It is the ‘deadliest war since Adolf Hitler’s armies marched across Europe’. It is the ‘deadliest war since the Holocaust’. It is a place where ‘the savagery is beyond imagination’. It is a place where rape has become ‘a normal part of life’. There is ‘unimaginable brutality’. It is a world where a ‘culture of impunity’ allows men to ‘treat women like dogs’. It is a world swarming with women who have been subjected to the ‘monstrosity of this century: continual rape’ and have been ‘gang-raped by militias and shot in the vagina’. It is a world where ‘women are forced to eat dead babies’ (1).
Enough. The media coverage of the war in the Congo marks a shocking new low in Western depictions of Africa. In place of any analysis of the immense political complexities and the international dimension to the conflict in a country the size of Western Europe, we have borderline pornographic descriptions of instances of brutality and hysterical comparisons with the Holocaust. Vast numbers of Western observers have descended on the Congo, not to analyse or understand, but to search for the germ of human wickedness: to uncover African barbarism, and the essentially evil nature of humanity itself.
You’ve heard of ‘warzone tourism’, where thrill-seekers from the West visit cities scarred by conflict and pock-marked by bullets. In the Congo we have something new: ‘misanthropy missions’, where journalists, feminists and Western officials are desperate to discover the disgusting side to humankind. In recent years the Congo has been besieged not only by the armies of numerous African nations fighting a complex war over territory and resources, but also by Western Holocaust-hunters and rape-trawlers fighting to raise awareness about ‘evil’ in the ‘heart of darkness’.
The discussion of the Congo becomes more hysterical and distorted by the day. The latest development is that General Laurent Nkunda, the commander of Congolese Tutsi rebels in the east of the Congo who is most likely (serious experts say ‘definitely’) backed by the Rwandan government, has moved his forces further into Congo and threatens to take the key eastern city of Goma. Nkunda is acting on the ostensible basis of protecting Tutsis from the Hutu forces that were expelled from Rwanda following the massacres of 1994 and which are based in eastern Congo. Yet few analysts doubt that Nkunda’s moves are part of a Rwandan effort to re-assert its political influence in the Congo, with the spectre of the evil Hutu and memories of the 1994 genocide cynically used to justify political opportunism and land-grabbing.
As serious as this latest outburst of conflict is, the reaction to it – handwringing media coverage and the speedy intervention of both Britain’s David Miliband and France’s Bernard Kouchner – is driven by something other than facts on the ground. As one sensible observer points out, ‘There is something of an arbitrary quality as to how one crisis seizes the public imagination and others go ignored’. Indeed, Goma itself has seen ‘far worse than this’: the arrival of thousands and thousands of Rwandan refugees in 1994; a cholera epidemic that killed huge numbers; a lava flow that killed many more (2). Yet it is only today, in the panicked atmosphere of a threatened Tutsi takeover, that Goma is described as a ‘hell’ (3).
via jolibilite
(via guerrillamamamedicine)
