The media spotlight
Chad has been in the news a lot lately. Every morning as I get ready in my hotel room, there is another story on the BBC talking about the spillover from Darfur. That’s the angle, of course – that the Janjaweed have taken all they can in Sudan and are now moving into Chad. The situation is considerably more complex than that, but one can always count on journalists to parachute into a crisis to air knowing reports on matters with which they are barely familiar. It is the way of the industry these days.
It really gets my hackles up to watch some of these stories, even though I know it is important that Chad takes its rightful place on the world stage. I hate watching the reporter sitting across from a crying mother, nodding with a studiously pained expression as the woman relates the bombing of her village. I hate the way the camera zooms in when her eight year-old bursts into tears. I even frowned when I saw a long interview with a colleague I met in Abeche, touring a bombed out village with the reporter and agreeing with her that it was all about Darfur. I thought, et tu Matthew? Of course it's his job to say something sensationalist to guarantee pickup in the media. Obfuscation is expedient. But still.
On the way into the office this morning, the radio was full of stories about the new accord reached between Chad, Sudan and the Central African Republic. We ask the driver what he thinks about this new agreement. He shrugs impassively, his eyes on the road. “Faire des accords, c’est facile. Mais c’est la pratique...” It’s easy to make deals, but acting on them is another matter. Chadians are tired of talking.
It’s funny to me that this much-touted accord was reached in Cannes. Hearing about it, I had a sudden vision of the bubble I wrote about earlier this week. I pictured Presidents Bashir, Deby and Bozize sitting around some marvelous poolside eating camembert and agreeing in a most gentlemanly fashion that they would not support each other’s rebels, while le Patron M. Chirac nods approvingly. Meanwhile, a thousand miles away, the AKs stutter in the desert. And the next morning, the singsong chanting of new recruits trotting past my window greets the dawn.
posted by E @ 3:59 AM
2 Comments:
I know what you mean. I watch BBC every morning, and today they were suggesting that perhaps the situation could become "another Rwanda"
P.S. See your previous notes under WTF....
Yeah, that's a major WTF. There is no meaningful resemblance between what is going on in Chad (or Sudan) and what happened in Rwanda. That said, there is a meaningful resemblance between the world's inaction then and now.
It drives me crazy how easy it is to portray wars in Africa as "tribal" or "ethnic" conflicts. They often are, in the sense that there are two or more ethnic groups fighting each other. But they are almost always fighting each other for very modern reasons. Politicians find it expedient to use ethnicity or religion as a rallying point, regardless of the fact that it's usually fundamentally irrelevant to the cause of the fighting. That's not unique to Africa -- we see it from Kosovo to Iraq to Burma. But for some reason we Westerners are easily convinced that the tribals are at it again. Perhaps it's because then we can look away and say there's nothing we can do if these people want to kill each other.
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