4.5 million cadavers.  That is my estimate of the number of people who have died due to violent conflict in Africa in the last decade.  The number is easy to calculate.  About 4 million from the great Congolese conflagration (see below), plus somewhere between 200 and 300,000 in Darfur, and you are almost there.  Add in tens of thousands of deaths from each of a number of other long-standing conflicts, many of which came to an end in this period: Northern Uganda's 20-year conflict, conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone, civil war in Angola, the North-South conflict in Sudan and so on, and you are pretty close to the 4.5 million mark.  This number does not include the 800,000 who died during the Rwandan genocide in 1994.  

This post is called Hanging Chad.  The play on words relates to a country that almost no American knows anything about, but which is now being dragged into the genocide/civil war on its border with Sudan.  The conflict in Darfur is one of the few in the region that has achieved some international notoriety.  The Bush administration, to its credit, has termed it genocide and used tough language with the Sudanese government.  To its discredit, it has done little else.  Today, thousands of Darfuris fled their burning villages, sure to further inflate the growing numbers, now estimated at 4 million, who rely on international humanitarian aid to survive.

While we do nothing about the Darfuris, whose plight ought to be motive enough to act, we also allow this conflict to roil the rest of the region.  Hanging Chad Out to Dry. That is what the title refers to.  But it may as well refer to the continent as a whole.

This is not a post about a great African crisis that, if ignored, will suddenly explode into a conflagration we will wish we had paid attention to before.  No, not at all.  The crisis, unlike headline-seizing natural disasters of the past few years (the tsunami, Katrina), is ongoing, the conflagration is already here, and almost nothing will happen if we continue to ignore it.  Nothing will happen to us, anyway.  Basic human decency, however, suggests that we should care about the Africans themselves. 

So here is a quick rundown.

The following countries, at a minimum, are engaged in some form of conflict, ranging from isolated violence in a marginal region of the country, to full-scale international war: Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad, Central African Republic and Congo.  Note that these countries share borders in the central and eastern part of Africa.  As is usual, the deaths involved in all of these conflicts are largely from sickness and malnutrition rather than violent attack.

The Sudanese case is well known, and Chad's problems are associated with that conflict, though there are additional internal factors at work.  The same can be said of Central African Republic, which has experienced scores of coups in the past decade, but which now finds itself destabilized by overflow from Darfur.  Somalia is engaged in a civil war in which Ethiopia and the US have backed a transitional government against Islamic rebels.  Typically, the Union of Islamist Courts had brought relative peace to Mogadishu as it ran out the transitional government, but at a price: more restrictions on personal freedom under Islamized rule.  Now, however, the peace is gone.  Today, Ethiopians and Somalis marched toward Mogadishu for a showdown with the UIC.  The UN worries that the conflict will spiral out of control once the warring parties meet in the capital.

Not all of these conflict-prone countries are at the high-point of their conflicts.  In Congo, for example, recent elections and demoblizations have marked a partial return to peace in a country where international conflict claimed some 4 million lives in the last 8 years.  Nonetheless, rebel leader Laurent Nkunda, a rather unsavory rebel leader, continues to terrorize the locals and send refugees pouring into Uganda. 

Nor is the center-east the only part of Africa that is burning.  Recent attacks on oil companies in Nigeria have escalated a long-simmering conflict over oil rights there. Cote d'Ivoire is effectively cut in two, with a UN force in the middle guarding an uneasy standoff which was to end its own civil war in 2002. Burkina Faso is experiencing a low-grade conflict between the police and military with the potential for more violence. Zimbabwe is suffering the dying pangs of a cruel dictatorship that has destroyed the country's economy and led to a sharp escalation in torture and rape (see earlier post below).

And of course, cruel violence is not the only problem facing Africans today.  Cruel poverty is as great of a threat to many.  Consider that in Zambia, doctors worry that even with cheap ARVs for HIV patients available, victims of the disease are so poor that they are unable to eat when they consume these partially toxic medications.  As a result, they often become even sicker.  The world has poured new money into disease prevention, and treatment, in poor countries in recent years (see earlier post below on HIV).  But Zambia is a reminder that controlling disease must be part of an integrated approach to human welfare.

Okay. Guns and Disease. You've heard all of this before. So now what? What can be done about all of this? In the next post, I will look at what the world has done in recent years to aid Africa, and what could be done better.