Dying Under the Radar

When pressed to think about death on a massive scale in Africa, one's mind likely focuses on the crisis in Darfur. The Rwandan genocide or Ethiopian starvation may also rate. But for all the (deserved) attention such humanitarian causes have attracted, they seem to have overshadowed a problem that is dwarfing many other crises in terms of lethality: postconflict death in Congo.

Certainly no celebrities have made a pet issue out of the country, and it's not hard to understand why. Congo's problems are tough to sloganize. Death in the large, central African nation is not due to a horrific campaign of ethnic cleansing, or headline-grabbing violence among religious sects. Militia gunplay, while sporadic and increasingly prevalent in the vulnerable North Kivu region, has hardly defined the country overall since the end of the Second Congolese War in 2003. Instead, the country's top killers have been preventable conditions such as malaria and malnutrition--the spread of which has been made possible by a ravaged postwar infrastructure and struggling economy.

In a new report released Tuesday, the International Rescue Committee updated its running total on Congo's dead since the outbreak of war in 1998. Their number, counting surveys through April 2007, now stands at 5.4 million deaths--1.5 million of which have occurred in just over the past two years (a rate they say is 60 percent higher than sub-Saharan Africa overall). According to the IRC, nearly half of those who perished were children under the age of five. NEWSWEEK's Seth Colter Walls spoke with Dr. Richard Brennan, head of global health programs for the IRC, about the association's field work in Congo, the scale of the tragedy, and why it seems to escape greater notice in the developed world. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: How do you place Congo's problems in perspective alongside the better-known crises in Africa?
Richard Brennan: Clearly, the total number of deaths surpasses any other humanitarian crises we've seen in recent decades. What's really so disturbing is that [the high mortality rate] is so protracted. Five years after the official end of the [Second Congolese War], 40,000 people are dying every month. We are getting more and more data about deaths in other, smaller countries, like Sierra Leone and Angola, that shows how mortality rates can remain elevated for some time after war. But when you combine those high mortality rates with a country as large as Congo, it ratchets up the numbers to an astounding level. In Rwanda, many deaths occurred in a short period of time. In Congo, years after the official end of war, we're still seeing these rates.

How did you execute the study?
Congo is the size of Western Europe, and allegedly has less than 2,000 miles of paved roads. We chartered aircraft, boats, worked on motorcycles and four-wheel drive. We also walked for miles and miles. Particularly in the east, it's very mountainous. Physically, it's incredibly demanding. The important thing when conducting the survey is to select villages at random, knowing that you're going to be walking up mountains in the blazing sun. When you've randomly selected a village at the top of a mountain, your team might say, "Hey, let's go to some other village!" But you've got to be strict.

A lot of these places are not secure, either, so you don't want to go there in the dark. You've got to start early in the morning. One thing that amazed me was how welcoming people are--and how eager they are to participate. The whole village will cluster around you, and you actually have to ask people to back off, because you're trying to have a personal conversation about the deaths in someone's family.