Where's Sam Brownback When You Need Him?

The U.N. Relief Director has hit the newspapers in an effort to drum up some political pressure for American help on African crises. Apparently, our compassionate conservatism is not quite being compassionate enough. I've excerpted a portion of his interview after the jump, you really need to read it to understand how bad things are getting (not to mention why putting the Ten Commandments in schools won't save us, and may in fact bring about some of the worst horrors on memory). Unfortunately, his interview also shows his problem. From what he's saying, there's currently an urgent humanitarian crisis in Sudan, Chad, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Somalia, Togo, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Uganda, among others. Think about that -- a pressing crisis in at least 14 countries. The world is remarkably slow, inept, and reluctant to deliver aid and avert catastrophes, so what do you think our chances are of responding effectively 14 times over?

It's possible that some of the unwillingness to help Africa is racism, but I doubt it. Much of it, I fear, comes from a sense of hopelessness. A feeling that problems there are entirely intractable, trying to solve one will have no greater impact than nailing the first brown flash in a game of whack-a-mole. To some degree, that's our fault. A close relative of racism does cause us to see the African continent as a whole, rather than a collection of distinct countries whose problems need to be viewed individually. And to some degree, it's simply the truth of a region that seems intent on winning the prize for world's largest, longest, most creative parade of modern horrors.

What do we do? Damned if I know, try and deal with Sudan, I guess. I remain of the belief that a swift, sure, and powerful attack against one or two genocidal forces would cause future incarnations to think twice, particularly if it became clear that Western strike forces would intervene as soon as the body bags proved serious and systemic. But, as Justin Logan will surely point out, that stance has its own set of problems, and may not fix anything either. So I've got no good solutions for you, but do read the interview after the jump. Doing that, at least, is easy.

He said that of the 14 fund appeals the United Nations had made for Africa, eight had attracted less than 20 percent of the requested amounts.

"In the Central African Republic, which is one of the poorest places on earth, we have 6 percent of what we asked for," he said. "And in Somalia, which has in some areas worse mortality rates than Darfur, we have 8 percent."

In Chad, he said, more than 200,000 refugees from neighboring Darfur were overtaxing the resources of an already impoverished country. In Togo, unrest after a disputed election has generated "overnight" a refugee problem in Benin and Ghana.

He said there were desperate food shortages in the south, in Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Mozambique, and in the north, in Ethiopia and Eritrea.

He warned of a "triple threat" menace to southern Africa - a combination of H.I.V./AIDS, which he said had taken 250,000 lives in the region since January; drought brought on by catastrophically low rainfall, and weak government.

Mr. Egeland appealed in particular for urgent attention to northern Uganda, where several recent attempts to sign truces and open peace talks have faltered, and fighting has intensified in an 18-year-old conflict between rebel fighters and the government that has left 500,000 people dead and 2 million displaced.

The rebellion has been led since 1988 by a brutal force called the Lord's Resistance Army, which, in the name of forming a government based on the Ten Commandments, has slaughtered peasants and kidnapped children, turning them into what Mr. Egeland called mindless "killing machines."

Relief groups have estimated that 28,000 children have been abducted and forced to become soldiers and sex slaves in northern Uganda. "It goes beyond anything I have ever seen in my years of humanitarian work in terms of trauma and suffering and incomprehensible cruelty, where people are mutilated, humiliated and destroyed as human beings," Mr. Egeland said.

In Uganda, he said, only 34 percent of the $54 million sought in a United Nations appeal in November had been received. "We are in danger of losing an historic opportunity to put an end to one of the worst set of atrocities in our generation," he said. "If we don't act, the window will close, and we will always regret what we did not do in 2005."