Bad Things in Forgotten Places

by Michael Bear · 2009-08-25 19:42:00 UTC
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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]

Michael Bear
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