Indifference

My host sister goes to a one-on-one private English lesson every Saturday, and the company that she goes to also contracts with a Japanese teacher. My host family graciously offered to take me to sign up today. While I was in the waiting room during her lesson, I was bad and read some books in English. I read Plato's Pheades and that put me in a really extistential mood, of course I was also craving current events so I picked up a TIME laying on the table. The cover story was about the ongoing suffering caused by nearly a decade of brutal war in Congo. It got me thinking...I was seven when that conflict started, I was 2 when the Bosnia genocide occured. Logically which event should I know more about? Well, here is where all logic fails. I know far more about the Bosnia-Herzegovina conflict than I do about the conflict in the Congo. I've been vaguely aware of simmering conflicts in Africa, yet nothing specific was ever mentioned. I knew that there had been some sort of political change and that region had rather fluid borders, but I knew none of the details. The article that I read in the TIME magazine today stirred my conscious. I realized that this had been going on for nearly my whole life and I was blissfully ignorant, even after making an effort to at least stay minimally briefed in world affairs. I got home tonight and immediately tried to learn all I could about the conflict and all the international decisions and the various positions of major countries. I uncovered numerous articles depicting the complicated politics of the situation, the corruption, and the civilian suffering. One of the most powerful columns I read was by Johann Hari, it's long but well worth the read　(that's a link by the way, and hint to read that article). Anyway, like I was saying, my conscious was stirred. Now I can't just standby and let all those people suffer. I feel like I have to do something, but as I read I realized the brevity of the situation. There are so many parties to this conflict, all working for their own motivations. So many societies, governments, infrastructure, and lives have been destroyed by this ruthless war. Where do you start? Each militia group has its own demands, motivations, and position. How can you possibly reconcile them all? Even if you could manage to reconcile their differences, how do you rebuild a society that has been so ravaged by war that the very innate human instincts of love and compassion seem to have disappeared? How do you reintegrate women maimed by atrocious, heinous sexual violence into a culture that shuns it's very own children as witches and blames all their woes on them? Most importantly how do you rebuild a society with children that know nothing but fear, adrenaline, hate, and death? If you start by rebuilding the infrastructure to supply basic necessities to the millions of starving people the militias will destroy them. If you start by disarming the militias they will simply buy more guns. If you start by healing the civilian population they will simply be raped again by the militias. If you try to reconcile the differences between the numerous states involved in the conflict you may simply re-open old wounds. Just as this is a multi-faceted problem, the solution also must be multi-faceted. That means unilateral co-operation from all the countries of the world. None of us are isolated from this conflict and this conflict affects all of us. As a race we are all connected to the people dying in Congo. How can we ignore it? Yet it continues to slip under the radar of nightly news programmes, radio, and newspaper. Increasing the awareness of the conflict, I think, is the first step to reconciling this horrendous chapter in human history. The point that occurred again and again in all the articles I read was the immense reserves of valuable resources that Congo processes and the illegal trafficking and sale of those resources. Two of the most used metals in modern electronic devices come from the Congo. Did you know that? All the money from the sale of those metals to big multi-national corporations goes to the militias and their guns, not to improving Congo for the Congolese people. Part of the solution is to demand proper commerce of those metals. As consumers it's our duty to demand that our free market economy live up to our expectations of humane commerce.
The thing that scares me the most is the lack on any sort of intellectual news programmes here in Japan. It’s all the routine weather, some fire in a pharmacy somewhere, a train derailing, etc. and then strange game shows and soap operas. One of the new world powers has a population of people that are unaware of the world that they influence. I’m sure many Japanese companies have/do buy metals from illegal sources in the Congo, but the people here are indifferent to the effects of their consumer culture. It’s a disturbing trend in the post-modern world...
－鴻