Keeping Quiet about a Deadly Diamond Disaster

(idexonline.com) - I am a troubled journalist. Still. Last week it was the scapegoating of Beyonce by fellow journalists for wearing the Tiffany Yellow Diamond that troubled me. This week it's the way the world's media has reported - or failed to report - the diamond mining disaster that has cost 12 lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The toxic spill of diamond tailings in upstream Angola literally turned tributaries to the Congo River bright red. Thousands of fish floated to the surface. Hippopotamuses died. Thousands of people living near the river were poisoned. And the water, polluted with heavy metals, is now flowing towards the Congolese capital Kinshasa, home to 12 million people. It has been described as an unprecedented environmental catastrophe. And yet it has attracted little news coverage. And the focus of that coverage has been more on the question of compensation than the human tragedy. DRC is hardly home to a rolling 24-hour news hub, nor is it a magnet for foreign correspondents, so the victims of this tragedy have no faces. We don't get to see weeping relatives clutching tattered pictures of their loved ones, as we would if this had happened in the western world. Instead we get rhetoric about how the polluter must pay, as though this is nothing more than a mishap that can be financially rectified. What we don't see is any real examination of how on earth this could have happened, how those responsible will be held to account, and how they will absolutely ensure it never happens again.