since UN troops have been busy making a name for themselves by raping the locals, well, the situation is lacking somewhat in moral clarity.
Macintyre concludes:
The tangled civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (which officially ended in 2003, but still rages on in the east) has killed ten times as many people as last December’s tsunami. Relief agencies describe this as the worst humanitarian tragedy since the Holocaust itself. Ten million people have been displaced from their homes, and more than three million are beyond the reach of aid groups. Yet there are few letters of outrage in the papers; the novelists and pamphleteers have barely lifted a pen; you could count the number of angry bishops on the fingers of one, mutilated hand.
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is too often deployed as a cliché for black savagery on the dark continent, when it is truly an indictment of the black hearts of the white men who came to enslave and steal, and were utterly corrupted by their own greed. The heart of darkness belongs to Mr Kurtz, dying surrounded by the severed heads of Africans.
It took a concerted campaign of moral indignation to shine a light into that darkness, and Leopold’s legacy continues to ensure misery in the most dramatically failed state in Africa. The tragedy of the Congo lies not just in the terrible events taking place there, but also in our own acceptance of the horror, the horror with a shudder, and a shrug.
I don’t know….must everything be turned into a navel-gazing session about our own moral shortcomings?
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