While we were looking somewhere else...

...the violence, the pain, the death, the homelessness, the destruction, the atrocities continue in Democratic Republic of Congo. It's become like a cosmic version of one of those "whack 'em" games: Every time it appears some gain is made in one part of that stricken nation, the brutality bubbles up somewhere else.

Kinshasa, Congo (AP, March 17) - Militiamen grilled bodies on a spit and boiled two girls alive as their mother watched, U.N. peacekeepers charged Wednesday, adding cannibalism to a list of atrocities allegedly carried out by one of the tribal groups fighting in northeast Congo.

The report came as a key U.N. official said the ongoing violence in Congo, claiming thousands of lives every month, has made it the site of the world's worst humanitarian crisis. ...

Jan Egeland, head of U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said Wednesday that the fighting in Congo had overtaken Sudan's embattled Darfur region as the world's most serious humanitarian crisis. ...

About 3 million Congolese are now in acute need of assistance and as many as 30,000 people are dying every month from conflict-related causes, Egeland said. ...

The new International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, said this week that its first cases will deal with war crimes committed in eastern Congo.

About 10,000 may be dying each month in Darfur. About 180,000 have died there since October 2003 and 1.8 million have been made homeless.