Too PC to Call Ethnic Conflict “Ethnic”

The New York Times is still doing its best to avoid writing clearly when covering Africa. Its write-up yesterday, describing terrible ethnic violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is a case in point:

The top United Nations human rights official [Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein] on Tuesday accused a militia linked to the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo of atrocities, including mass killings, pregnant women cut open and infants hacked with machetes.

The Bana Mura militia “have in the past two months shot dead, hacked or burned to death and mutilated hundreds of villagers, as well as destroying entire villages” in the central Kasaï region, the official, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, told the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The piece is replete with vague language that obscures more than it explains: “the situation,” “escalating violence,” “the conflict convulsing the Kasaï region.” And the Times‘ readers are never enlightened as to who the “Bana Mura” militia really are.

How did other outlets fare with the same material? Al Jazeera ran a piece titled “UN accuses rivals in DR Congo of fuelling ethnic hatred”, emphasizing a different and more important part of Al Hussein’s report:

“I am appalled by the creation and arming of a militia, the Bana Mura, allegedly to support the authorities in fighting the Kamwina Nsapu (rebels),” Zeid told the UN Human Rights Council.

Over the past two months, the armed group had carried out “horrific attacks against civilians from the Luba and Lulua ethnic groups”, destroying entire villages and shooting, burning and hacking to death villagers, among them babies and young children.

Since last September, the armed followers of tribal chief Kamwina Nsapu – who was killed a month earlier – have rebelled against the authority of the central government.

Why does the Gray Lady (with the exception of veteran Africa reporter Jeffrey Gettleman) so consistently understate the importance of ethnicity in African conflicts? We cannot know for sure, but here’s a hunch: maybe it’s just not polite—not politically correct—to talk about ethnic conflict because it conjures up images of ‘primitive peoples’ blindly killing each other.

The paradox is that by avoiding mentioning the unspeakable, the Times’ context-less reporting contributes to the very same kind of lazy thinking it is presumably trying to shield its readers from. Careful study of ethnic conflict reveals its nuanced dynamics. (There are, after all, entire academic journals dedicated to the study of ethnicity and politics.) For a newspaper now marketing itself as the last great defender of objective truth, the failure to acknowledge the relationship between ethnicity and violence is only the latest example of hypocrisy.

But can these complex dynamics be explained given the space constraints of the contemporary newspaper? Certainly. For its part, the WSJ also underlined the worrying ethnic dimension of the killings in Kasaï, adding to it a detailed and much-needed analysis of how the commodity crash and patronage network dynamics are shaping politics and violence in the DRC:

At the same time, the drop in prices for oil, copper and cobalt—which account for 90% of Congo’s exports—cut into government spending on social services and other payments that usually flow to local chiefdoms. The commodities crash also diminished the chiefs’ revenue from illicit mining and logging, as well as informal levies they collect from local traders.

“A deteriorating economy has fueled resentment toward Mr. Kabila’s regime, especially among traditional chiefs,” said Adeline van Houtte, Africa analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit.

To conceal the ethnic dimension of this conflict is to do a disservice to just about everyone—to readers trying to stay informed of events far afield, to activists trying to draw attention to a neglected region, to policymakers evaluating potential responses, and not least of all to the more than 3,000 people of Kasaï who have been singled out and killed because of their ethnic identity. To borrow the language of the social justice left, the NYT’s colorblind approach to ethnicity amounts to nothing less than erasure.

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