Bukavu.
I came home from the Factory just wanting to know what the place looked like.
Where people I've talked to sometimes but never met live, or is "endure" the word for it?
There's little on the Net, but this is a detail from a much bigger picture in a series taken there in 1999 by Garret Wilson, who says his skills range from information technology to African and Oriental studies.
Garret "didn't get out to see the town very much. The rebels had changed the flag, and there was a curfew late in the evening. Being sick with Giardiasis didn't make me feel like exploring a lot, anyway."
 Somehow Wilson's pages and his other pictures, made me feel better! Just another African town, little different from so many others.
Bukavu is high in the news because of more "unrest" there, at least 88 people killed in a week of clashes which take hundreds of words to try to explain in a way the Kansas City milkman could understand, in the unlikely event that he cares...
"Where's the shit going to hit the fan tonight?" the duty editor on AFP's English Desk asked me as I quit, gave the usual quick parting briefing to the few poor devils left to handle the world's horrors and joys throughout the night until tomorrow morning. "Bukavu?"
"I hope not," I replied, banging my hand down on the desk in the usual superstitious touch wood move. "But then, over the past few days, I've constantly hoped they wouldn't start the same old crap all over again. And still they did and they are."
Bukavu, capital of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo's Sud-Kivu province. The BBC sees what's going on there like this. It's mostly accurate enough, as far as anybody can tell. And then there's Ituri, another trouble spot, even further north on the eastern edge of a single country the size of western Europe, if you leave Scandinavia out of it.
In Rwanda, today's trouble was of a different kind. A former, post-genocide prime minister got a 15-year prison sentence (AFP). And behind that little phrase -- "charges that covered inciting racial animosity" -- in our lead paragraph, lay no fewer than 13 minutes on the 'phone, me in Paris, Anthony in Nairobi, Helen in Kigali, trying to get the comprehensible formula for what it was all really about.
Normally, it doesn't take that long. Nobody was especially weary. But how my heart hits my boots when I turn up for my news editor stint at the Factory knowing that it's that particular part of Africa, the so-called Great Lakes region, which is going to take up the best part of the day.
So many lies all round.
So much sheer stupidity.
Propaganda daily pouring out on every side.
Intractable conflicts which seem to have lasted forever and become almost cyclical, to such an extent that if the "shit really does hit the fan", we might almost as well start digging out stories sent five years ago and refile the things, just changing a name or a faction or two.
It would be in the face of indifference from the rest of the world, apart from a few mining companies keen to go on raping DRC, ready to work with whichever faction suits, and be damned the daily misery of the people of the place. And from quite a handful of dedicated charities and non-governmental organisations with rather more commendable motives.
Plucky little Rwanda, or at least the current regime there, sickens me the most. Like some Israeli leaders who have for decades politically milked an appalling Holocaust for all it's worth -- six million Jews, well, yes, we know! -- Rwanda has its 1994 genocide. Nobody knows exactly how many. 800,000? The government says one million.
I'm no anti-Semite. I'm no anti-Tutsi. But are these immense traumas of the past any excuse for the "victims" to turn aggressors, well-armed little fortress nations where most of those who wield the power are the worst of all?
Every time there might be some grounds for optimism, a hint or two that peace, of all ridiculous things, is breaking out, we journalists have to watch somebody go and screw it up; some leader who seems to have a steel implant in place of any heart, does something absurd.
Or do they? Ask the Institute of Islamic Political Thought and they'll tell you that
"Sharon's visit to the mosque highlighted another rather important, though occasionally sidelined, element in the conflict. The Al-Aqsa Mosque and its blessed environs, mean a great deal to the Muslims world-wide. It is, therefore, not surprising that as the Palestinians rose up and exploded in anger, their Intifada was paralleled by hundreds of Intifada in Arab and Muslim cities around the world. Israelis and their allies in the West seemed shocked. The reaction to Israeli brutality and Sharon's disrespect for Islam and Muslims was beyond anticipation" (source IIPT).
But ask another bunch of academics trying to make sense of 'Palestine Facts' and they'll reply that
"Sharon did not attempt to enter any mosques during his 34 minute visit to the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest place, which Muslims have renamed Haram al-Sharif. His visit was conducted during normal hours when the area is open to tourists. Palestinian youths — eventually numbering around 1,500 — shouted slogans in an attempt to inflame the situation. Some 1,500 Israeli police were present at the scene to forestall violence" (What started the (...) Intifada?).
Now we have Pasteur Bizimungu jailed by a Rwandan court under Paul Kagame's regime, a Kagame once described to me by a journalist who interviewed him as one of "the coldest, most chilling men" they had ever encountered.
Did the former prime minister or didn't he "incite racial animosity" in a powderkeg and embezzle public funds as well?
I don't know, yet I have every faith in the way the story eventually got sent to the world. I very much doubt that most "regional analysts", "well-informed diplomatic sources," the whole of the rest of the pack of people journalists turn to at such times for a bit of light really have the remotest real idea.
"Stick to the facts, always the facts," aspiring journalists are told, "and give proper sources for everything. Back up your 'leads'." But what the hell are the facts, sometimes?
Even the "hardest" of news can so often come down to little more than opinion, ever amorphous, unreliable.
It's on a similar basis, as the latest Iraq war most amply proves, that powerful politicians make appalling decisions, trigger mass slaughter and mayhem, some apparently genuinely believing they have the noblest of motives when in fact they're already lying through their teeth, lying to themselves, lying to journalists, lying to the people who put them where they are.
The better informed the rest of us think we are, the more news sites and propaganda sites we consult, the less we really know, until the point comes when you cease to care. Or you think you do.
All this is really why I've decided to stop writing about politics. Enough is enough. A day at the Factory can be so exhausting when you're constantly searching for the "right words", to the extent that you cease to be sure that there are any. It's always an approximation, based on the trust you learn to have for "your people on the ground", their eyes, their ears, their experience.
But this log is certainly going to turn elsewhere now.
There really are times when -- despite the immense respect I retain for a few practitioners of the art who strike me as being genuinely good men and women -- I feel that the politics of our times have become quite simply incompatible with any kind of truth, integrity and decency.
Yup, I think I need next week's month off!
11:10:54 PM link 
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