Bloody conflicts in Africa should outrage the world

The ongoing fighting in Gaza has taken the global attention off other serious conflicts in the world including the Russia, and Ukraine war.

There has been an explosion of global outrage as a result of Israel’s sustained bombardment of Gaza which has led to the deaths of more than 10,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, following Hamas militants’ attacks in Israel on October 7 that killed 1,200 people.

Protests have taken place in major cities across the world, including Mombasa and Nairobi, calling on Israel to stop killing civilians, including children. Similar protests took place after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. That is how a world with a conscience should react in the face of injustices.

However, it is perplexing that such outrage has not greeted injustices of similar magnitude in Africa.

For instance, the conflict in eastern DRC is estimated to have killed not less than six million people since 1996. Only last Sunday, at least 23 people were reported to have been butchered by Islamist militants who raided a village in the region. The militants are said to have tied up the people before hacking them to death with machetes.

In Sudan, the death toll from the country’s six-month war between the military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) is estimated at about 9,000. Early this month, RSF reportedly killed more than 1,000 people, prompting the European Union to call for urgent international action to prevent another genocide in the region.

Sadly, even as conflicts such as these continue to claim the lives of thousands of people in Africa, they never evoke, even within the continent, the kind of outrage that the current one between Israel and Palestine has. 

Perhaps that explains why such conflicts go on for years on end. The world should get angry over these conflicts. Even as the Jeddah peace process on Sudan gets underway, the world should demand a ceasefire; an end to the bloodletting in Darfur and other parts of Sudan. Silence is fuelling conflicts in Africa.