OpEdNews » "You Cannot Eat Propaganda, and You Cannot Eat Hope..."

Support OEN
With Your
Tax-Deductible Donation

Tags for This Article:

Populum Tag Cloud Control Panel
	Fine tune your search to access content

Articles	Links
Diaries	Products
Events	All

All time
Last 6 mos
Last month
Last week
Last 24 hrs

From:
Month Day Year

To:
Month Day Year

Alphabet Popularity	Count ON Count OFF
This Level	Sub-levels

Tag(s): Africa; Censorship; Charity; Explotation Of Human Rights; Foreign Policy Failure Americas; Human Rights; Media; Media CNN; Media Distortion; Media Foreign; (more...) Media Independent; Media International; Media Journalists Endangered; USA United States Of America (less...)
Add to My Group

March 26, 2007 at 09:31:10

"You Cannot Eat Propaganda, and You Cannot Eat Hope..."

by Georgianne Nienaber Page 1 of 1 page(s)

www.opednews.com

SAVE FAVORITES

VIEW FAVORITES

View Ratings | Rate It

Calm Returns to Kinshasa--Copyright Olga Frayshteter/MONUC

UPDATED

The UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) is reporting that over 100 people were killed in the capital city of Kinshasa in two days of heavy fighting that ended Friday. The violence was instigated by fighters loyal to defeated presidential candidate Jean-Pierre Bemba, who fled to safety in the South African embassy. South Africa has called to an end to the violence. Reports from the area indicate that, although calm has returned, doctors are ill-equipped to contend with the steady stream of dead and wounded—all victims of heavy machine gun fire and mortar explosions. The casualties included the Congolese regular military (FARDC) and the Congolese National Police, members of Bemba’s guards, and Congolese and expatriate civilians.

Nearly 4 million people have died from hunger and disease in DRC in an unreported war which has raged since 1998. There was a window of calm and hope in October (2006) when closely-monitored democratically held elections saw Bemba lose to President Joseph Kabila. Bemba soon alleged fraud, and the election process was tainted, renewing anger and resentments. DRC is linguistically divided, with Bemba drawing support from Kinshasa and the Lingala speaking west, while Kabila is more popular in the Swahili speaking eastern part of the country.

Hundreds of millions of dollars of aid from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been pumped into DRC with little tangible results. Meanwhile, villagers and orphans in the east go hungry, while doctors at Mamo Yemo Hospital in Kinshasa are crying for help to attend to the wounded. The dead are beyond hope, help or mercy. The ultimate irony is that the wounded know no language barrier. You can find them in the hospitals in western Kinshasa and in eastern Goma. Meanwhile CNN and the Christian Science Monitor continue to focus on gorillas and wildlife while broken babies and broken mammas fill hospital tents in Goma and the innocent die at Mama Yemo.

Broken Baby in DRC-- Copyright G. Nienaber

keith harmon snow (sic), an independent American MONUC accredited journalist is now on the ground in DRC. He reports that mainstream American media and Congolese support groups are totally blind to hidden agendas in DRC. The aid and guns continue to flow, and the innocent go on suffering forever.

“They do not report on the true thieves; or the true thievery -- they are always blaming the victims -- the people of Congo who, most of the time, suffer in silence, and die out of sight,” snow wrote when speaking about Congolese support networks.

“The Congolese on the plantations, in the forest, around the gold mines, are being paid as little as 1000 francs Congolese ($2) per month. After 100 years there is nothing -- no health care, no development, and everything is poised to have exactly the same now. It’s all being covered over by propaganda. But you cannot eat propaganda, and you cannot eat hope, and you cannot live on two dollars a month, snow says.”

A UN official writes, “We spent two nights in our offices here in Kinshasa, with our colleagues…no way to sleep…Oh my God...the situation this morning (Saturday) at 9:30 AM is calm but volatile; we do not know what how it will evolve....”

MONUC peacekeepers are now patrolling the streets of Kinshasa and removing unexploded munitions. In an official statement, MONUC welcomed “the restoration of order in Kinshasa by government forces, although it deeply regrets that force was used to resolve a situation that could and should have been settled through dialogue.”

Note: As the author of this story, I am writing as a MONUC-accredited journalist.

