Last week, United Nations officials announced that the armed conflict in Somalia has created a humanitarian crisis that is likely Africa’s worst, eclipsing that in Darfur. The fighting in Somalia has been nearly constant in the country since 1991, and recently flared up in Mogadishu, sending thousands fleeing from the capital. At least 850,000 people are now internally displaced in Somalia, with some officials placing the figure at closer to one million. Deaths from disease and famine have already begun.

The UN’s pronouncement of this crisis fell with a thud in North American media. Most major newspapers in Toronto didn’t even carry the story, let alone put it on the front page where it belonged.

This should come as a surprise, considering the amount of media attention that has been garnered by ongoing conflicts in the Darfur region of Sudan. Given that Somalia’s crisis is more than comparable in scope, why are Canadians taking so little notice?

Like so many Westerners before them, the majority of Canadians have a very hard time thinking of Africans as fellow human beings in the same way that they conceive of Europeans or North Americans. In the minds of many, Africa is the continent of perpetual disaster: poverty, famine, AIDS, and constant war. We seem to think that Africans naturally just have harder, shorter lives than we do. No one is surprised to hear of another outbreak of war in the “dark continent.”

The violence in Darfur is the only conflict to have broken into the Western consciousness with any force in recent years, largely because of it has been portrayed by media and activists as a different kind of African conflict.

The conflict in Darfur has been deemed a genocide. This separates it from other serious conflicts such as the largely unheard of Congolese war, which since 1994 has claimed more than 3.8 million lives. The situation unfolding in Sudan is clearly serious and requires the full attention of the international community, but should we disregard the deaths of people in other regions simply because they are being killed for different reasons?

Labeling Darfur a genocide seems to contextualize the violence for Westerners. Genocide is something we can understand. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that Europeans suffered one. We identify the victims of the Sudanese violence with those of the Holocaust. This is a comparison made explicit by the hundreds of activists who wave Israeli flags at Save Darfur rallies, and chant “Never Again!” at our politicians.

Any slogan or historical allusion that urges action against the atrocities in Darfur should certainly be used to full effect, but what about the victims of conflicts that aren’t so easily analogous to Western history?

The war in Somalia seems to confound our sympathies. We do not see ourselves in its victims, only an unlucky mass of humanity unfortunate enough to have been born into a continental maelstrom of unending violence.

Our difficulty in identifying with Somalis should be all the more troubling because 200,000 Somali-Canadians live in this city. Many of those who are now facing hardships are erstwhile Torontonians who have returned to Somalia during lulls in the fighting.

If we could call them neighbours a few short years ago, why can’t we spare them space on our front pages today?