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International News Round Up: Mugabe’s Diamond Fever

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

If diamonds are forever, so is the pain they cause. Though this strain of diamond fever—with its corresponding blood diamonds—doesn’t call Sierra Leone and Guinea home, it does bear a strong resemblance to the one(s) found there a decade ago. This time, however, it’s hit Zimbabwe, as Mugabe’s sickening government looks to one of the country’s natural riches to spice things up economically.

But diamond fever’s not the only illness plaguing Zimbabwe’s borders. The country’s hoping to gather international aid in its fight against a cholera epidemic, which has been declared a national emergency. When will someone cut this oppressed, violent, inflation-stricken, refugee spawning, utterly ravaged country a break?

And on another side of Africa lies Rwanda, stirring up trouble for its neighbor, the Congo. The beleaguered former Belgian territory is preparing for an internal rebellion, and neighboring Rwanda, harboring a series of “strategic interests” is content to fuel the fire by sending over hundreds “if not,” as The New York Times put it, “thousands of troops to rebel front lines.”

A blood-spattered Mumbai has led many—powerful and otherwise—to ask whether Pakistan is doing what it can (or, worse, what it shouldn’t) to battle militancy. The most recent carnage has raised questions of how effective the country’s current government is when fighting that extremist-spawned violence.

More than a half a year since the disastrous Sichuan earthquake struck China, couples victim to a one-child policy are trying to rebuild. While still in mourning, many middle-aged couples are seeking government-funded medical help—such as reversing vasectomies—to start again by having another child now that so many of the country’s single children were lost during calamity.

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International News Roundup

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

Suicide Bombs Just Won’t Stop Afghanistan took another grieving day today after a Taliban suicide bomber packed a tanker truck chock full of explosives and detonated it in Kandahar’s temporary council office. Felt throughout the city, the bomb killed six people, wounded 40 and caused five houses to cave in on themselves. Few newspapers or Web sites ever analyze what bomb-wounded really means: these folks may not be dead, but they’re badly burnt, some of them maimed or blinded, nursing gashes and lost limbs. Even one dead or one wounded is still too many.

Another Bomb and…Attending School is a…Sin? And in the same article as above, we learn that in another part of Afghanistan, the Nangarhar Province, not only did a Taliban suicide bomber slam into an American military convoy, killing what media outlets have estimated at between 56 and 74 people, but also that two as-yet-unidentified motorcyclists sprayed eight adolescent girls on their way to school with battery acid. Why? Because they were women attempting to receive an education.

When Will the Congo Heal If it’s not Belgian oppression, it’s widespread rape. If it’s not rape, it’s coerced fighting. Young men in eastern Congo have run from their homes, choosing displacement over membership to rebel forces. These men have explained the rebels beat their home doors down, seeking new ranks, stopping at nothing to gain new hands to help their cause.

Europe Wants no More from Russia (With Love or Not) Tired of facing the fact that more than 60 percent of its energy comes from imports (two fifths of that Russian in source), the EU is planning a supergrid of internal power supplies (e.g. increasing dependence on North Sea area wind farms) that would rely less on Russian monopoly.

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Mediating catastrophe

Thursday, October 18th, 2007

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I recently went with another reporter to photograph the Mununga II camp containing 8,000 people displaced from the war. This place has a sort of biblical aesthetic. There are two active volcanoes and most of the ground around Goma is jagged volcanic rock. The people displaced from the war sleep, eat, cook, and the children play atop it, constantly lacerating the bottoms of their feet.

The situation as it is seems sufficiently horrible but in order to get a photograph the wire services will run, you have to find ribs and death. That’s the problem with Congo, people in the camps are malnourished but not starving. It’s difficult to get that James Natchtwey gaunt-face / flies-on-the-eye photograph. People are dying slowly, which is more amenable to time-lapse than snapshot. A malnourished child has a distended abdomen and a bloated face. Something clearly looks wrong but a photo won’t cry out death.

According to UN OCHA (the UN agency responsible for coordinating with other UN agencies about humanitarian crises) there are currently 650,000 people displaced from the war and living in these Eastern Congo camps. There was recently a cholera outbreak in this one and I’m supposed to be headed north where the problem is measles. Yet it’s very difficult to get the attention of major media outlets because this tragedy doesn’t fit the long-established visual cultural of mediated Africa.

