Islamist militants massacred 51 people last Saturday night. Did you hear about it?

Matthew King reports in The American Interest,

Late Saturday night, Islamist insurgents struck residences and a health clinic in the Congolese city of Beni, claiming upwards of 51 victims in close-quarters machete attacks designed to shock and horrify as much for their intimacy as for their brutality. The following morning, makeshift hearses trundled through the streets, their open truck beds bearing not even shrouds to cover the dozen-or-so bodies unceremoniously stacked within. Grieving onlookers snapped photos as rigor mortis set in.

...Dozens dead, Islamist involvement, potential government collusion—what happened in Beni has all the makings of a big news story. Aside from the initial wire service reports, no major media outlet has released an in-depth story on the massacre. Had such an attack occurred just about anywhere else, even in less accessible and more hazardous reaches of Syria or Afghanistan, reporters would have flocked to the scene. World leaders would issue condemnations and call for summits. Names and stories and pictures of victims would circulate on social media. We would see a new Facebook filter à la Paris or notice hashtags trending around the world. #JeSuisBeni. #PrayforBeni.

Yet we heard so little.

In French, béni means blessed. But when it comes to receiving international attention, Beni is cursed. The August 13 attack is merely the latest act of a violent drama that has claimed more than 1,100 lives in the region over the past two years.

...This all looks very complicated if you are seeing it for the first time, but the massacre that transpired last weekend in the DRC is no harder to understand than events in many other world hotspots. Given how slapdash and superficial most press coverage of Africa is, it wouldn’t take much in the way of time, resources, or intellectual focus to do a measurably better job. With terrorist organizations like ISIS and Boko Haram looking to expand further in Africa, and Asian powers like China, India, and Japan scrambling for influence and lucrative contracts there, no serious student of geopolitics can navigate global trends with a blind spot obscuring this billion-strong continent. The wire services and, for that matter, the WSJ, deserve credit for doing more with Beni than most of their peers. We hope they’ll redouble their efforts. Stories like these are too important to overlook.

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