In a remote corner of Africa, millions of civilians have been slaughtered in a conflict fuelled by an almost genocidal ferocity that has no end in sight. Victims have been targeted because of their ethnicity and entire ethnic groups destroyed — but the outside world has turned its back, doing little to save people from the wrath of the various government and rebel militias. You could be forgiven for thinking that this is a depiction of the Sudanese province of Darfur, racked by four years of bitter fighting. But it describes the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has received only a fraction of the media attention devoted to Darfur.

The United Nations estimates that three million to four million Congolese have been killed, compared with the estimated 200,000 civilian deaths in Darfur. A peace deal agreed in December 2002 has never been adhered to, and atrocities have been particularly well-documented in the province of Kivu. In the last month alone, thousands of civilians have been killed in heavy fighting between rebel and government forces vying for control of an area north of Goma, and the UN reckons that another 50,000 have been made refugees in their homeland.

How curious, then, that so much more attention has been focused on Darfur than Congo. There are no pressure groups of any note that draw attention to the Congolese situation. The politicians are silent. Yet if ever there were a case for the outside world to intervene on humanitarian grounds alone — “liberal interventionism” — then this is it.

The key difference between the two situations lies in the racial and ethnic composition of the perceived victims and perpetrators. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, black Africans are killing other black Africans in a way that is difficult for outsiders to identify with. The turmoil there can in that sense be regarded as a narrowly African affair.

In Darfur the fighting is portrayed as a war between black Africans, rightly or wrongly regarded as the victims, and “Arabs”, widely regarded as the perpetrators of the killings. In practice, these neat racial categories are highly indistinct, but it is through such a prism that the conflict is generally viewed.

The contrasting perceptions of events in Congo and Sudan are ultimately both cause and effect of particular prejudices. Those who argue for liberal intervention, to impose “rights, freedom and democracy”, ultimately speak only of their own interests.

By seeing foreign conflicts through the prism of their own prejudices, interventionists also convince themselves that others see the world in the same terms. This allows them to obscure uncomfortable truths. This was the case with the Washington hawks who once assured us that the Iraqi people would be “dancing on the rooftops” to welcome the US invasion force that would be bringing everyone “freedom”. Highly seductive though the rhetoric of liberal interventionism maybe, it is always towards hubris and disaster that it leads its willing partners. — The Guardian