Demagogue

Reuters has this article on the world's forgotten crises

Brutal conflicts in Congo, Uganda and Sudan are the world's three biggest "forgotten emergencies", each dwarfing the toll of the Asian tsunami but attracting scant media interest, a new Reuters AlertNet poll of experts shows.

War in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country two-thirds the size of Western Europe, has claimed at least 10 times as many lives as the December tsunami yet remains almost unheard of outside of Africa, key players in the aid world said.

"It's the worst humanitarian tragedy since the Holocaust," John O'Shea, chief executive of Irish relief agency GOAL, told AlertNet. "The greatest example on the planet of man's inhumanity to man."

The article examines a litany of crises around the world that are receiving little to no attention.

As anyone who has read this blog for more than 1 day knows, I've been writing relentlessly about Darfur, but that is a rather lackluster excuse for why I have been ignoring these other situations.

I guess the best I can do at this point is to highly recommend a book I just finished reading by John F. Clark called "The African Stakes of the Congo War." The on-going war in the DRC is absurdly complicated, but Clark's book is a good place to start if you want to know more about "Africa's First World War" - a conflict that has taken nearly 4 million lives over the last six years.