Where is the World? | Africa |Axisoflogic.com

In 1985, the tune �We are the World� was riding high in the charts. It was written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie and recorded live when the singers gathered at the 1985 American Music Awards ceremony. The recording was made with other popular and legendary performers such as Bob Dylan, Harry Belafonte, Kenny Rogers, Billy Joel, Tina Turner, Paul Simon, Bette Midler, and about 35 others. The recording was made as an American answer to an earlier British effort, Band Aid, and both were aimed at raising funds and awareness to ease atrocious living conditions in Africa. Later follow-ups by other groups carried on the process as did similar efforts in other countries, including mine.

It is unclear how much of the money raised, and there was a lot of it, ever became food in the mouth of an Ethiopian baby, or shelter for a pregnant Somali woman, or medicine for a sickly Eritrean teenager. Corrupt officials and brigands in some of the countries where the aid was destined and distribution problems among the donors managed to siphon off much of it. But there is little question that at least some of the money was put to good use; and for that we can be grateful. The jaded might say that many among this musical elite loaned their names and voices to these projects for the publicity but the end result and the nobility of the cause is justification enough for any inflated egos.

Today, the question has to be: �where is the world?�

All that misery that excited the world�s concern in 1985 is still there, almost twenty years later; and many new miseries have been added. But there isn�t much point in looking to your local newspaper or your television set for information because you won�t find much of it; this is just not glamorous stuff. We are far more interested in the daily blathering from the campaigns of the two idiots presently running for president in the United States, of the spouting of political drivel all round the world. But even more, we care about Britney and Madonna and Michael Jackson (again) and some soccer player from England.

Except for those African nations lucky enough to have resources that foreign white men want, the Africans are on their own to stew in their juices, to kill each other at an alarming pace, to die from horrible (and often preventable) sickness and starvation. In those nations where resources are to be found, there is sometimes a helping hand from the foreigners, but only until the assets are secured.

International aid organizations and charitable groups are struggling in obscurity to help because the world is just not listening � again.

There are ongoing droughts and famines in Mauritania, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Zambia, Malawi, Angola, Mozambique, Swaziland, Lesotho putting about 40 million people in danger of starvation or the diseases brought about by incessant hunger. In addition, several other countries are perilously close to similar conditions. People are on the move to escape the unremitting poverty and starvation in their homes and a new refugee crisis is brewing.

There is inter-tribal warfare in several countries; there are foreign mercenaries in several countries; there are more cases of AIDS in Africa than in all the rest of the world combined; there have been recent severe outbreaks of Ebola virus in both Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Congo-Brazzaville. Five years of civil war in DRC barely raised eyebrows around the world despite deaths exceeding 4 million people � conflict in C�te D�Ivoire and Liberia, instability in Chad and the Central African Republic, potential civil war in Nigeria, and a lot of hot air at the United Nations about genocide in Sudan.

And virtually all African countries are facing the devastation brought upon them by the disastrous intervention of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the dumping of heavily subsidized Western produce into their markets; they are unable to compete which weakens their economies even further and exacerbates all the natural and manmade problems.

We all remember massive killings in Rwanda and Somalia that occurred during the past decade; we should also remember how much attention the outside world gave to these problems until after the bleeding had stopped. So now that the hot-spot-du-jour is Sudan, the world is chattering about it while doing absolutely nothing to help �

Most of us never saw reports in our press of the more than 4 million dead in DRC, mainly from starvation, during their five years of civil war. Our leaders deliberately chose to allow the killing of more than 800,000 Rwandans in 1994, mainly hacked to pieces with machetes, despite months of foreknowledge of what was to come. It is often forgotten that the man in charge of that file at the United Nations was the current Secretary General, Kofi Annan. Our media is mostly silent about ongoing mass murders in Burundi; the West does nothing about the rule of a cruel henchman in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, and other �warlord� leaders in other countries. [Mugabe has made speeches where he describes himself as a �black Hitler, tenfold� but no Western leaders have made any noises about orchestrating a �regime change� in Zimbabwe.]

James Morris, head of the United Nations� World Food Program, has complained that the 40 million Africans facing immediate starvation are receiving no attention while 26 million Iraqis have the largesse of the world�s great powers because, well, those Iraqis are desperately in need of democracy; it is not polite to point out that the United States is desperately in need of Iraqi oil. And Morris is only addressing part of the problem; even he is missing the famine in Madagascar. Despite the occasional news that trickles from Madagascar about cyclones and flooding, the news of the other half of the country where drought is rampant is largely unknown.

Morris says: �I cannot escape the thought that we have a double standard. How is it we routinely accept the level of suffering and hopelessness in Africa we would never accept in any other part of the world?� Mr. Morris�s question is likely rhetorical because he surely knows the answer as clearly as the rest of us: skin colour.

Your local press doesn�t think you�ll be interested in any of these things, and perhaps you are not. But, oh my, didn�t many of us manage to get excited about the prospect of blowing up one little Iraqi with a pot belly and a funny mustache. And didn�t we all get indignant about him living in splendid luxury and golden palaces while his people suffered.

The world�s governments stood by, largely mute, while the United States and Britain did their level best to level Iraq, at a cost of billions of dollars, so that they can then rebuild it, at a cost of billions of dollars. And we all hear repeatedly about those ungrateful Iraqis who don�t appear to have the proper gratitude for having been freed from that terrible dictator only to be plunged into absolute chaos by a foreign power whose only interest in Iraq is oil.

And the world stands by, largely mute, while Africa teeters on the brink. Even though the musical elite of America and Britain saw fit to help out in the 1980�s, their homelands are ignoring the situation right now. And so is mine and, with only a few exceptions around the world, yours probably is too. It is fair to say that many of Africa�s problem derive from several centuries of European colonial rule; but that ended long ago. It is equally fair to say that many of Africa�s problems are the fault of the Africans themselves. But it is even more fair to say that the rapacious corporate colonialism that currently haunts Africa is the cause of their biggest problems.

Regardless of the source of Africa�s troubles, these are today�s problems, and they need the attention of those who can help today, including America and Britain. But in a triumph of moral leadership, America and Britain have managed to keep priorities straight and they haven�t wasted any of that Iraq-bashing money on starving Africans.

Additional articles by Paul Harris