What the intellectuals must do

ef. And what are we in the West going to do in view of the unspeakable human sorrow? In the Congo alone 3,740,000 people have been killed since 1998.

Where are the voices now that were once raised against exploitative colonialism? Is Peter Scholl-Latour the only honest intellec-tual left in the West whose independent voice denounces the injustice and appeals to our conscience?

A Congolese friend recently told me that Neo-colonialism was much worse than colonialism ever was. Anybody who knows how the colonialists ‘ruled’ particularly in the Congo will know what this statement implies.

It is unbearable for the people in the Congo that the First and Second World countries remain silent.

Rightly, the president of the Civil Society demanded that the big powers leave the Congolese people and their country alone. The peace-loving Congolese will forge their own future which undoubtedly will have nothing to do with either militaristic Trotskyism or marauding big business.

Leaving the Congolese alone does not mean to abandon people and to remain silent. What is needed instead is human compassion, is to hold those responsible for the dire poverty, to account, denounce the injustice, to stir people’s conscience, to make it known, to find ways together to help in an unbureaucratic manner. This is where our responsibility as intellectuals lies. In the 70s and 80s there was a wide-spread discussion about the situation of the Third World. Academics stirred the conscience of many people–not only students–with their dis-cussions that took place at universities. Honest concern and real indignation at the injustice suffered by people of the Third World made many people sit up and think. It made a lot of people want to do something for the people in the Third World.

It is time this was revived.