Why the World’s Deadliest Wars Go Unreported

In 2013, when I traveled as a journalist through the Central African Republic (CAR) during the country’s civil war, I discovered massacres unknown even 5 kilometers from where they had been perpetrated. As it turned out, after killing hundreds of civilians suspected of aiding rebels in the country’s west, soldiers had destroyed radio antennae so the news wouldn’t get out. People, fearing reprisals, didn’t dare speak about the killings. For months, these massacres went undocumented.

This article is adapted from Breakup: A Marriage in Wartime by Anjan Sundaram (Catapult, 208 pp., $26, April 2023). 

Even as we receive round-the-clock news from the war in Ukraine, with dozens of international reporters rotating through the country, journalists are still unable to cover much of our world. The dead haven’t been counted in the conflict in CAR. The war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the world’s deadliest since World War II, makes the front pages of newspapers briefly, only when violence explodes. In Latin America, hundreds of environmental activists have been killed while bravely defending precious forests, mountains, and rivers, and many of their deaths are just a footnote in the news. The reasons are timeless: a lack of interest in places deemed faraway, and in violence against people seen as unlike us. We don’t grieve as much for some people as others.

Another problem is that news from places such as CAR and Congo often needs to travel to London or New York before it reaches countries such as Nigeria and India. This means that much of international news is filtered through a Western lens or neglected altogether. A lack of international news outlets in the global south has led to great gaps in coverage—even when millions of people die in the world’s deadliest wars.

On our way, Mirek stopped at a series of villages and honked. The villages were empty—people had fled into the forests upon hearing our engine, not knowing if we were soldiers arriving to ambush them. Responding to Mirek’s honks, someone ran out from behind the houses, toward us, and thrust a sheet of paper through our window into my lap. This happened in each of the villages.

I looked at the sheet, and at the neat handwriting listing the names of people who were sick, and which medicines they needed; of people who had died, or had been killed; and the community’s food, water, and medical needs. Mirek collected a half-dozen such pages from villages and carried them to Bouar, where he presented them to nonprofits and international nongovernmental organizations that needed to know whom they should help.

Those villages were cut off from the world, as is much of CAR today. Crucial war reporting was collected and delivered by hand, by the courage of one brave abbot. His selfless work was known outside Bouar only to the nonprofits that worked in his area and the Catholic Church. The abbot was, however, a war correspondent—without receiving the recognition of a byline.

Many villages in CAR waited for survivors of massacres to escape and make their way out—usually on foot through treacherous jungle or roads—to report what happened. Even if the people got out, they were often afraid to speak. Massacres then went by unknown. When reports emerged, often by word of mouth from a survivor who was brave enough to tell others what had occurred, they did so weeks after the killing—too late to help. Despite the world’s technological advances, conflicts like the one in CAR are still shrouded in darkness, and we often don’t know the perpetrators, who is attacked, or why.

The neglect of such war zones is the consequence of an international news system still structured by colonial relationships. Foreign correspondents fly out from global capitals such as Washington, D.C., and London, more or less to similar places at similar times, to tell us more or less the same stories. Local journalists and stringers struggle to sell their vital news reports, as I did in CAR and Congo, where I started my career as a reporter in 2005. Often, a foreign correspondent is parachuted in, at great expense, to “illuminate” a conflict and render it important to a Western audience. The news, still relying on celebrity reporters, suffers in quality and breadth of coverage.

The American philosopher Judith Butler has written that news media depict some wars as less worthy of grief—and outrage—than others. In certain places, entire populations have been destroyed, but, she writes, “there is no great sense that a heinous act and egregious loss have taken place.” Sporadic parachute journalism embodies the global inequalities cited by Butler. It exacerbates and institutionalizes the neglect of remote conflicts and deepens the challenge of covering distant deaths.

With CAR’s local media receiving little information from the countryside, and unable to finance reporters’ travel expenses, the front line in CAR was difficult to find. A Central African reporter, Thierry Messongo, told me a massacre had likely been perpetrated about 250 kilometers from the capital, Bangui. But he lacked a car. So we drove there together, and while there, witnessed an army general drive into the jungle to attack rebels hiding in a remote town.

It took me a few days to get to that town, on motorcycle, deep in the jungle. The general had set fire to the village. The thatch roofs on houses had been burned black. Warm food sat in bowls. Clothes were flung about haphazardly, discarded by people fleeing in a hurry into the forest. The village appeared empty. Thierry yelled out that we were not soldiers, that it was safe for villagers to come out.

A woman in a red shirt emerged from the forest. Others saw her run out—and, seeing that she was not harmed by us, followed her example. Strangely, the first thing they asked me was not for food or medicine, but if people knew about their situation. It was apparently what Holocaust survivors had asked the American soldiers and rabbis who liberated the concentration camps. Almost as important as food was having that information passed out. If others knew about the killing, they could hope that someone in power might help.

This is the power and utility of a journalist who simply shows up. Reporters don’t have the power to alleviate killing—or end a war. But they show up and, in bearing witness, in the simple act of watching the perpetrators of killings, they can reduce the severity of war crimes. Showing up prevents the abuse of power and holds the powerful accountable.

The contrary is needed in Western news: greater humility and openness to its blind spots, so that freelance reporters who show up in remote conflicts find an easier path to publication—rather than facing confusion from editors unaccustomed to covering those wars, and who then easily dismiss those events as less relevant. Myths about the authority and completeness of world news need to be questioned, deconstructed, and broken.

This has only become more important as another crucial conflict has cracked open. According to the international nonprofit Global Witness, 1,700 environmental defenders have been killed around the world in the past decade. Two-thirds of those deaths are concentrated in Latin America. In defending our environment, they are fighting the great conflict of our age. This is perhaps the most vital frontline conflict that journalists need to report on to protect the brave individuals risking their lives to protect our rivers, forests, and biodiversity.

So far, our news system, rooted in colonial inequalities, has failed us here, too, providing us with relatively little coverage of these heroic people. That needs to change. Modern war reporting now has higher stakes than ever, since it is essential to our collective survival. We need to cover all the world’s great conflicts—not only to protect those at risk, but also to defend a natural world vital to sustaining us.