Amnesia comes easily

It seems like a small amount. I mean, it's a great deal of money, but in the larger picture, it's such a small amount. In fact, at the moment I write this, it's less than 1.2% of the estimated amount of money we've spent on the war in Iraq. Yet it seems so hard, so ridiculously hard, to come by. From Thursday's BBC:

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has launched an annual aid appeal to help address what the UN calls the world's forgotten emergencies.

Mr Annan asked for $1.7bn (£922m) for aid projects to deal with neglected humanitarian crises, mostly in Africa. ...

The appeal is meant to provide basic food, medical care and sanitation. But last year's appeal raised only just over half of the funding requested.

Half. Just half. Isn't that amazing? Incredible? Horrendous? For what we spend in one month on killing people in one country, we by ourselves could fully fund an appeal to improve the lives of 26 million desperately needy people in 14 countries. This in no way absolves other industrialized nations of their own failures to help, their own stinginess, their own indifference in the face of suffering, their own willful amnesia - but since I believe that the measure of the generosity of heart of any people is measured by what they do, not by what they call on others to do, I look to us. And I blame us.

The Beeb adds that

[o]ne of the biggest and most expensive crises for the UN is in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where many people have been displaced by war....

Overstretched UN peacekeepers there say they have not yet managed to bring peace.

However, in an unusual step, those peacekeepers, from Uruguay, are taking a more "muscular" approach. They have begun making joint patrols with Congolese government troops, BBC said on Friday. The patrols

aim to root out former soldiers from neighbouring Rwanda who fled there after the 1994 Rwandan genocide. ...

[The] former Rwandan government troops are accused of terrifying the local population by looting, rapes and other attacks. ...

The issue of the Rwandan rebels has been a running sore here for a decade and has led to two full-scale wars between Congo and Rwanda.

The peacekeepers admit that they don't know if the tactic will succeed, since the Rwandan refugees say they don't trust the Rwandan government and are unwilling to go home. But it's thought to be worth a try.

At the same time, it's wise to recall that despite the admitted difficulty of getting aid to the rural areas of DR Congo, controlled as they often are by violent militias,

[a]id workers with the UN and private charities say security is not only brought by soldiers - tackling some of the causes of social and economic breakdown, they say, can be just as effective.

Footnote: The BBC has a pop-up overview of the conflict in DR Congo. It's just that, a quick overview, but it's worth looking at if you are unfamiliar with the background. The link is here.