Ashley Judd’s Heart Of Darkness

I wonder about the girl, the very little girl, in the tattered pink tutu. It's been a little more than six months now since the American actress Ashley Judd caught a glimpse of her through the mud-streaked window of a battered car rattling toward Goma in eastern Congo. Today the headlines, mostly in the news-roundup columns, the "also in the world today" segments, say that tens of thousands of refugees are fleeing toward Goma, which already had so many. They are the miserable survivors of one of those wars the world hasn't quite forgotten, but just doesn't really give a damn about. Have a million people been killed there this decade? Actually, many more—but faceless people, African people, victims bereft of significance in a 24/7 news cycle that fixates on Sarah Palin's wardrobe.

That Judd fixated on that little girl's wardrobe struck me as much more important when I read the description in Judd's diary of a brief trip into Congolese hell published recently on the TheCommunity.com. And then I met Judd in New York a few weeks ago. I've talked to any number of stars who've adopted causes, but she was the first I'd interviewed since Audrey Hepburn back in 1992 whose descriptions of what she saw made me see the suffering for myself. Both were incredibly vulnerable to what they experienced, Hepburn working with UNICEF, Judd with Population Services International. The difference is that Judd is just so American, so Southern, so earthy, in fact.

"Tell me about the girl in the tutu," I said.

"Well, Goma," said Judd, choosing a word very deliberately, "is a s---hole." The description is perfectly accurate. "There are no paved roads, there are giant potholes, there is loose dust and dirt, there is strewn rubble: just massive scenes of garbage and rubbish. There is a different look in people's eyes, very cagey and challenging and suspicious, sinister, because of the sense that you don't know what's getting ready to happen. Random armed men would just come up to the car and knock on the window. There was a volcanic eruption not that long ago, so literally, the world is grey. Goma is just grey, grey, grey."

And Judd wondered, "How does a child—3- or 4-years old, or maybe an 8-year-old whose growth is so badly stunted by malnutrition if not outright starvation—come across a pink tutu?" The cast-off clothes of the world wind up in Africa, in fact, barely clothing a cast-off people.

Judd thought of America's abundance, and those little girls she sees going to church on a Sunday in Tennessee who, having proudly dressed themselves, wear colorful mismatched elastics and rosettes in their hair and maybe a little tutu-type dress. They are so safe and happy, as they should be. And then there was this vision of the little girl in Goma, and seeing her was one of those moments that anybody who visits war zones and refugee camps experiences. Surrounded by so much incredible suffering, you glimpse something incongruous, something you can't quite process, and it releases emotions like flame exploding from a burning home. "That torn, filthy, ragged tutu on this child just seared into my soul," said Judd.

"Why do you think people don't pay more attention, given that there is so much suffering?" I asked. "Do you think it's because it's so hard to figure out the good guys from the bad guys?" In the current fighting, the Tutsis—the tribe slaughtered in Rwanda during the genocide of 1994—are leading a rebel army against the government of Congo. They claim, with reason, that Congolese military is allied to the Rwandan Hutu killers who sought refuge in the countryside surrounding Goma after their defeat 14 years ago. Those armies, and others that have splintered off, are also looking to control vast deposits of valuable tin and colombo-tantalite, or coltan, a metal useful in the manufacture of cell phones and computers. All sides turn children into soldiers, all sides use rape as a weapon of war. And the biggest peacekeeping contingent deployed by the United Nations anywhere in the world has neither the ability nor, it would seem, the will to impose order. "It's hard to build a narrative here of anything except suffering," I suggested.

"Maybe the numbers are too staggering," said Judd. The International Rescue Committee has counted 5.4 million people who've died from war-related causes in the Congo since 1998, which it calls "the world’s deadliest documented conflict since WW II." The vast majority have died from "secondary" causes, which bring on protracted suffering as horrible as that inflicted by any bullet or bomb. Under other circumstances, the fatal malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia and malnutrition would be "easily preventable and treatable," as the IRC concludes.

"Maybe this concept of secondary deaths isn't something that we respect yet," said Judd. "I don't know. I do think that women and children tend to be the most vulnerable and the most exploited and the most underserved and so there is probably a gender inequality factor that contributes to the lack of attention that's being given."