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A bi-weekly audio series and podcast service, hosted by Committee on Conscience Project Director Bridget Conley-Zilkic, that brings you the voices of human rights defenders, experts, advocates, and government officials. Vital voices addressing one of humanity's most vital issues. The opinions expressed in these interviews do not necessarily represent those of the Museum.

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Congolization
In Sunday's New York Times, Lydia Polgreen examined the vexing question of why Darfur has received so much more attention than Congo. Money quote:
Darfur holds the world’s gaze because of that magic word, genocide. The word, implying that there are clear criminals and clear victims, has been perhaps the single greatest attention-getter for efforts, however feeble, to end the fighting and organize relief efforts, even though the fighting has lately turned in directions that indicate the situation was never so clear-cut. The conflict in Congo, by contrast, long ago descended into a free-for-all with many sides. Instead of Darfur’s seeming moral clarity, it offers a mind-numbing collection of combatants known by a jumble of acronyms. And that has been a particularly cruel fate, since the long-lasting war there in fact had its roots in the greatest mass killing since the Holocaust — the unambiguous genocide of 800,000 mostly ethnic Tutsis in neighboring Rwanda in the spring of 1994.
As the Darfurian rebel groups fracture along ethnic lines and turn on civilians, and the conflict spills over into Chad and even the Central African Republic, she warns that "in some ways, the greatest tragedy in Darfur may not be that it could become the next Rwanda. It is that it could easily become the next Congo."


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