Kinshasa’s skyline, seen from The River
Rory MacLean has done me the honour of responding to my recent post, berating him for writing, in a review of Tim Butcher’s Blood River for The Guardian, that ‘there is little difference between the Congo seen by Stanley and by Butcher’, and suggesting that readers should weep for Congo but not go there. (See the original post and comments here.)
Rory wrote:
I am sorry if my review of Tim Butcher’s Blood River has upset some DRC residents. I am no Congo expert, but I understand that life in much of the country can be very grim. The Lancet reports that 1,200 people die in the Congo each day through civil unrest. By comparison, post-Saddam Iraq and post-Taliban Afghanistan do not even come close to 1,200 dead per day. As to...
Maybe I could fix things up so they’ll go: a lighter repairman at work
I’m still reeling from returning to Congo to find Kinshasa flooded (for want of a bookshelf our library was lost), our neighbourhood hit by up to four power-cuts a day (candle sales are booming; my laptop battery is foutou), and a series of mind-boggling news reports (a radioactive river, an attempt by the ruling alliance to rewrite the constitution, journalists beaten up in a Minister’s office, MONUC moved to express its ‘deep shock‘ at ‘extreme violence’ after demonstrators threw stones at peacekeepers in North Kivu (where, as you may have heard, some 350,000 people have been driven from their homes and crops by ongoing combat, reprisal killings, rapes, forced recruitment,...
Happy Birthday, Alan Johnston.
1. The BBC’s Gaza correspondent turns 45 today. This is his ninth week in captivity. Reporters without Borders say 14 journalists have been kidnapped in the Gaza Strip since January 2005, but this is the first time that any of them has held for more than two weeks.
2. Arriving in the UK, I found the headlines dominated by one of Britain’s periodic outbreaks of mass sentimentality, last seen on this sort of scale in the period following the death of Princess Diana. Urged on by the press and a growing constellation of their favourite celebrities, the public - or at least that part of it which most avidly consumes the news, and in turn (symbiosis!) helps to direct its attention - is alarmed about a pretty young girl called Madeleine McCann who...
On my bookshelf, side-by-side, are two books called Staying Alive. Both are, in fact, extremely useful guides to staying alive (in one sense or another), and so they both have their uses in emergencies, but that’s where the resemblance ends.
One is about how to stay safe as a humanitarian worker in a conflict zone. Written by a former British Army colonel who joined the ICRC after leaving the Parachute Regiment, it provides just enough technical background - accompanied by the inevitable silly cartoons - to demystify the dangers and thus render them manageable. There is information on different kinds of landmines and how to avoid them, what to do when the shooting starts, how to deal with roadblocks, how to make a basic shelter, and, for example, how to deal with looters.
A lot of...