Almost a week of fighting in the Liberian capital Monrovia, where terrified civilians are fleeing (AFP) in their thousands, has led the UN agency and aid coordinator for the west African country to voice the warning words that Africa specialists hear only too often:
"one of the worst humanitarian tragedies in the region" is in the making.
The BBC's Paul Welsh reported on the radio a couple of hours ago that part of the worst of it all is that neither the rebels nor government troops are behaving like "conventional armies". For days, terrain has been lost and recovered by either side with wildly sprayed gunfire and the "stray" bullets are sometimes the killers.
In the way journalists sometimes have to employ to catch anybody's attention about Africa, Paul's morning story on the Beeb leads on heavy shelling "near the US embassy".
Many, not just your experienced Africa hand, would wonder "Is the US embassy really the point?" But reporters know perfectly well that an editor anywhere from Kansas City to San Francisco is more likely to print the news if something American is at the top of it.
The day after the media agonised over which bloody bits of Saddam's son's photos (BBC) to publish, my thoughts return to an appalling series of pictures of a roadside execution. They were taken at one of the worst moments of the 1990s savagery that brought Liberia's current -- but hopefully outgoing -- President Charles Taylor to power.
The night that film landed at "the factory", we agonised too. But after talking to the shaken journalist who had witnessed the scene in a war where drugs were as abundant as guns and, of course, could do nothing about it, there was absolutely no question that AFP should release the pictures to clients worldwide.
I'm glad to say my opinion was shared by almost everybody else. They were. And they were widely used.
While I'm against shock-horror journalism, few things anger me more than the increasingly aseptic reporting of the world's most appalling conflicts that has become a characteristic of our times.
That goes for Iraq and it most certainly goes for Africa. Yes, words can often do the trick, when employed by a damned good reporter. But undue queasiness and even cowardice regarding the images that should, on rare occasions, be pumped straight into people's living rooms is a key factor in the way some of the world's leaders are allowed to get away with actions that can only be called criminal by their anaesthetised electorates.
I still haven't made the planned post-crash changes to the looks of this log. The past couple of days have been tough, where My Condition is concerned. With luck, today's the day for it, perhaps tomorrow. But my own physical state is, evidently, as nothing compared with that of many a man, woman and child in Monrovia.
I can only hope that since the Americans seem unlikely to go in (which is probably no bad thing), the self-appointed world's policeman will at least cough up the cash and the logistical support to get a west African force into that desperate nation, founded, like neighbouring Sierra Leone, by freed slaves.
zzz
There is, after all, a last "lost" post I want to recall.
The outlook may be getting slightly better, at least, in the country that endured the terrible conflict some called "Africa's First World War". Experience has taught me that the rebels in Goma, their eastern capital on the border with their small overlord state Rwanda, are perhaps not to be trusted any more than most politicians and fighters in the vast nation, but on Wednesday they raised the DR Congo flag (Beeb) over the city.
"It is certainly a sign that the war is over," said former rebel leader Adolphe Onusumba. Direct and indirect casualties have been estimated around the three million mark, as noted here early in April ('Excess deaths').
At 'Mac-a-ro-nies', a Mac Diva (aka J.G. and Escritora), on July 7 published a fine piece on 'Poisonwood and the Congo' (via Blogcritics -- blogrolled), with a quick history and links to reports, including the latest peace plan now being implemented in fits and starts.
"Considering the history of the Congo, this idealistic attempt at a settlement of sorts does not seem very promising, though I hope it works," he wrote.
I've already written about the DRC several times, but Mac Diva turned his own lantern on the country because he'd just read one of the finest books written about Africa in the past decade: Barbara Kingsolver's epic novel 'The Poisonwood Bible (1998; link to Amazon US).
This novel is a "must" for anybody who prefers to approach some of Africa's most intractable dilemmas by way of fiction rather than news reports and analysis. Though her story is set mainly in the early '60s, Kingsolver spans a broader timescale and her insights are very pertinent to today's DRC.
zzz
As a sidenote still worthy of mention in a log where world news often features, I was impressed by Mac Diva's look in June at different kinds of blogs, including his thoughts on the blog as newspaper:
"...the single most frustrating thing I find in reading blogs. Few bloggers grasp the difference between fact and opinion, something I had drilled into me in j-school. Not only that, but some of them will utterly freak out if one says their opinions are just that. (...)
I suspect a blog as newspaper would have the fact/opinion problem on a grand scale."
Quite.
'I found When the 'personal' isn't as good a read as the piece on the Congo.
12:07:03 PM link 
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