Darfur is Not the Only Tragedy in Africa

The international community has still failed to adequately address the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. What's sad is that Darfur has actually elicited a fair amount of coverage and still very little has been done. With the world's weak commitment to the troubles of Africa, it is no wonder other tragedies have gone almost unreported, as covered by The Coalition for Darfur:

In Uganda, the Lord's Resistance Army has abducted some 20,000 children and forced them to become either soldiers or slaves. The attacks have displaced nearly 2 million people and every night, tens of thousands of children trek to the cities to sleep, in hopes of avoiding the rampant kidnapping. For years, the LRA had been supported by the government in Khatroum, the same government now responsible for the genocide in Darfur.

In the Congo, an estimated 3.5 million people have died of disease, starvation and violence since 1998. The situation in the Congo can be directly traced to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which itself took nearly 1 million lives. There are currently 19,000 UN peacekeepers in the Congo with a mandate to disarm the militias, but so far they only attention this peacekeeping force has received has come from allegations that soldiers are sexually abusing the residents of the DRC.

Darfur is an anomaly only to the extent that it has managed to generate a significant amount of coverage and global attention. But if the world does not act soon to address this genocide in Sudan, is it all but inevitable that it too will eventually evolve into years-long, seemingly intractable conflict such as those found in Uganda and Congo.