CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Bring Me Your Neglected Crises

Female refugees in Pakistan. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0

A family arrives at a camp in Sudan carrying everything they still owned. A few cooking pots. Some blankets. Perhaps a plastic bag of clothes.

They expect to stay a few weeks before returning home.

Instead, they are displaced again.

The war that unsettled them has become one of the largest humanitarian disasters on Earth. Tens of millions have been uprooted. Aid agencies inform those who listen that millions face hunger, disease, and violence.

Yet outside these aid agencies and diplomatic circles, many struggle to explain anything of what is happening.

How does one of the largest humanitarian disasters become something so barely noticed?

Some of humanity’s largest emergencies unfold in relative obscurity. History is full of such examples. Entire populations suffer while the rest of us scroll past.

Sudan is not unusual. In fact, that isone of the most unsettling things about it. “Well, everywhere is war,” as Bob Marley sang, “Me say war.”

Then there is the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)—the Heart of Africa. In 2019, WHO officials working in North Kivu reported that ongoing armed conflict was hampering Ebola contact tracing because communities were repeatedly displaced by violence. Today, humanitarian agencies warn that renewed fighting in eastern Congo has further displaced millions and restricts access to vulnerable communities. Many are fleeing a vicious cocktail of violence and disease, making containment and relief efforts almost impossible.

It is a crisis that........

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