Media Coverage On Afric Ethnic Conflict And Civil War

Media Coverage in Africa Ethnic conflict and civil war is a recurrent phenomena affecting many countries in Africa, and has been ignored, oversimplified and overlooked by majority of the Western world. Despite the decades of conflict, and loss of life, when the media does cover conflict in Africa, the damage has already been done. For an example, the awareness regarding the Rwandan Crisis was very delayed and action was taken too late, causing the deaths of thousands of lives. In 1994, Rwanda s population consisted of seven million people and was composed of three ethnic groups: Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa. Ranging between 85% for Hutu population, 14% for Tutsi, and 1% for Twa. In the early 1990 s, the Hutus blamed all of the country s†¦show more content†¦While Rwanda was having one sided bloodbath, the rest of the world thought this was a resolution to the Hutu take over of the late 1950 s. When the crisis finally came to light, the media harshly criticized the United Nations for not recognizing the conflict as a genocide sooner, and reacting to prevent it. However, the media must share blame for failing to provide notice of the genocide. In remote places of the world where significant information intelligence is not abundant, the news business is highly relied upon to act as a system of warning; in Rwanda, the media did not fulfill this role. Between 1976 and 1978, a Marxist government in Ethiopia killed approximately five hundred thousand of the the country s citizens in a a bloodbath called the Red Terror. The Terror came from a peaceful movement to end the rule of Emperor Haile Selassie. The Emperor was deposed of in 1974 and military members known as Derg took over. The Derg began rounding up and killing those suspected of being members of a rebel force [3]. Another conflict without the role of the United Nations or other Western governments intervening that would have prevented a multitude of deaths in Ethiopia. By the end of the 1980 s, the regime was losing financial and military support from the Soviet Union and even then, it still took as long as eleven years afterward for the Ethiopian People s Revolutionary Democratic Front