matthias j.

We had a nice time didn't we? Nice tanks, nice planes, nice bombs, dead muslims, Bagdad's skyline in flames and the whole thing live on CNN. It's over now. The badies are dead and our glorious western society stands victorious once more. The world is safe again. Welcome back lethargy! No more worries!

No more worries?

Since 1999 three million people have died in Kongo. Nobody cares. Almost nobody, Louis Michel, the belgian foreign minister, cares, Madelein Allbright used to care, but Clinton's no longer in office and face it, Belgium is a joke.

Why doesn't anybody care? Why was there so much concern for the Afghan and Iraqi people? Cynics would say "there's no oil in Kongo", but that would mean the sympathy for the Iraqis wasn't honnest. That can't be, can it? And even if it was (imagine that!) Kongo's stuffed with diamonds, copper, the black stuff used for electronic devices and tons of other valuable minerals. Other cynics would say "it's because the war is a great excuse for western companies to loot those natural resources". That sounds rather silly doesn't it? I mean, we could invade it and call the looting "nationbuilding", much more convienient, much "cleaner".

But if it's none of those things, what is it? Could it be we just don't care?

It puzzles me, the whole world gets excited by some little conflict in the Middle East but a real war killing millions, injuring even more and bringing famine to tens of millions seems to be unimportant.

Maybe it's because camera's can't handle the wet climate...

ex-idaho

You forgot to mention that Congolese people are black.

matthias j.

But they're Catholic sir!

ex-idaho

oh, well then no worries. They're saved so we don't need to bother with saving their lives.

Zar

matthias,

Although I completely sympathize with your sentiments in other respects, I actually would not support U.S. military action in Congo. Only if we could act as an intermediary to solve the problem with a cease fire and subsequent agreements would I want to be involved. If we are supplying the conflict with arms (not an uncommon thing for the United States to do) perhaps it would help to cut that off. We could pressure other contries to do the same. We could carrot and stick them into some kind of peace. Maybe the nation needs to split, or maybe there is another way. But there are probably a number of things we could do short of attacking Congo.

P.S.: I believe you were not actually advocating attacking Congo, but simply providing a comparative analysis.

ex-idaho

I would be interested in seeing what role US and European corporations are playing in this civil war. Pat Robertson has a huge stake in the diamond mines as do several other huge companies. You would think that they would be pressuring the Bush admin to take some sort of action on this if it were affecting business. This leads me to belive that they feel that this war is somehow beneficial to their business.

Jolimont

That's the biggest problem with the US playing world cop without UN endorsement. We are now in a position to pick and choose which dictators we ignore and which we topple. The guys in the Congo who are encouraging ethnic violence are safe, so is the royal family in Saudi Arabia and many other places. They don't ruffle our feathers so we let them be, and that's quite the endorsement from the most powerful nation on earth.

matthias j.

Of course I'm not, I'm a pacifist

It's just a pecular feeling I've had for some time now. Nobody cares about Africa, really, nobody cares about Africa, nobody at all. The only substantial thing we do is send in some people from the WTO to learn them how to cut expenses on public accomodations so they can repay their debts to us. Sure there are some peace talks, but all we do is hire a nice conference room and bring in the press for a day or two and that's it. We're not being constructive, we just hold a little international summit pro forma, so at night we can convince ourselves we at least tried to help those poor little bastards.

I mean, it's utterly appalling. Africa is on it's way to total destruction and all we do is looting a dieing continent.

The West just can't treat Africans as adults, to us they're just those cute little black guys we give guns to play with (they've found P90's in Kongo for crying out loud, that's a gun that can fire 900 bullets per second, you can feed a whole village for half a year with the money it costs)

HaysooChreesto!

Just a quick question. Do the leaders of nations and political movements in Africa play any part in the misery of their people?

matthias j.

Did Saddam Hussein play any part in the misery of the Iraqi people?

Corrupt leaders don't justify us not caring. Most of the African leaders are just puppets for western companies anyways. It's well known that the Royal Dutch Shell owns Nigeria for example.