Vincent Browne: Bob Geldof returns to Africa this week nearly 20 years after his famous visit to Ethiopia in the midst of an appalling famine. He challenged the world then to respond to a humanitarian crisis unknown for 40 years, he might now challenge the world by inquiring what it has been doing during the African holocaust.
Africa has long suffered from war and famine but in the last 20 years there has emerged a new affliction, AIDS. Nearly 30 million people in sub-Saharan Africa have AIDS, the worst epidemic of human history. The number of new infections annually is about 3.45 million and about 2.5 million people die of AIDS in Africa each year. The incidence of AIDS in sub- Saharan Africa is expected to rise at least until the end of this decade.
In four African countries the incidence of AIDS exceeds 30 per cent of the adult population. In Lesotho, the incidence is 31 per cent, in Swaziland it is 33.4 per cent, in Zimbabwe it is 33.7 per cent and in Botswana it is 38.8 per cent. (These statistics are taken from the UN AIDS report of December 2002.) These countries also have half a million children with HIV.
That same part of Africa is also devastated by famine. It is estimated that more than 14 million people there are in danger of starvation. The same number of people (14 million) are threatened with starvation in Ethiopia. In Eritrea, which won independence from Ethiopia 10 years ago, 1.4 million people are affected by the drought out of a population of 3.29 million. In Somalia, three-quarters of a million people are on the threshold of subsistence.
There has been a civil war in Sudan for almost all of the 19 years since Geldof's first trip to Africa and in that war two million people have been killed and millions more died of starvation and preventable disease.
Several countries in west Africa are affected by war, notably Liberia and the Ivory Coast. As a consequence of these wars in Africa there are more than 4 million refugees and internally displaced people, with one of the poorest countries in the world hosting the most refugees, Tanzania, where there are over half a million refugees (only Pakistan has more refugees and it has nearly 4 million). But it is in the region of Africa, known as the Great Lakes region and including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, that most devastation has occurred.
According to the New York-based, International Rescue Committee, 3.4 million people have lost their lives in the eastern part alone of Congo since 1997, as a consequence of the war. In neighbouring Rwanda nearly one million people were slaughtered in the genocide in 1994 and in Burundi, more than 300,000 people have been killed in a rolling genocide in the last seven years.
There has been nothing like it anywhere else in the world since the second World War. Almost five million people losing their lives because of interconnecting wars in the space of 10 years, while the world has looked away.
The world's gaze remains deflected, for right now a genocide is happening in the north- eastern part of the Congo, the Ituri region, and the Security Council dithers over sending in a few thousand troops. A correspondent of the Guardian, James Astill, reported from Bunia in north-east Congo on Friday last.
He wrote: "Dead bodies litter Bunia's empty streets. From some the blood still drips from machete slashes, spear thrusts and bullet wounds. Others are two-weeks-old and stinking, half-eaten by packs of dogs flopping lazily about the once-prosperous north-eastern capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. There are women's bodies scattered in Bunia's main market place, a baby's body on its main road; two priests' bodies inside one church."
Britain is considering sending a few hundred troops. It is already too overstretched by its humanitarian mission in Iraq as is the United States, to be in a position to allocate serious resources to Congo.
Only earthquakes in Africa attract attention, or the Ebola virus or terrorism, where terrorism is directed against western interests. Sometimes endangered species - animal or insect - get attention.
AIDS features occasionally, but otherwise almost nothing (to be fair, this newspaper in the recent past has featured events in eastern Congo and has editorials on them, and on Monday a column by Seán Love of Amnesty on what is happening in Ituri was featured on this page).
Given Europe's unique engagement in Africa and the desolation it visited on the continent both during and since the colonial era, one might have expected a recognition of this in the draft Constitution for the European Union. Instead there is a recapitulation of its pre-eminent guiding principle, self interest.
"In its relation with the wider world, the Union shall uphold and promote its values and interests." That's why Europe is with America in Iraq and not Congo.