Fantastic talk last night at the Frontline Club all about the Congo.
The panel was great; Michaela Wrong of the Financial Times and New Statesman; Marcus Bleasdale, a photojournalist who has worked in the Congo for 10 years; Dino Mahtani from the Financial Times and Reuters, and Mulegwa Zihindula, spokesman for President Joseph Kabila from 2002-2004.
And the discussion really got firey. One Congolese man stood up, introduced himself as a journalist, and then tried to flog his yet-unpublished book. Another embarked upon a rant about how Rwandan president Paul Kagame was all to blame. Insightful stuff.
But the most dramatic moment was when a British film-maker accused the panel of indulging in “the pornography of disaster”. It was as if she had come prepared to make her speech, for the accusations she levelled at the panel were completely without foundation: she said there was no context to the discussion, when they had spent 90 minutes putting the issues into context. She said that coverage was all about finding a dying child and talking through it’s last minutes (particularly directing her venom at Radio 4’s series of programmes about the DRC). And she slated the rest for showing graphic images that drove away investors and thrilled in it’s depiction of the horrors of war.
But she completely missed the point. The whole idea of “demystifying the Congo” is explaining how, with the war directly killing so few, so many are dying of treatable diseases and hunger. And forums like this are the perfect place to “demystify” the Congo; indeed putting everything into context and debating the causes and solutions. As Marcus Bleasdale so succinctly put it, perhaps we are dwelling on the horrors of it, but while children are dying in their millions, then we should continue to force the issue to people’s attention.
