Africa, War & Child Soldiers you've never heard of

Apologies for the lateness of this blog post - it seemed rude to write personal stuff when I had 9,000 words of work to produce. Fortunately, that's all out of the way, so now I can catch up. I assume most of you read it sneakily on Monday mornings at work anyway!

So, this week, in between producing large reports for work, I was bloody annoyed that a war crimes tribunal is devolving into what amounts to a bitchy fight between two talentless slags.

I am of course, talking about the Trial of Charles Taylor. He's currently on trial for a wide variety of assorted war crimes - most of which feature a recurring theme of recruiting of child soldiers, then either supplying them so badly they are forced to loot and/or commit cannibalism, all the while using them to guard the slaves digging your diamond mines &/or rape camps.



Above: Maybe if the child soldiers were white, there'd be more coverage.

The world's news media has decided that two not-even-that-famous any more celebs arguing over what happened at a particularly squalid dinner party is more important than the trial of man who has been accused of-

• Five counts of war crimes: specifically, terrorizing civilians, murder, outrages on personal dignity, cruel treatment, and looting;

• Five counts of crimes against humanity: specifically, state-sanctioned murder, rape, sexual slavery, mutilating and beating, and enslavement; and

• One count of other serious violations of international humanitarian law: recruiting and using child soldiers.

To quote one other witness, Joseph "ZigZag" Marzah, one of Taylor's erstwhile military commanders, "We executed everybody – babies, women, old men. There were so many executions. I can't remember them all." Taylor had encouraged his commandants - usually former child soldiers themselves - to cannibalise victims, in exchange for $200 of "cigarette money".

It is the prominence given to this squalid dinner party compared to other testimony from the trial that feels odd.

Both Sky News and the BBC News channel cleared their schedules for over an hour and a half, thus devoting more coverage to Naomi Campbell than to the whole of the rest of Taylor's trial since 2007.

In fact, Sky have not covered any of the other 90 witnesses – not even Taylor himself. The Guardian website & the good old Beeb led on the trial when the former president testified, but other outlets - ranging from the Today programme, Channel 4 News & even debaters-bible The Economist have all ignored the trial while in session.

This is at all surprising, but nowhere near as shocking as the lack of attention given to another child-soldier fuelled conflict, that has been rumbling on since the overthrow of appalling dictator of Congo Mbutu Sese Seko in 1997.

Congo's history often seems like an uninterrupted tale of woe. After decades of often brutal foreign rule, first as the private possession of King Leopold II of Belgium and then as a Belgian colony, Congo won its independence in 1960. But within months its first elected Prime Minister had been murdered by Belgium- and U.S.-backed opponents because of his growing ties to the Soviet Union, an assassination that eventually opened the way for army general Mobutu Sese Seko to grab power.

A U.S. favorite during the cold war, Mobutu presided over one of the most corrupt regimes in African history, siphoning off billions from state-owned companies and allowing most of the country to languish in poverty & disorder.

In 1996 neighboring Rwanda and Uganda jointly invaded Congo to eliminate the Hutu militias, known as the Interahamwe, that had been responsible for the Rwandan genocide and were hiding in Congo's eastern forests. As the invading armies advanced across the country, Mobutu fled, and the invaders installed a small-time rebel leader named Laurent Kabila as President.

But things got worse. In 1998, after Kabila got too friendly with the Interahamwe, Uganda and Rwanda invaded Congo again, triggering what became known as Africa's first world war. The scramble for power and resources dragged in forces from at least eight African neighbors, spawned a myriad of Congolese factions and set off campaigns of ethnic cleansing. Kabila, as nasty and corrupt as his predecessor, was shot dead by one of his bodyguards in 2001. His son Joseph, 29, has ruled since.

In Congo, a nation of 63 million people in the heart of Africa, a peace deal signed in 2006 was supposed to halt the war between nine countries, in addition to 20 separate private armies of indigenous Congolese. In short, you probably needed more space in the signing box than for the average, standard form peace treaty.

The war produced a record of human devastation unmatched in recent history. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimates that 3.9 million people have died from war-related causes since 1998, making it the world's most lethal conflict since World War II. But you never even heard about it.

The suffering of Congo's people continues. Fighting persists in the east, where rebel holdouts loot, rape and murder. In particular, I was personally involved with a project to protect, arm & train the Northern Pygmy alliance from being preyed upon by militias who regarded them as "subhuman" - with some believing that eating pygmy flesh can confer magical powers. But you never heard about that, either.

The Congolese army, which was meant to be both symbol and protector in the reunited country, has cut its own murderous swath, carrying out executions and razing hundreds of villages. Even deadlier are the side effects of war, the scars left by years of brutality that disfigure Congo's society and infrastructure. The country is plagued by bad sanitation, disease, malnutrition and dislocation. Routine and treatable illnesses have become weapons of mass destruction.

According to the IRC, which has conducted a series of detailed mortality surveys over the past ten years, 1,250 Congolese still die every day because of war-related causes--the vast majority succumbing to diseases and malnutrition that wouldn't exist in peaceful times. In many respects, the country remains as broken, volatile and dangerous as ever, which is to say, among the very worst places on earth.

Yet Congo's troubles rarely make news headlines, and the country is often low on international donors' lists of places to help. After Sudan, Congo is the second largest nation in sub-Saharan Africa, a land so vast and ungovernable that it has long been perceived as the continent's ultimate hellhole, the setting for Joseph Conrad's 1899 book Heart of Darkness.

It is in part because of that malign reputation--and because the nation's feckless rulers have consistently reinforced it--that the world has been willing to let Congo bleed. Since 2000, the U.N. has spent billions on its peacekeeping mission in Congo, which is known by its French acronym, MONUC, and it is at the moment the largest U.N. force anywhere in the world. However, the troops number just 17,500, a tiny force to secure a country almost the size of the EU. Many of the battalions are besieged in their bases by the resurgent militias. But you didn't hear about that.

In February, the U.N. and aid groups working in Congo asked for $682 million in humanitarian funds. So far, they have received just $94 million--or $9.40 for every person in need. By comparison, Oxfam estimates that Haiti appeal last year raised $550 for each person. But you didn't hear about that - and they don't have a former member of the Fugees running for President to make headlines - so you probably won't.

In short, the message from The Hague today is you can have as many child soldiers as you like, but if you really want to impress the 21st-century western media, then no matter how brutal your crimes you do need to have a celebrity on board.

Depressing. What we need is a celeb to take up the cause...

Get Him To The Greek Opening - watch more funny videos

Of course, if you are interested in Africa, I can't recommend a better blog than the excellent Will Jones' "My name is not Muzungu"...