There has been a marked disparity in the coverage of
conflict in Gaza and the Congo in recent days. A disparity that has led some to
question whose blood is more worthy of mainstream media attention. It’s
certainly not a competition, but the disparity and the continuance of these
conflicts is an indictment of a lot more than a jaundiced media focus.
In August 2009, around the time I still believed myself to
be sane, I interviewed Professor Norman Finkelstein while he visited South
Africa on a speaking tour. I was buoyed by the curious combination of
nervousness and confidence that only the young and stupid can attest to.
Finkelstein had, just months before that, made headlines for losing tenure at
the university where he taught owing to his views on Israel. As I spoke to
Finkelstein, about Gandhi, colonialism and the legacy of the Holocaust in his
own family, I also asked him how he responded to observations that conflict in
Middle East was apportioned too much media coverage. What about the Congo,
where more than 1,000 people were killed in December 2008 – around the same
time as Israel’s Operation Cast Lead? Why does Gaza get more attention than the
Congo?
Finkelstein was pensive in response. He said he didn’t know
how to answer a question like that. “I don’t have an easy answer about focusing
on one and not the other,” he said. “It is about who holds the power [to shape
the narrative] but [the Israeli-Palestinian] conflict is also the longest
occupation in the modern world.
“This thing just goes on and on and on.”
Three years on, I no longer lay claim to sanity – I sleep
too little to qualify – but these same niggling questions about a jaundiced
media focus are spilling out in heated verbiage across the world. And it says
something about our collective failure as a world that three years on we’re
once more talking about Gaza and Goma. These things really do go on and on and
on.
On Sunday, British columnist Ian Birrell noted that coverage
of the recent conflict in Gaza had eclipsed another deadly conflict happening
simultaneously in the eastern Congo.
Birrell described the Democratic Republic of Congo as a
“scene of massacres, of mass rape, of children forced to fight, of families
fleeing in fear again and again, so many sordid events that rarely make the
headlines.”
“It can seem a conflict of crushing complexity rooted in
thorny issues of identity and race, involving murderous militias with an
alphabet of acronyms and savagely exploited by grasping outsiders. But consider
one simple fact: right now, there is the risk of another round breaking out in
the deadliest conflict since the Second World War,” he wrote.
Birrell is not alone in his sombre assessment. Others
describe the situation in eastern Congo as “the greatest humanitarian crisis in
the world today.” The charge of a lack of media attention is also not
unfounded. Since 1999, when Doctors without Borders first began issuing its top
10 underreported humanitarian crises in the world, the DRC has featured nearly
every year.
Just over one week of bombing in Gaza and everybody was up
in arms. There were rallies and protests right across the world. In the media,
pages and pages of reportage, analyses and testimony. Hundreds of journalists
made the trip into Gaza to record first-hand the death and destruction.
Together with them, the reports of ordinary Palestinians on social media lent
us some clues of the scale of human tragedy unfolding in the homes, the media
offices and the refugee camps in Gaza.
And then there’s the Congo.
In the last week, rebels from the M23 group humiliated
Congolese troops, taking the town of Goma and vowing to press on to Kinshasa,
the capital. In the wake of the rebel victory, an all too familiar cycle of
unease, reports of abuse at the hands of militia and the threat of a worsening
humanitarian situation.
Two of my friends are currently tramping around Goma
wielding recorders and cameras, doing their bit to bring the crisis there to
the attention of the world. It’s not that what’s happening there is going
altogether unreported. All the major wires carry updates on the situation
several times a day. The crisis is certainly not being ignored. It just is not
exciting the same kind of fevered attention that Gaza did.
When superstorm Sandy ripped through the Caribbean and then
the east coast of the US last month, many media analysts complained that
coverage of the hurricane was overwhelmingly skewed in favour of how it
affected Americans. No matter that people in Cuba and Haiti as equal citizens
of the world also braced the hurricane and also suffered loss and a disruption
to their lives, it was the effect of the storm on the US that filled the
world’s media. Some analysts and observers of American dominance on the rest of
us meek creatures used the asymmetry in media coverage of the storm in the US
and outside as the US as proof of the warped focus of global media.
Others, however, said the skewed coverage was just a natural
consequence of news wires and major news broadcaster being either
American-owned or heavily invested in the comings and goings of Uncle Sam. If
the Caribbean owned media platforms with global reach, it would be their plight
we would be following.
Borrowing from that logic, then, if as Africans we had a
broadcaster, or news service with a global reach, we would be able to influence
the world’s news agenda with our own news values instead of relying on foreign
correspondents to do the job for us.
South Africans, humble as we are, routinely refer to our
country as the gateway to Africa. In the sanitised halls of conferences and
other such gabfests we’re told that South Africa’s economic prosperity depends
on extending outwards to the rest of Africa. For every one dollar invested in
South Africa, 40 cents makes its way across our border. Africa, we like to
think, begins here.
Yet as the purported doorway to a whole continent, the
conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo has hardly registered a blip on
our radar.
We’ve got 99 problems and some Congolese kerfuffle ain’t one
of them. We really are mired in our own set of unhappy circumstances. And we
don’t really have enough attention to devote to problems with little bearing on
our immediate futures, but even in the birdcage of our insularity, the DRC
ought to feature more prominently.
There’s the little matter of some 2,000 peacekeepers from
the South African National Defence Force stationed as peacekeepers in Goma. And
despite the ambiguity of the SANDF’s communication department, two South
African soldiers have been injured in the last week there. They could have been
injured in a harmless game of soccer or they could have been injured in clashes
with rebels, who knows? But if the lives of Congolese nationals don’t quite
rouse us to the point of attention, then perhaps South African lives may. Some
2,000 South Africans are caught in this conflict and we don’t seem to care
much.
And it’s not just the troops that are caught up here. There
are South African investments in the DRC. There’s the Inga Dam project that
President Zuma signed off on last year, that’s supposed to bring us together,
the DRC and South Africa, in mutual need of each other. There’s also our
penchant to represent the entire continent every time our politicians speak on
a global platform. We are Africa and Africa is us – at least that’s what the
theory is.
The reality, however, is far from that.
From Gaza to Goma, what we can see is an utter failure to
move beyond the safety of self-interest, because at the end of it all, if media
coverage of the plight of Palestinians or Gaza, or the Congolese in eastern DRC
really did move us, would we actually be allowing these violations of our
humanity to continue?
