I am in Mugunga camp, near Goma. Not the place where you’d expect to find old acquaintances, but there he 
is. Charles. I see him. The tilt of his baseball camp, the mischievous glint of his eyes from behind those distinctive glasses, the smart checked shirt. That’s him! That’s Charles. And you might have recognised him too.
Charles Kimanuka is 78 year-old chef and lives in Mugunga camp with his six children. He’s also a bit of a star. If you have walked down the South Bank in the last couple of weeks you might have seen him. His grinning face is on display outside the National Theatre as a part of the Rankin exhibition. When we launched the Rankin exhibition, we did it to raise awareness of a harrowing, but forgotten conflict. Since then, Congo’s violence has increased even more horribly and Oxfam is doubling its emergency response to reach the newly displaced. But it’s important to remember in the midst of this, that many of the people in Congo have been displaced for sometime. Charles has been at Mugunga camp, which is home to 17,000 people for more than a year. For a guy that used to cook steak and Marconi cheese for important people, living on the rations is far from ideal. But he struggles on, he laughs and he copes.
Mugunga is one of the four camps in Goma, where Oxfam have a long established water and sanitation response. The view is dotted with Oxfam water towers, Oxfam water pumps and latrines - hardly sexy, but an absolutely essential way of saving lives in the sprawling, cluttered environment of Mugunga camp. We have committees of people in the camp who help us spread public health messages and keep their environment clean. They tell people to wash their hands and make sure the latrines are clean. They inform women who have been raped where to get their anti-retrovirals. These community members are absolutely crucial to our response and we hope to mobilise similar groups in other camps like Kibati, where the latrines are dirty and a public health risk.
So how was Charles? He was okay. By some stroke of luck - and given the speed I was deployed to DRC on this emergency, trust me it’s luck - I had a leaflet from the Rankin exhibition (complete with his grinning face) in my bag. I showed it to him. And he laughed. I asked how it was to have his face on show in London town. It was okay, but he had bigger priorities he wanted to share. He wants peace, an end to this fighting and he wants to go home. That’s what he wanted me to share. We shook hands, not once, not twice, but maybe more than three times. We smiled and I left him with the leaflet. He showed it to his friends around him and they laughed too. He tucked it in his inside pocket. ‘Cheka Kidogo’ - laugh a little. Going to the camps you realise the sentiment behind the Rankin exhibition more than ever before. These are people just like us. Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, farmers, tailors, shop owners and chefs, but living in impossible circumstances. We can help them and we owe them that.
Tags: Conflict, congo, democraticrepublicofcongo, drc, Humanitarian, rebeccawynn
I am writing to offer my thoughts on the use of the term ‘forgotten conflict’, which I think needs to be replaced. This term suggests that the conflict in question was once remembered, but this is hardly the case here - the conflict has always struggled to attract attention. The term also suggests that the existence of the conflict has just accidentally slipped the minds of those in a position to respond. But this is also hardly the case. The marginalization of these conflicts is typically the result of a series of conscious and deliberate decisions by key actors. This distinction is, I believe, important.
I prefer the term ’stealth conflicts’, indicating that they do not appear on the ‘radar’ of international consciousness. Their stealthy nature is also crucial in determining the level of humanitarian emergency and death toll - a conflict that is not given attention invariably suffers far more in terms of deaths from starvation and preventable diseases. I believe the term ’stealth conflicts’ better captures these characteristics of such conflicts.
I have recently published a book that I think you may find interesting in this regard. It is entitled Stealth Conflicts: How the World’s Worst Violence Is Ignored. The book examines responses to conflicts and attempts to unravel and explain how large conflicts end up being ignored by policymakers, the media, the public, NGOs and academia. I hope you will have a chance to take a look at it. The introduction is available on the publisher’s homepage. (http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754675068 ). I think that the book may serve as a modest contribution in bringing to light the mechanisms behind the wall of ignorance and apathy surrounding much of the conflict in the world today.
I wish you all the best in your work.
November 18th, 2008 at 8:39 am