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xv Introduction In early December 2010, as we were researching the final sections of this book, our local newspaper, The Windsor Star, ran a long editorial on the Congo entitled “The Congo’s Plight: A Tragedy without End.” In that editorial a Congolese clergyman was quoted as saying that “populations in the east of the country remain subject to a regime of growing terror and insecurity—violence, massacres, sexual violence and murder are recorded every day.” It was further reported that 15,000 women had been raped in eastern Congo over the previous year, that 36,000 people died every month (roughly the population of a medium-sized Ontario town), and that the total death toll over the past decade approached 5.5 million, with another 2 million displaced from their homes. All this tragedy had been coupled with an ineffectual international response: in the words of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, “The barbaric civil war being waged there is the most lethal conflict since the Second World War … Yet no humanitarian crisis generates so little attention per million corpses, or such a pathetic international response” (both as quoted in Windsor Star, 2010, Dec. 6: A6). The editorial ended with a question: “Where are the world leaders acknowledging that this horrific crisis needs to be addressed?” Our interest in undertaking this project could not have been stated more clearly. First published as an essay, “The Coming Anarchy” in 1994, Robert Kaplan’s description of the disintegration of Sierra Leone in the early 1990s presages developments that were to ravage the Congo beginning two years later: “Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occurring, albeit in a more tempered and gradual manner, throughout West Africa and much of the underdeveloped world: the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war” (2000: 9). It is now clear that the Congo’s near decade-and-a-half-long humanitarian disaster, like the atrocities in Darfur that took place during some of Introduction xvi the same time period, presented a newly “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P)–equipped United Nations with challenges that it failed to address with anything approaching adequate responses. The question as to why this was the case remains. Was the concept of R2P fundamentally flawed or, as Kaplan’s analysis would suggest, were the first two crises that occurred after it had gained acceptance by the international community simply too complex for any international involvement to bring under control? The answer is a combination of the two explanations, and in the following chapters we hope to traverse in brief the troubled history of the Congo, examine the record of three UN attempts to deal with the fallout of that troubled history, as well as investigate the role of mass media in generating public support in developed nations either to support a UNled intervention or to lead one authorized by the UN Security Council. Admittedly this is an ambitious a task to undertake within the covers of one volume. Nevertheless, in the following chapters we have attempted to weave together these disparate threads. To neglect any one of them would leave readers with an incomplete appreciation of the magnitude of the task entailed in controlling both inter- and intra-state violence in a country that, if it had ever gained control over all its territory, had clearly lost that control by 1997. In short, the story of why the Congo is mired in a never-ending humanitarian disaster and why the international community has been unable to mitigate that disaster to any meaningful extent does not provide easy answers. Readers should not expect to find in these pages a set of simplistically packaged solutions. To understand how major US mass media, both television and print, treated the seemingly endless conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and what role they played in the international response, readers need to have background information relating to three major areas. First, it is important to understand that the Congo is both blessed and cursed. It is blessed with size (the third-largest country in Africa), combined with an abundant range of valuable mineral resources and “more than one-quarter of the continent’s total” supply of water (Williams, 2007: 1033). In turn, since the 1880s it has been cursed by a history of colonial subjugation as brutal as experienced anywhere (Hochschild, 1998); a tribally diverse population that complicates...

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