Two months ago fighting resumed in the DR Congo's Eastern province of North Kivu between the rebel group led by Laurent Nkunda and government forces, in violation of a peace accord signed in January. As many as 250,000 people have been displaced since the violent conflict re-ignited in August, bringing the region's total displacement figure to over 2 million. Mobs of angry civilians have been attacking UN offices in Goma, North Kivu's provincial capital, infuriated that the UN hasn't been able to protect them.
Fred R. at Extra-Extra gives some background to understand the population's frustration:
... the task [of bringing peace and security by ending the plague of foreign armed groups and local militias] fell to cautious, over-stretched UN forces and a corrupt, inept national army barely that was composed of former warring factions. With the huge country split into myriad, inaccessible local enclaves, it was never going to be easy to resolve all the problems of corruption, mismanagement, inter-ethnic rivalries and power struggles. But the immediate post-election period offered a real window of opportunity for the new government to unite the country behind a clear vision and (with UN support) determined backing for the rule of law. They blew it.
Mark Leon Goldberg at the UN Dispatch comments on the population's frustration towards the UN:
Local's are understandably upset that the peacekeeping force had not done enough to stall the rebel advance. Protests outside the UN compound turned violent earlier this week as residents of Goma hurled rocks at the compound in frustration. Unfortunately, the peacekeeping mission cannot repel this attack without reinforcement.It needs help. Fast.
When I lived in Bukavu (DRC) all NGO workers, MONUC staff members and expats in general lived in the same neighbourhood on a pretty peninsula full of beautiful colonial houses by the lake, built by the Germans and Belgians. So we all knew each other, met at the Friday night happy hour at the MONUC cafeteria and invited each other to Sunday barbecues and generally hanged out together during our spare time. There was one exception, though: MSF (Doctors without Borders). We knew who they were and where they lived as they were our neighbours, but they never mixed with other expats from other organizations, and especially not from MONUC. Their policy of complete independence and neutrality meant non-fraternization with anyone else.
Since then, for me MSF has been an organization with very high ethical standards and an "all work and no play" attitude. In the working conditions of Eastern Congo this kind of attitude seemed a bit impractical to me, since transportation and the meager road infrastructure are such big obstacles to aid and so the unwillingness to cooperate with other organizations working in similar types of aid is a waste of resources. I suspected that perhaps they took themselves a little too seriously in the humanitarian community.
This week I encountered MSF again in a much different context than in Bukavu. Their US section has organized an outdoor educational exhibit called "A refugee camp in the heart of the city" that is touring various North-American cities including San Francisco last week (from the 15th to the 19th). Their website described the exhibition as follows:
Guided by MSF aid workers, visitors are asked to imagine that they are among the millions of people fleeing violence and persecution in, for example, Somalia, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Sudan.The exhibit is made up of materials used by MSF in its emergency medical work around the world, including emergency refugee housing, a food distribution tent, water pump, health clinic, vaccination tent, therapeutic feeding center, and a cholera treatment center.
Needless to say, I had to go check it out. Although while in Eastern DRC I saw mostly IDP camps, i.e. camps of internally displaced persons from the same country as opposed to refugees from another country that had to cross borders, they look the same and function in a similar way. So I was curious to see if MSF's exhibition resembled reality, and how the educational aspects had been planned. And since they set the mock camp by the water on the poshiest street in San Francisco, the Marina boulevard, with the Palace of Fine Arts in the back and Golden Gate Bridge in the front, I was probably also secretly curious about the aesthetical contrast of the juxtapositon.
Overall my impression of the tour was quite positive, albeit too long. The camp was surrounded by a fence and visitors had to wait in front of a gate for an MSF guide to let them in, in groups of 10-12 people. It was not possible to visit the camp independently in spite of having several panels with explanations, maps and photos along the way. Our guide walked us through the different exhibits in the camp which followed a set route. He was serious and dry, as expected from a member of an organization with such a deep sense of professionalism as MSF. There were a few tents showing different styles of shelter in camps of different countries, a few latrines, a medical station, a kitchen from where food rations are distributed, a malnutrition center, all complete with tools and materials used in real camps. At every stop he gave us long explanations about every utensil and routine happening there, and he also talked profusely about his own experiences on the ground in several field operations. The tour of the tiny camp took about an hour and a half, and the exit was through a bigger tent where MSF staff were handing out leaflets and posters about their activities, and encouraging people to leave video commentary on the spot as well as donating money to them.
Only one guy in my group asked questions, which seemed to be more of the showing-off his knowledge kind than actual questions looking for information. The amount of information given by our guide was overwhelming and some of it frankly irrelevant to regular people in San Francisco that have no intention to either work as humanitarian workers or even to travel to conflict zones in the world. It seems to me that they were trying to be informative and at the same time to be interactive by making the visitors experience how life in a real camp is, describing every detail of the context and the circumstances of the refugees.
Educating people about war and injustice through live exhibits that appeal to the senses rather than to the reasoning is not a new thing. WWII concentration camps turned into museums inmediately come to mind, but the examples are endless. And in an increasingly visual and interactive world, this trend is only becoming more and more popular with new travel agencies that offer tours not only of genocide sites, but also of slums and refugee camps (mock ones for the general public, real for celebrities). And while I can see the educational value of showing rather than telling, of transporting visitors in time in space to make them experience a bit of what the real victims also experienced, there's something about this type of exhibits that has always made me feel uneasy. There's something deeply disturbing about turning suffering into a voyeuristic experience, down the road of banality.
