Friday Rants Are The Best

This week's movie of the week was the "Constant Gardener." The film was released in 2005 and this was the first time I have seen it.
It is a film that takes place in Kenya, it does not relay the events that are happening in Somalia or in Southern or Western Sudan. Rather is portrays a message of corporate manipulation of drugs for TB that is hypothetically occurring in Africa and the death of two of the main characters occurs at the hands of such companies rather than at the hands of the English or Kenyan government.
If you have not seen the film I advice you to see it because it portrays another actor in the continuing human rights struggle of Eastern Africa. However from this perspective it is not focused on government corruption or the arms trade, but rather the health perspective that is also a driver in the conflicts of this region.

From a security perspective I would like to point out that greater instability in a region is likely to lead to the spread of terrorism. Thus it is even more important to stabilize the humanitarian situation in these countries due to the fact that such instability may cause the spread of terrorist activities such as those we are currently seeing in Afghanistan and Iraq. There is also the military component and the tribal fighting that is ongoing in this area.
As you should know Al Qaeda has ties to Somalia and my theory is once it covers Somalia there should be no reason for such cells to pop up in other regions of this continent. Of course there is the border of Ethiopia and Somalia to keep the conflicts against the coast. It is a pending situation that will have different effects in the next 5-10 years. I have not even begun on the ongoing war in Congo. Africa in many ways has become the forgotten continent, I think we may come to regret this in the next decade or so. Not to mention the Chinese have not forgotten about Africa, neither have their investors.
Ultimately there are multiple military and diplomatic efforts that we as the public do not know about. In addition there are grassroots efforts and many other factors that we may or may not be aware of.
I could go on and on with this, but the combination of frustration and redundancy is already apparent. Each conflict must be individually broken down and examined to see the combating parties, what they are ultimately fight over (ie water or land) and what are the powers supplying the guns, the planes, the medicine and diplomatic/military support. In addition you have to consider the desertification of Northern Africa that is expanding the size of the desert (desertification) and causing conflicts over resources that spur life. Such as water, wood for cooking and land for raising animals/crops.
Like I said there are many many factors to the conflicts within the African continent. The "Constant Gardener" simply shows one of those "hypothetical" forces.

One of the things that often annoyed me when we were doing fund raising or awareness campaigns back at school was a) the level of apathy and b) the people that did show an interest quickly disappeared. While people may not have to pack their bags and relocate to the troubled areas of the world we can do work at home to monitor what our government is doing as well as the multinational corporations that we rely so heavily on for our standard of living.