I won’t admit in public what I said when I saw the number. Enough to say it threw me back in my chair, staring, willing it to be wrong and knowing it was right.
This afternoon I spent a little quality time with Nicholas Kristof, the author and New York Times columnist. Not face time, though I think I would like that. I was catching up on his last four columns. He’s been traveling in eastern DR Congo and writing from there. I had caught the first one — even wrote a response to it that showed up as comment #95 on his blog. But I’ve been busy at the office and hadn’t gotten back yet to read the other three pieces.
Nicholas Kristof is an advocate for Congo. He advocates for the people of Congo with his head and his heart and his pen (or keyboard), and I strongly recommend these columns. (I’ll give you the links at the end of this post.) He wants to put Congo on the radar screens of the international powers that he believes could help bring an end to the war and violence that have come to seem endemic to Congolese life. International powers that have pretty much ignored Congo since we no longer find the country useful to us.
In his fourth and last column, Kristof suggests four steps towards ending the violence. In my way too simple summary, they include (1) pressure on Rwanda regarding its influence, (2) international monitoring of mining exports, (3) demobilization and repatriation of Rwandan militia forces, and (4) professionalizing the Congolese army. Obviously, the DRC can’t do all that alone. It needs partners with clout. Like the U.S., for instance.
And the number? 6.9 million.
That’s his estimate of the number of Congolese people who have died as a result of war since 1998 (see the third column in the series). He’s done his homework, and I’m afraid he’s right. He started with 5.4 million, the number that has been generally accepted since the International Rescue Committee published it in January 2008, one finding of an extensive study done in ‘07. A second finding was that 45,000 people continued to die every month from aftereffects and continued violence. And Kristof did what I hadn’t yet bothered to do (and haven’t seen anywhere else) — he did the math.
6.9 million people dead as a result of war. This is no longer just the deadliest war since World War II — it was that three years ago, at 5.4 million. This is a second holocaust.
And we can’t be bothered to get involved. Yes, props to Hilary Clinton for her visit late last summer. But it’s going to take a lot more than that.
If you can be bothered to get involved, there are good opportunities in addition to our own medical and economic development work in the northwestern part of the country. A friend of ours, HEAL Africa, does wonderful work in Goma, in eastern Congo, treating victims of violence while helping individuals and villages to find the strength to shape their own futures. The Enough Project, “The project to end genocide and crimes against humanity,” does advocacy for international attention to Congo. (And what was on their blog just now when I pulled up the page to check the URL? Kristof’s number and his Congo columns.)
6.9 million fathers and mothers and running boys and laughing girls and … sleeping babies. Makes you want to swear and cry, all at once. But then, get up and do something.
Here are the links I promised to Kristof’s four columns:
“From ‘Oprah’ to Building a Sisterhood in Congo”
“The World Capital of Killing”
“The Grotesque Vocabulary in Congo”
SAJ
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