Bad Things in Forgotten Places

Published August 25, 2009 @ 07:42PM PT

Darfur is sexy. Or, at the least, rarely lacking for public attention. (As the title of Rob Crilly's upcoming book proclaims: Saving Darfur - Everyone's Favourite African War.) Even Congo - the uber forgotten conflict - has been getting a fair amount of attention of late.

Yet what if you're forced to flee your home and there's no media attention, much less public outcry? You're still screwed. On one hand, it certainly makes sense to think in terms of specific conflicts like Darfur, or Congo. Any specific conflict is, on some level, comprehensible. You can analyze a given situation, learn the history, the place-names and tribe-names. You can imagine concrete solutions.

On the other hand, conflict as a whole, as a topic or a category, is far more ephemeral. It's only comprehensible as metaphor - everyone's favorite apocalyptic horseman - or in ever-more generalized, theoretical terms.

Our outrage might be finite, yet at the end of the day a village burned in Darfur is a village burned in the Central African Republic. A woman raped in Congo is a woman raped in Mindanao.

As the man said: "Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel."

So, without further ado, bad things in semi-forgotten places - at least forgotten by those who don't have the misfortune of actually living there:

- Flooding worsens the plight of displaced civilians in Sri Lanka

- The Lord's Resistance Army - everyone's favorite Ugandan rebels - are wreaking havoc in South Sudan

- Fighting in the Central African Republic forces 125,000 to flee their homes. (And, map.)

- More than 250,000 people remain displaced in central Mindanao, in the Philippines

- Eastern Congo - not so good. An impressively long roster of combatants has succeeded in forcing around 2 million people to flee their homes.

- And, tho the Israeli-Palestinian is hardly forgotten, the humanitarian disaster caused by the Israeli blockade of Gaza gets surprisingly little attention

[Photo of a demobilized child soldier in the Central African Republic from hpdtcar's photostream on Flickr]

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Comments (1)

THANK YOU, Michael Bear, for keeping this fact in our minds. Indeed, suffering is suffering is suffering, by any name, in any place, involving anyone (of any nationality, religion, or species). It often seems as if the whole world is in crisis, probably because it is. Compassion and personal responsibility, those Golden Rules with which I was raised, seem to have passed into history for many.

I personally thank you for making mention of Palestine and of Afghanistan, both nations reeling under decades of invasion, occupation, and suffering. And Sri Lanka.

Posted by Jamaka Petzak on 08/31/2009 @ 03:28PM PT
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Michael has worked for NGOs in Afghanistan, across east and central Africa, and Iraq. Prior to going overseas, he worked on a project providing assistance to the United Nations on the application of International Humanitarian Law to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.