New York - Few Americans know about the deaths of possibly up to 2,5 million people in rebel-held eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) over the past three years, and even fewer know why.
Prominent US television journalist Ted Koppel, who begins a five-part series on the war in the DRC on Friday, said journalists who failed to give the story the attention it deserves are to blame.
He starts the series with an extraordinary apology from his programme and his profession.
"These are events you should have heard about on Nightline years ago," Koppel says in his introduction.
Nearly impossible to identify good guys and bad guys The series is a heartbreaking, harrowing start in shining a light on the region's tragedy. After Friday, it continues next Tuesday to Friday.
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"How can two-and-a-half million people die over a three-year period and we don't even notice?" Koppel asked in an interview. "It's not as though we were looking at the story and saying, 'It's far away, let's not bother.' It didn't even rise to that level."
Contrast that to the attention given to the war in Kosovo, where an estimated 20 000 people died, he said.
The New York-based International Rescue Committee estimated that 2,5m people have died in rebel-held eastern Congo during the war.
Congo is far away, is so inaccessible that Nightline had to shoot scenes from the air and, in many places, is too dangerous to visit. America has no obvious strategic interest and it's nearly impossible to identify good guys and bad guys, he said.
'I think that if you make the stories accessible, then everybody cares' Racism is also partly to blame for the inattention, with the insidious sense that people expect this from Africa, he said.
Nightline shows the bones of gorillas and elephants killed for food at a game preserve. As the cameras pan over valleys of lush vegetation at the park, Koppel says: "We don't have a pile of human bodies to show you.
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