Does the word 'genocide' help or hinder?
It's only one word. But "genocide" has lost none of its power to enrage, distract, focus, galvanize and distort our responses to the wars and horrors that still crop up in some parts of Africa.
Has the word helped anyone in Darfur? You can argue that one both ways. But by the time it became common currency, the very worst of the atrocities there were over.
Will it help in the Democratic Republic of Congo? Its relatively tentative, lawyerly inclusion in an exhaustive UN report on a decade of atrocities has snatched the headlines and infuriated Rwanda.
Perhaps it will help focus attention on the region's search for justice - but not for long, I suspect. Will it actually do anything to help break the long cycle of impunity that keeps the beautiful Kivus in such chaos?
Over the years I have rarely covered a conflict where the word wasn't employed, almost routinely, by one or both sides. I know the strict definition of "genocide" is broader than one might expect, but is it used too glibly now?
The focus today is on Rwanda's reaction to the word, and the report. Surely we should be more interested in the voices and opinions of all those civilians who've suffered - at the hands of so many different armies - in the green hills of eastern DR Congo?
±õ’m 
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