For most of us, Halloween has just passed, and we’ve slowly sobered up and regained our humanity. We’re leaving a season with reverence for the dead, where ours and many other cultures around the world celebrate life and ancestry through feasts, goodwill, tricks, and general debauchery. Blissfully, we play with the idea of death and the dead and walk around in mobs that smile and cheer to each other. All the while, as we stumble down Carlotta and stare at all the bare flesh, some people across the world are stumbling and half naked for an entirely different reason.
Doubtlessly this Halloween season, you’ve seen countless doctors, especially with the Grey’s Anatomy crazy, but if you were in Geti, Goma, Kikwit, or many other cities in Congo, then you’d be hard pressed to find a doctor even in their hospitals. Looted, burned, and bullet-ridden, they stand as mausoleums, haunted houses of their own. People come and go, looking for a glimpse of hope, realizing that they must continue on to search for it. This is the Congo, where the war officially ended in 2002. At the end of this summer, an estimated four million people have died in the Congo since 1998, and according to the International Rescue Committee, half of these people were children under five. By the end of this year, twice as many people will die in the Congo as have died in the entire conflict in Darfur, which began in 2003.
The conflict in the Congo arose after the genocide in Rwanda, a shadow of death creeping over the land. The Hutus, responsible for the genocide in Rwanda, fled to Congo, which was at that time known as Zaire. Those who regained power in Rwanda followed, seeking their pound of flesh. Rwanda and Uganda entrenched themselves in Congo and began a slaughter to rival that which took place in Rwanda.
At this point, the world took a step back and let this happen. No country took a real effort to step in, which is perhaps because they were all too embarrassed over allowing the Rwandan genocide to occur. “A lot of the killings and horrors were in large part overlooked, either deliberately or not” says Anneke Van Woudenberg, a researcher with Human Rights Watch for Congo. She sets the mood very well. Even right now, as these people are dying and struggling to democratically elect their leaders for the first time since 1965, we are mostly ignoring their plight and deaths.
As I write this, the elections are going on. As you read this, they have passed and the world has noted a leader or at least a run-off between two viable candidates will be set. Throughout the campaigning for the first election, tension mounted at every single event because of ethnic slurs and racial epithet coming from all sides. Groups, such as the Human Rights Watch, are calling for an end to these slurs because they have only lead to death and destruction in the past. Abdoulaye Yerodia, one of the Congo’s four vice-presidents, used this tactic in 1998 when he used such language to entice violence against the Tutsi. He made a series of speeches that resulted in the murder of hundreds of Tutsi and the injuring of many more. In all hope, the Congolese people will elect a leader they can be proud of and agree on. In all hope, they will have chosen someone to unite them and someone the rest of the world can back. If not, there is a great possibility that the many rivaling groups will continue with their violence and the world will look on, unaware and unsure of whom to support. If this happens, then we might still be in the dark about the situations and about the death and destruction that continues. The Congo will not be in the news if violence continues, but Darfur will stay in our headlines for the time being.
We’re taking a look at Darfur, because, as Lydia Polgreen put it, Darfur comes with a magic word: “genocide”. Darfur presents us with a moral high ground, a way to clearly define the right and wrong parties, the human and the inhumane. While local militias and guerillas from other states have joined in the war in Congo, Darfur remains mostly isolated to the Arab government and the non-Arab tribes that rebelled in 2003. The Sudanese government’s military actions, aided by other arabic militias called janjaweed, have forced about 2.5 million from their homes and killed hundreds of thousands so far. You’ve seen the commercials, so you know of the mass rape and pillaging narrated by famous voices. However, their charities are still far short of cash.
The world is looking at Darfur, acting concerned and publicly denouncing it as a horrible crime against humanity, but we’re sitting on our hands. The UN is having trouble sending aid and military forces to Sudan and the surrounding area. The National Redemption Front, the rebels’ new name, is claiming large victories. It also claims that since it is a new organization, it is not bound to any previous cease-fire agreements or negotiations, according to Adam Shogar, a spokesman for the National Redemption Front. “It is all-out war,” Shogar proclaims, “there are no agreements.”
The conflict of Darfur has spilled across the border into Chad recently. Refugees from Darfur have been seeking shelter there in camps, but now they are mounting counterattacks against the Sudanese government from camps and from locations near these camps. The National Redemption Front even makes statements out of a headquarters in N’djamena, the capital of Chad. As they become a unified rebellion, they add in other countries, militias, and motivations for waging war. In response, the Sudanese government will need to hire and rely more on the janjaweed, which presents another group with other desires to add to the pillaging and murder. This conflict is a war that is rapidly deteriorating into multiple factions all vying for power, a goal that they seek to achieve through murdering their enemy entirely. Commercials and politicians have spouted this conflict for months, saying we need to act before it becomes another Rwanda. I urge us to act before it becomes another Congo.
———————————-
Further reading
Human Rights Watch. “D.R. Congo: Halt Growing Violence Ahead of Elections: Presidential Candidates Must Act to Reduce Tensions Ahead of October 29 Vote”
http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2006/10/25/congo14441.htm
Polgreen, Lydia. “Grim New Turn Likely to Harden Darfur Conflict.”
The New York Times, October 20th, 2006.
The International Rescue Committee
Uganda website: http://www.theirc.org/where/the_irc_in_uganda.html
Sudan website: http://www.theirc.org/where/the_irc_in_sudan.html
No comments:
Post a Comment