Namibian foreign minister laments lack of TV coverage

Namibian Foreign Minister Theo-Ben Gurirab has strongly criticised what he called the failure of the world’s major television networks in their coverage of “bloodletting and human suffering” in many parts of Africa. In remarks widely carried in the local media, Gurirab, who is currently president of the UN General Assembly, was addressing the Fourth UN World Television Forum in Geneva. In Kosovo and East Timor, he said major network coverage had brought home the disaster to peoples’ living rooms around the world. But they were downplaying, or ignoring conflict in Africa, he added, citing the example of the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict involving more than a quarter of a million troops, tens of thousands of casualties and over 600,000 displaced people. He also lamented that lack of coverage devoted to the civil war in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Burundi: “These bloody conflicts and humanitarian crises are virtually forgotten because there are no television news cameras to record the carnage and anguish.”