One dead gorilla is news – a guerrilla war is not

It was one of the most arresting images of last year. A majestic male mountain gorilla, his body flecked with blood, splayed out lifeless on a stretcher that 15 park rangers were struggling to bear through the jungle of eastern Congo.

The massacre of the silverback Senkekwe, along with five other rare apes, made the cover of US magazine Newsweek under the headline "Gorilla Warfare". In Britain, the "Murders In The Mist" prompted The Sun to launch its own campaign, and around the globe people wrote in to media outlets, telling of the sleepless nights and trauma the images had caused.

For Anneke van Woudenberg, the Congo specialist for Human Rights Watch, it was a case of gritting one's teeth. "Kill a mountain gorilla in Congo and it gets much more coverage than five million dead," she says. "It irks me every time."

Trawling through the archives of British newspapers for the first four months of 2008, the point is hammered home. The slaughter of elephants in Congo to make ivory chopsticks appears to be the most widely reported story. Another popular item is the arrest of sorcerers suspected of stealing or shrinking human penises.

Breaking the trend of wildlife stories and wild tales are Financial Times articles about Congo's vast mineral resources, a Guardian feature on plans to build the world's biggest dam across the Congo river and a report about Kinshasa's vibrant music scene in this newspaper.

Conspicuously absent are dispatches about the humanitarian crisis, the legacy of the worst conflict since 1945, and a crisis that is still killing an estimated 1,200 people every day. Although Congo's war officially ended in 2002, malaria, cholera and malnutrition mean that the equivalent of the population of Manchester will be wiped out this year.

The humanitarian statistics alone are mind-boggling. Then consider the violence still raging in the troublesome east of the country, and the use of rape as a vicious weapon of war from which even toddlers are not immune, not to mention how Congo will rebuild itself after what is commonly dubbed Africa's First World War. So why aren't we reading more about it?

"Death and destruction in Congo is not something people want to think about over Sunday breakfast. The bean-counters at media outlets know this," sighs Marcus Bleasdale, a photojournalist who has documented the Congo for eight years. "But, as journalists, we have a responsibility to let the world know what is going on, whether or not it sells newspapers or magazines."

David Lewis, a Reuters correspondent in Kinshasa for three years, remembers one of the biggest media flurries during his posting. Children believed to be witches were being tortured to exorcise demons and, if that failed, either cast out on to the streets or killed. "Even British tabloids, which wouldn't report on Congo ordinarily, sent people out here. The whole concept of children being chopped up is something that sells much more than the concept of a huge nation embroiled in a complicated, bloody conflict," Lewis says. Undoubtedly it was a horrific and compelling story, but also one that affected the tiniest percentage of Congolese.

As most staffers and freelancers will testify, getting stories about run-of-the-mill life in Congo into print is a tough challenge, particularly when there is not a historic event like the 2006 elections (the country's first in almost half a century) to peg them to. "Yet if I were to tell them that Ben Affleck is going there next week then suddenly I'd have eight pages," says Bleasdale. "What the hell does Ben Affleck, who's probably only going to spend 24 hours there, have to do with the story?"

The financial equation for Congo in these belt-tightening media times is a lose-lose one. The stories won't sell newspapers and cost a lot to report. Only international news agencies and the odd international broadcaster have correspondents permanently based there, and flying to Kinshasa even from Nairobi and Johannesburg, where many Western foreign correspondents are based, is extremely expensive.

Once in country, the distances are vast. Travelling from the top to bottom of Congo is the equivalent of a trip from Scotland to Sicily; from west to east we are talking Ireland to Russia, only without any decent roads. A decent reporting trip comes in at about the $10,000 mark. In a year when newspapers have to budget for the US presidential election and Beijing Olympics, it is an easy expense for the bean-counters to axe.

When reporters do fight their way in, they are under pressure to get dramatic stories quickly. Anybody Here Been Raped And Speaks English?, the title of the best-selling memoirs of foreign correspondent stalwart Edward Behr, might have been inspired by a TV crew's request overheard during the fighting in the Congo in the 1960s, but variations on the theme are still uttered today.

Parachuting in without the luxury of the daily familiarity of the story that the in situ reporters enjoy, the trap for visiting journalists to avoid is what might be termed "Heart of Darkness syndrome". Joseph Conrad's novella was short in length, but long-lasting in influence, as evidenced by the fact that "I survived the Heart of Darkness" T-shirts are on sale in Kinshasa today.

"There are very few articles written about Congo that don't make reference to the Heart of Darkness, so the myth is perpetuated," says van Woudenberg. And that leads to Congo fatigue. "It's like it has always been a basket-case, horrible things have always happened there, horrible things will always happen there."

Another problem for visiting reporters, according to Richard Dowden of the Royal African Society, is that there are few people to contextualise events. "What strikes the visitor may be important or unimportant to people who live there – or have a completely different meaning," he explains. "And it is so very difficult to find Congolese who can explain Congo to outsiders."

In Africa, Congo is also competing for attention. Dubious elections in Zimbabwe and Kenya in the past six months have generated extensive coverage in Britain, resonating firstly because they are both former colonies and, secondly, because Kenya is a popular holiday destination. Meanwhile, crises raging in northern Uganda, Somalia and Darfur vie for space. Even the UN has been forced to try to come up with unique branding for each humanitarian crisis – one is the "most forgotten", another the "worst in the world".

Darfur has received a lot of column inches, thanks partly to the celebrity campaigning of Mia Farrow and George Clooney, and also because it is in some ways a more media-friendly crisis, with an easily defined bad guy in the shape of the Janjaweed militias. In Congo, especially in the east, where fighting continues despite a ceasefire signed early this year, what you have is an alphabet soup of armed groups.

However, what makes Congo particularly deserving of continued attention is the potential it has to destabilise an entire region. "It is literally as well as metaphorically at the heart of Africa, and so what happens here has a much wider significance in terms of the future of the continent," says Alan Doss, the head of the UN mission there, which is the biggest peacekeeping force in the world. And for dedicated reporters like Bleasdale, Congo is a story that is not going away. "If journalists aren't writing about it or editors won't run the stories," he says, "then they are just as guilty as the warlords."