The most important measure of connectivity is caring
Tuesday, July 25, 2006 at 1:33PM Hans Suter emailed the following to Tom with a link to Ethan Zuckerman's Is Israel a problem for the Democratic Republic of Congo?
Dear Tom, the mental image of core and gap in the largest number possible of people is easily one of the most important items in the political process of the core.Tom's comment:
Nathan Zuckerman has an excellent post on this. To wet your appetite here an extract:With forty times the violent death toll, you’d expect to hear a bit more about conflicts in central Africa - instead, Congo, Uganda and Sudan rank #1, #2, and #3 on Alertnet’s list of “forgotten emergencies.” Through hard work and advocacy by activists and journalists, many Americans have some awareness of the conflict in Darfur. But the deteriorating peace process in Sudan gets lots less attention than the details of the current Israeli incursion in Lebanon.The other two conflicts almost never make the news, even when major developments occur. DR Congo will have elections on July 30th, a chance for the first democratically elected government in that unhappy nation since the US helped overthrow Patrice Lumumba and install Africa’s greatest kleptocrat, Mobutu Sese Seko. The elections are difficult, fraught with infrastructure issues, political tensions, flares of violence and accusations of fraud. But they’ve merited 6,180 stories for “congo” on Google News over the past month, while “lebanon” yields 96,100 and “israel” yields 136,000.
There are lots of reasons why conflicts in the Middle East garner so much attention. Some are newsgathering factors - news happens where there are reporters to cover it. While many US newspapers are cutting overseas bureaus, most have maintained a major presence in the middle east, often in Baghdad and Jerusalem. And most don’t have bureaus in Kinshasa, Kisengani, or even Nairobi. Newspapers have finite staff resources, and the conflict in Lebanon is demanding the attention from those reporters, as Joe Strupp reports in a story for Editor and Publisher:
The most important measure of connectivity is caring. Israel is hugely connected, so when it acts, we care, because we can see it. Congo is amazingly unconnected, so when far larger numbers die there under the same levels of injustice or insanity or whatever, no one cares. In the end, right or wrong has nothing to do with it. It's where you can get the reporters to cover and the cameramen to film.
Reader Comments (9)
To all,
Or it could be that there haven't been any African suicide bombers hitting the West, or African fundamentalism on the level of the jihadists of the Middle East.
Vinit,
That was also the case before suicide bombers et al. Israel is far more connected to us than Africa. Not just economically and politically but also culturally, historically and religiously.
Before "the brief" my guideline for military action was "wherever Christianne Amonpour went the US military was sure to follow" It wasn't as conceptual as Gap v. Core and a lot less ordered. It just happened to be true.
The bombs at US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania might counter your theory, Vinit. So might the emergence of the Union of Islamic Courts running Somalia, a Salafist group in Mali and pockets of instability throughout the continent. I find Tom's answer reasonably satisfying - if you accept that disconnection equals danger - an equation I find helpful - DRC is high on the disconnection index. My work the past few years is on increasing connectivity, in literal and figurative senses, for precisely the reason Tom points to...
hmm, i know there is no 'if' in history.
but had the Uganda Proposal been accepted, there might be 2 fewer problem in the world today
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/Uganda.html
You only get suicide bombers (95 percent, according to Pape) when outside military comes in.
You only get that when there's connectivity worth protecting, so Vinit cites a symptom.
Tom are you saying...Africa is not worth protecting??
BTW, the US mil is in Djibouti doing limited ops right now...I know Nic Roberts, or Christianne haven't visited recently...lets not forget the "billable hours" that are adding up tonight that puts Africa on the "Map" tomorrow morning.
The rest of my rant…once upon a time...the US was truly connected to Africa.
The South tried to protect its vital flow of slave labor (not a good people-content flow!) and the North realizing the errs of our ways...we fought a bloody Civil War over Africa.
We haven't looked back to Africa for much since only to fight proxy wars with Nazism and Communism. But it is still worth protecting!!
My point would be...the US, Europe, and other Core players have a lot at stake in Africa. History is going to judge us badly over this century for OUR lack of human caring---we have been late to respond or unresponsive over AIDS, poverty and genocide. Plus there are real dollars at stake with natural resources (oil, diamonds, etc) and a "idle" labor force. Whatever our excuse: ignorance or arrogance...Africa is the best place I can think of to put the "Blueprint" into action.
To be historically accurate, the United States banned the importation of slaves from Africa in 1808. The unpleasantness of the 1860s was largely over how to deal with the descendants of those Africans who had been part of that earlier flow.
In terms of its effect on the lives of most people in the Core, Africa could sink into the ocean like Atlantis tomorrow and hardly anybody would notice. If you would like to see enough of the Core care about protecting Africa for it to receive the attention that was devoted to, say the Balkans in the 1990s, connectivity to the Core will have to increase.
Fortunately, the current high energy prices provide a way for that to happen.
Brazil has converted almost all of its transportation infrastructure to use ethanol made from sugar cane instead of gasoline. All cars in the United States can use 10% ethanol without any noticable effect except higher octane and lower exhaust emissions. Some FlexFuel vehicles can use blends of up to 85% ethanol.
If European nations were to invest in ethanol plants in their former colonies in Africa and gurantee to import the product, they would not only diversify their energy sources and clean their air, they would divert a significant fraction of their energy dollars to Africa. Most important, they would have important connections to Africa. If some sort of instability were threatening 10% or even 5% of the transportation fuel of France, Germany or England, they would definetely care about it and be very inclined to do something about it.
Chris Keller: you would probably enjoy conducting a more thorough review of Tom's writing, he answers your questions about why and how to "protect" (or, to be more accurate, to *connect*) africa often and in detail. Based on my sense of your concern for the contintent conveyed in your comment, you will like what you read.
Mark in TX: brilliant comment, thank you. exportation of brazilian sugar ethanol manufacturing technology to africa to engender fuel exports to europe is one of the coolest solutions i've heard in some time, one of those rare and beautiful ones that helps solve multiple problems simultaneously.