Congo is a crisis without a campaign.

While the fighting in Darfur has spawned a celebrity-fueled human-rights movement, the fighting in Congo has been largely overlooked, writes the Chicago Tribune’s Paul Salopek. (By the way, Paul is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, for Explanitory Reporting & International Reporting and was the journalist who was detained in 2006 by the Sudaneese Government drifting from Chad to Sudan)

The level of human suffering in Sudan’s Darfur region during the past few years has been horrific. By most estimates, things have been even worse in Congo, where four million people have died from a civil war during the past 10 years — 20 times more than the number killed in Darfur. The Congo conflict also has forced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, and rival factions have turned to mass rapes as a weapon of war.

Yet the international outrage on a billion-dollar “Save Darfur” scale is nowhere to be found. Some experts worry that Congo is the victim of the Darfur campaign’s success. With so much celebrity activism and media coverage focused on one African crisis, the world appears to have little desire to ponder other calamities on the continent. And experts note that while the Darfur conflict presents a relatively clear-cut narrative for those in search of a cause — ethnic Africans being killed and forced from their homes by government-backed militias — the Congo war is much messier. Rebels, rival militias and government forces all are committing atrocities along shifting battle lines.

“I think there’s just this expectation that Congo will always be a bad, dark, brutal place,” said Anneke van Woudenberg, with the aid group Human Rights Watch. “This is the original ‘Heart of Darkness,’ right? So why care?”

More on this and his article, click here.

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