Two and a half million people have died in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the last three years. More than 350,000 have been killed in the war that has raged there over 33 months - the other 2.15 million have died of disease and malnutrition.
The estimate of deaths in eastern Congo has been published by the US organisation International Rescue Committee. The 2.5 million deaths have been calculated on the basis of surveys in eastern Congo, which because of the difficulties in gathering information, especially in "unsafe" areas, may be a significant underestimate of the actual death toll. (The full report is available on the IRC web site at www.theIRC.org/mortality.cfm.) The figures relate to the period August 1998 - when the war to overthrow Laurent Kabila began - to March 2001.
The war has ended (for now) but massacres of civilians by the Rwandan Interahamwe and a tribal militia, Mayi-Mayi, continue.
The catastrophe is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world since the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and yet it has got virtually no attention from any of the world's media.
The Guardian published details of the report a week ago but nothing has appeared in any other newspaper that I have seen. RTE News, for the first time in months, made reference to that part of Africa in news bulletins yesterday morning, when it carried a brief report of the IRC document.
In the period since 1994 probably five million people have lost their lives in the area encompassing the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and southern Sudan. Around 1.5 million of these have lost their lives in the violence that has engulfed the area - about 400,000 in the Congo, 800,000 in Rwanda, 300,000 in Burundi and some 50,000 in Uganda and southern Sudan.
There was a brief spasm of guilt on the part of the Western powers when they faced up to the reality that they had turned their face away from the genocide in Rwanda in 1994; the French did worse by actually supporting the Hutu regime that started the genocide. But once a war crimes tribunal was established in Arusha, Tanzania, the world has largely forgotten what has been happening in that part of the world.
A United Nations report of a panel of experts on the illegal exploitation of natural resources and other forms of wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo was published last April. It reported that exploitation of the mineral and forest resources of the Congo was taking place "at an alarming rate". There was "systematic exploitation" by the governments of Rwanda and Uganda, which have had armies in the northern and eastern parts of the Congo since August 1998.
The report was prepared for the UN Security Council and although the Presidents of Rwanda and Uganda were found to be implicated in these activities, nothing appears to have been done about it. The report, incidentally, largely ignored the role of Robert Mugabe in the exploitation of the Congo's resources, seemingly on the grounds that Zimbabwe was an "invitee" in the Congo war (a war that involved eight countries).
Almost none of this has got any attention at all. What is it about Africa that draws such indifference on the part of the rest of the world? How it is that major peace initiatives are undertaken in the Balkans, for instance, where the death toll has been a fraction of that in the Great Lakes area of Africa?
How is it that the UN mustered a vast international army to repel the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in 1990 and there seems to be hardly a cheep of protest over the invasion of the Congo by foreign armies in 1998 and the systematic exploitation of that country's vast resources, accompanied by a massive death toll? I am not suggesting that another vast international army should be assembled to roll back what has happened in the Congo or that that country should be subjected to bombing such as Iraq has had to endure since the Kuwait invasion. I am merely drawing attention to the calculated indifference to what happens in Africa.
That calculated indifference applies not just to Western "powers" but to ourselves as well. There are more asylum-seekers from the DRC than from any other country at present, other than Nigeria and Romania. Having been given the green light recently by the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice is now about to deport hundreds of asylum-seekers from the Congo, presumably on the grounds that they are "bogus" - their plight is not sufficiently desperate, lives are not sufficiently at risk.
If asylum-seekers from the Great Lakes area, encompassing the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, are "bogus", then how could any asylum-seekers be genuine?
Four weeks ago, the Minister of State, Ms Liz O'Donnell, announced an aid package for 41 "humanitarian projects in 22 of the world's poorest countries". The grand sum of £250,000 was allocated to the DRC. A quarter of a million pounds to the area of the world most desperately in need of aid in the same month that the Government celebrates the splurge of £41 million on Farmleigh House. And we are expected to be impressed.