Africans must help Africa

You've seen those heart-wrenching TV ads with a celebrity, or sometimes a Christian missionary or relief worker, pleading for financial contributions to help starving African children who are prominently displayed with bloated stomachs and flies buzzing around their bony, scrawny faces.

Many of those pathetic scenes are filmed in the Congo which, according to the Lancet, a leading British medical journal, is suffering from the world's deadliest humanitarian crisis - 38,000 people dying each month, most of them children. It's the mortality equivalent, says the journal, of two southeast Asian tsunamis plowing through the Congo every couple of months.

Between 1998 and 2004, nearly 4 million people perished. There's really no excuse for this, because the diseases that kill them are easily preventable or treatable - malaria, respiratory infections and malnutrition.

Those who plead for financial aid - whether from the government, the United Nations or private donors - would have you believe it's all because of a lack of money, that more generous contributions would solve the problem.

Oh, if that were only true.

Several African nations, and especially the Congo, are in a terrible humanitarian crisis of their own making - years of tribal wars that have ruined health-care services or stopped them from ever being developed. Major fighting ended in the Congo three years ago, but there is still enough scattered warfare to stifle improvements in the nation's impoverished economy, and to prevent creation of meaningful medical delivery systems.

Often, the warlords cut off food and medical supplies from reaching great numbers of innocent people; no wonder so many get sick and die, or that humanitarian missions are cutting back on their aid to Africa.

It serves no useful purpose to provide warlords and their militias with nourishment and medicine so they can more easily kill and starve the general population.

What's necessary here isn't to just throw more money at the ongoing tragedy, but for the United Nations to beef up its peacekeeping forces, preferably from African nations that are functioning effectively.

Wars, starvation and illnesses cannot be effectively combatted by outside missions until Africa gets a grip on its own security problems. Conditions can't improve until Africans improve them. For now, this requires more will and determination than it does money.