Georgianne Nienaber is a writer, author, and investigative journalist. She lives in the world. Her articles have appeared in The Huffington Post, SCOOP New Zealand, Glide Magazine, Rwanda's New Times, India's TerraGreen, COA News, ZNET, OpEdNews, The Journal of the International Primate Protection League, Friends of the Congo, Africa Front, The United Nations Publication, A Civil Society Observer, and Zimbabwe's The Daily Mirror. Her fiction exposé of insurance fraud in the horse industry, Horse Sense, was re-released in early 2006. Gorilla Dreams: The Legacy of Dian Fossey was also released in 2006. Nienaber spent much of 2007 doing research in South Africa, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She was in DRC as a MONUC-accredited journalist, and recently spent six weeks in Southern Louisiana investigating hurricane reconstruction. She is currently developing a documentary on the Gulf of Mexico DEAD ZONE.

	Contact Author
	Contact Editor
	View Other Articles by Author

Bookmark this page: (what's this?)

(More...)

3 comments

I am me, and there is no other exactly like me :O)I hope I can come back to this later, I really just want to say something on here, and dont know if I will ever be back.
Katarina OlszkeaI am me, and there is no other exactly like me :O)I hope I can come back to this later, I really just want to say something on here, and dont know if I will ever be back.

I think humans have a violent gene......

This comment has been flagged and is awaiting review by the editors -
Reason: Totally Irrelevant

that makes them fight and war, instead of having survival, loving others and peace. Richy elite men and governments are truly evil.

hey, if you give a politician viagra, what happens?>

he grows taller. :O)

by Katarina Olszkea (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 35 comments) on Monday, March 26, 2007 at 1:44:21 PM

A native Californian, Jan Baumgartner is a freelance writer currently living in Maine. Her background includes scriptwriting, comedy writing for the Northern California Emmy Awards, and travel writing for The New York Times. She has worked as a grant writer for the non-profit sector in the fields of academia, AIDS, and wildlife conservation and anti-poaching for NGO's in the U.S. and Africa. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous online and print publications in the U.S. and internat...

to see more of bio, click on member name
Jan BaumgartnerA native Californian, Jan Baumgartner is a freelance writer currently living in Maine. Her background includes scriptwriting, comedy writing for the Northern California Emmy Awards, and travel writing for The New York Times. She has worked as a grant writer for the non-profit sector in the fields of academia, AIDS, and wildlife conservation and anti-poaching for NGO's in the U.S. and Africa. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous online and print publications in the U.S. and internat...

to see more of bio, click on member name

Crisis in DRC

Georgianne, great reporting. It is not unusual that most mainstream media is not reporting on what is happening in the DRC, or myriad other hot spots in Africa. CNN has become laughable - for many of the reasons that you site. I find many reports on the violence in DRC from the All Africa website. However, most Americans would not know about this site, or in truth, are so indifferent to what goes on in Africa that it is of no interest or consequence. Jan Egelund, during his final interview with Charlie Rose before leaving his post with the UN, brought up the 4 million dead in DRC and how little attention had been given to this catastrophe, saying in fact, that the Darfur crisis had become the cause du jour, deflecting attention from DRC and other crisis areas. Not to minimize the horrors of Darfur, but media, and the Western world, tends to pick and choose what crises will be flagged, addressed and publicized. For whatever reasons, DRC has remained under the radar.

Anderson Cooper claims to be "interested" in all things African, but I find his reporting to be dilatory at best. A year and a half ago, during the worst of the Niger famine, and when I heard nothing on mainstream media about the millions suffering and dead, I contacted CNN and other media outlets as well. Another couple of weeks passed by before Anderson Cooper was enroute to Niger - touting CNN as the first to be there, witnessing the tragedy firsthand. It is sad and rather pathetic how we view Africa and Africans as "other," or less than.

I don't necessarily agree, however, that all the focus has been on endangered wildlife in the region, i.e., gorillas, etc. In truth, little has been mentioned of this on mainstream media sites as of late - the spotlight comes and goes - I don't see any current interest or agenda on CNN or other broadcasts regarding gorillas or other species, including in newsletters I receive from various wildlife conservation organizations. Sadly, I think more and more people are feeling that they must choose between causes - this or that - instead of the notion that compassion can be limitless; we can feel deeply for and want to make a difference in the lives of all living things.

Bleak fact is, with the world in such chaos, both manmade and natural, suffering -- human, animal, and environmental - will continue on this grand and heartbreaking scale, and monies will never reach all of those who desperately need it. We will continue to turn a blind eye to the miseries of the poorest, sickest, and those most violated and vulnerable, while we continue our quest to destroy wildlife and natural environments at an ever frightening pace.

by Jan Baumgartner (52 articles, 137 quicklinks, 10 diaries, 252 comments) on Tuesday, March 27, 2007 at 12:19:25 PM