Press talk

The talk in Kinshasa is about the prospect of war in the east, as soldiers, tanks and helicopter gunships are sent to North Kivu with a view, one supposes, to squashing the Tutsi rebel leader Laurent Nkunda. Peacekeepers glumly shake their heads, expatriates raise their eyebrows, while the Kinois shrug knowingly: “What do you expect, it’s the east.”

The talk in the local press is about whether or not Jean-Pierre Bemba will return to DRC. The opposition leader and defeated presidential candidate has been in Portugal since April, when he fled the country after the fighting in Kinshasa between his men and the national army. He was supposed to return by 31 July, but he has now told the Portuguese press that he would return by 15 September.

The talk in the international media is about last Wednesday’s train crash in Kasai Occidental: the brakes failed on a derelict, colonial-era train, seven carriages overturned, and official estimates are of 100 dead and another 200 injured. If trains in Kinshasa are anything to go by, people would have been travelling on top of the train, hanging on to its sides and squeezed inside.

Picture by Fred

Some passengers are still trapped beneath the wagons due to lack of equipment to lift or cut through them. The first people rescued were transported by foot or on handmade wooden bicycles to the 22-bed hospital twelve kilometres away, but now a major UN medical and rescue operation is underway. The government has proclaimed three days of national mourning: the flags are at half-mast, and the television and radio stations are playing religious music. President Sarkozy sends his condolences.

As our journalist friends hurriedly leave for Kananga to cover the story, the rest of us are left wondering about the arbitrariness of news. Last July journalists flocked to the DRC to cover the elections, which cost the world so much money, then immediately flocked away again when the crisis erupted in Lebanon. Needless to say, the elections didn’t make the cut. In March, the fighting in Kinshasa which had us all holed up like rabbits for 48 hours and killed some 600 people barely registered with the international media. The fact that hundreds of people die every day here as a result of malnutrition and preventable diseases is not newsworthy, but this latest train crash is. Go figure.