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That’s one side of the PR dilemma. The other concerns the displaced. People here are extremely savvy when it comes to photography. I first noticed this when I was in Rwanda training a local in photography. Rwanda is an extremely hostile place to photograph because the population seems to think that every picture will end up on a UNICEF poster.

We were in the back alleys of Kigali’s Muslim quarter when my student asked for permission to take a photograph. Someone from the crowd that had formed behind us yelled, “Hey, they’re going to say you’re the poorest man in Africa.”

My student then took the photograph and we all had a laugh.

Flash to the camp in Congo.

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First we had to meet the president of the camp and his wife to pay our respects and get permission to photograph anything. Once we had permission, we went through the camp accompanied by a young woman who proceeded to guide me to the huts of the most aged and ailing people. She grabbed an old man with a massive goiter and placed him in front of his hut. Then she pushed aside the cloth door to reveal the squalid interior.

I took the photo and we moved on and she grabbed another man, crazed, with jagged teeth. Same thing as before, setting him up for me. On it went, us going through the camp, her calling forth the elderly, dying, pathetic.

Thing was, the volcano and the suffering were just the insane backdrop of what felt like any loathsome PR job in Los Angeles.

I eventually escaped and joined a woman and her five children as she cooked dinner. The moment of intimacy allowed for some natural and poignant photographs. Satisfied that I had captured something real, I headed back to the car to try and drink water without anyone seeing. (You become precariously dehydrated in the camps and feel guilty drinking your private stash of potable water). Outside the car a group of 8-year-olds had gathered wanting food and to have their pictures taken. The driver put in a tape of Celine Dion songs while a skirmish broke out among the boys.

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Celine sings: If I kiss you likje this and you whisper like that.

Outside the fight escalates, two boys shove each other.

It was lost long ago but it’s all coming back to me.

A punch is thrown.

If you want me like this and if you need me like that.

One of the boys picks up a large rock and is about to smash it against the other child.

It was dead long ago but it’s all coming back to me. It’s so hard to resist and its all coming back to me.

The violence stops, I gaze at the boy with the rock for a spell and then he drops it. We leave the camp and I file the photos and soon hear basically that they will not be used because there have been no new reports of cholera in the last few days and the photos lacked sufficiently dramatic elements.

——
Andrew McGregor is a contributing correspondent. This is the second entry in his Congo notebook. His photos have been published by Reuters, the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.

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Rapes like rustling leaves: a Congo notebook

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007

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One of the reasons I chose to come to the Congo is that for the past several weeks in Rwanda, I have been hearing rumors on the streets that the war in Congo will get bad again and very soon. I am in the east of the DRC in a city called Goma in a province named North Kivu, which has not experienced prolonged peace since 1994, when the consequences of the Rwandan genocide first spread across the region, exacerbating tensions everywhere.

The singular reason people think the war here will escalate again is because the incidence of rape is soaring.

In Congo this is like the rustling of leaves before a storm, part of the nightmare theater of the absurd the people here have suffered before. Rape here is so common that journalists don’t report on it, generally dismissing it as part of the problematic culture of the region. No newspaper stories but Doctors Without Borders chronicled a doubling in the amount of rapes last month.

The streets of Goma are tense and dangerous. Two nights ago six people were murdered and the following morning thirty-five rebels were killed. Helicopter gun ships and aged Russian cargo planes fill the skies.

Reliable information is a rare commodity. Within eighty miles there are hundreds of thousands of displaced people living in make-shift camps, multiple vicious armies and militias, starvation in the jungles, child soldiers, nearly twenty thousand UN personnel—the only “blue helmets” in the world authorized to use force—and yet there are only a handful of journalists, most of whom are transient, here and gone before they can know enough to make an impact.

I’m supposed to be headed to a region that has not received food for six weeks because it was deprived of aid until the battle lines moved. The human calamity is anticipated to be the same or worse as the recent famine in Niger… I’ll be sure to send pictures.

——
Andrew McGregor is a contributing Africa reporter. This is the first in a series of notebook entries from Congo.

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