“While the situation is bad in Darfur, there is a much worse genocide going on not far from it. That is the conflict that has been raging in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) for the last decade in which approximately 6 to 7 million people have been killed.”

There has been a lot of media attention given to the genocide going on in Darfur in recent years. While attention is given to this crisis, many facts go unreported.

The responsibility for the conflict is blamed entirely on the Sudanese government, while the role of rebel groups is left out entirely. One fact rarely mentioned is that the conflict began with attacks by rebel groups on government targets.

The Sudanese government then responded by funding the Janjaweed. The CIA Factbook says the conflict in Darfur has displaced nearly 2 million people and caused an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 deaths.

In 1996, the Clinton administration gave $20 million to rebel forces, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). The Boston Globe wrote in 1999, “To the peril of regional stability, the Clinton administration has used northern Uganda as a military training ground for southern Sudanese rebels fighting the Muslim government of Khartoum.”

The Economist observed that the SPLA was “little more than an armed gang of Dinkas… killing, looting and raping. Its indifference, almost animosity, towards the people it was supposed to be ‘liberating’ was all too clear.”

There have been widespread reports from humanitarian organizations of various instances of serious human rights abuses committed by the SPLA, including extra-judicial killings, beatings, arbitrary detention, slavery, raping and pillaging. In 1998, Clinton bombed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant. The plant produced 90 percent of Sudan’s major pharmaceutical products and led to the death of probably 20,000 people, mostly children. The plant provided 50 percent of Sudan’s medicines and its destruction left the country with no supplies of chloroquine, the standard treatment for malaria.

While the situation is bad in Darfur, there is a much worse genocide going on not far from it. That is the conflict that has been raging in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for the last decade. Approximately 6 to 7 million people have been killed in the conflict. It’s the largest conflict in the world since World War II. What’s going on there has been a silent genocide, receiving little or no media attention. When it does receive attention it is referred to as civil war, with no mention of the corporations that make enormous profits from the region. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a country extremely rich in resources, though the population is poor. It has diamonds, gold, rubber, coffee, cocoa, Coltan and Niobium. Coltan is an incredibly important mineral necessary for high-tech industry and is used in cell phones and other products; 80 percent of the Coltan reserves in the world are located in the Congo. The U.S. has a history in this nation: It helped overthrow democracy in the Congo in 1961 by assassinating Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected President of the Congo, after which the U.S. supported a 30-year dictatorship by Mobutu.

The invasion of the Congo in 1996 by Ugandan and Rwandan forces, sponsored by the U.S., triggered the current genocide. Rwanda was, and is, under the dictatorship of Paul Kagame, who was trained by the U.S. in Kansas. Besides the genocide, there is also mass rape going on. There are even cases of babies being raped, as well as what Newsweek calls “practically an epidemic” of “fistula.” So what is the explanation for this discrepancy in media coverage? Sudan is the third largest producer of crude oil in Africa, behind Nigeria and Angola.

While Angola and Nigeria are U.S. allies; Sudan is not. In fact, Sudan currently trades its oil with China, Indonesia and Malaysia. So Americans hypocritically campaign to stop the genocide in Darfur, which is carried out by an enemy state, while the much worse genocide in the Congo remains ignored.

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