The recent outpouring of international aid and assistance to the victims of the December 26, 2004 tsunami in Asia demonstrates the caring and compassion of which humanity is capable. Yet why is there not equal caring and action by the world community to address the suffering and needs of people, especially children, victimized by war and conflict.

Most people not directly victimized by war or other forms of oppression or disaster must feel “affected” before they will act on behalf of others. This is true in many societies.

Americans eventually felt affected by the Vietnam War in the 1960’s and 1970’s – ten thousand miles from home - because tens of thousands of Americans were coming home in body bags and the horrors of war came into the living rooms of ordinary people through live reporting. There was, however, much less concern for the three million southeast Asians killed in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, mostly from U.S. bombing missions as well as systemic killings of mostly rural civilian Vietnamese families by U.S. soldiers.

This feeling of being “affected” by war did not reoccur a decade later in Nicaragua, nearby the American border, where a US sponsored invasion, the Contra War, with US military and financial support killed hundreds of thousands of ordinary Nicaraguan civilians. Few Americans died in the Contra War of the l980’s, and the carnage was not televised.

World citizens felt affected by the plight of Ethiopians dying from drought in l984 because haunting images of Ethiopian families staggering across parched deserts, living skeletons lying on the ground in refugee camps waiting to die and vultures waiting to pounce upon dying children invaded the conscience through the media. Feeling affected, the world acted.

Direct U.S. support of UNITA, and US organizational support of RENAMO, however - two South African-supported armies which killed over two million people in Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe between 1980-1994 - did not offend the sensibilities of Americans whose taxes, contributions and indifference supported the killings

Since 1998, up to five million civilians have been massacred in the Democratic Republic of Congo – the highest number of casualties in any conflict since WW II – yet the world remains largely dormant in its response. Child soldiering is a major dynamic within the ongoing raids, massacres and violence. As Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost wrote in the Sunday, April 20, 2003 New York Times, in an article entitled: Chaos in Congo Suits Parties Just Fine: “It has not helped that in the 1990’s the United States supplied more than $100 million in arms and military training to six of the seven African countries that have been involved in the fighting of the Congo war.”

Why didn’t this statement have more meaning to its readers?

We believe people want to express their goodness, and do, when they feel affected by suffering. Helping society to feel affected by war and creating handles to make a difference through activities to prevent and end war, alleviate the suffering from war and support the needs of former child soldiers and their communities are objectives that drive our analysis, strategies and program development. Indifference is not a force unto itself, but the absence of feeling affected by the suffering of others. In order for societies in industrial and developed nations to take action against war and respond to humanitarian needs in other lands, they must feel affected.

Humanity – all of us – must grapple with other questions as it relates to responding to the urgent life and death needs of others. How and why in 1994 in Rwanda did the United Nations use its peace keeping forces to evacuate foreign nationals only – whites, in other words - and then withdraw, leaving an unarmed, vulnerable Tutsi population to be slaughtered by an extreme, armed and vengeful Hutu command? What role does institutional racism, in other words, play in decisions to become involved in saving lives or not?

What causes the international and mainstream media to cover an issue, or a war, and not another? Why is the genocide in Darfur so visible and yet the 18 year war in Northern Uganda so invisible? Even with its visibility, why does the world community act as if it is helpless to stop the genocide in Darfur?

How can we replicate the good will and human compassion the tsunami has generated to respond to the needs of people affected by conflict?