Sepharad:
‘There are many people in and out of the UN who want to attribute all the ills that afflict Africa—particularly sub-Saharan Africa—to their colonial pasts, which only impedes understanding. As the colonial past recedes further and further into the distance….’

It didn’t recede, it changed its form, when the American ruling class took over the task of keeping the world safe for capitalism from the British Empire.  The preferred American form is to control countries through native representatives, and this was adopted by its satellites.

Africa, like the Balkans and the Middle East, has not had the benefit of the sort of genocidal nation-building which resulted in the large, powerful states of Western Europe and North America, where ethnic and tribal discontents were eliminated or subordinated by force.  This makes Africa (and the Balkans and the Middle East) easier to control and exploit, if sometimes more troublesome.  But perhaps, eventually, African will find some non-genocidal way of getting along politically.  They are not likely to get much help.

To Sepharad:
It is kind of you to suggest that I “nail it’  when it comes to explaining why the world gives inadequate attention to the the horrendous violations of human decency which all to often occur in Africa. I am afraid I probably don’t even come close to providing a half decent answer.
My personal family tree goes back to 1652 when the Dutch set up the first refreshment settlement in the Cape on the shipping route to the East Indies. And I have Dutch, French ,English, Flemish, Swiss, Irish, Malay and West African (black African) blood in my veins. A sort of Heinz 57 varieties background. And I can assure you that unraveling the ins and outs of Africa and proving a recipe for getting it back onto a sensible track is a gigantic undertaking about as complicated as sorting out my family tree!   

There is much I could tell about my attempts to undermine apartheid, how I met Mahatma Gandhi’s son and grandson and so and so on. The one thing you can be sure about is that the situaion is far more complex than most people realize. And, as you rightly say, trying to put all the blame for Africa’s ills on colonialism is both inaccurate and dishonest.
You ask if I know of any books that are worth reading and I will recommend two very different books which might help. The first is a book by Martin Meredith called:
“OUR VOTES OUR GUNS” and subtitled “Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe”. 
Meredith was (and is I suppose) a British journalist who,in the early days of Mugabe’s rise to power, regarded him with much admiration.  But, as Meredith puts it the “honeymoon did not last Long”.  I get the feeling that those who have not lived in Africa don’t have much of a clue about the incredible strength and massively negative consequences of tribalism. And most people who use the word “racism” don’t realize that racism is very far from being confined to those of a Caucasian background. I am afraid the Mandela’s of this world are few and far between. Anyway, if you read Meredith’s book you will soon enough see how quickly and how completely Mugabe went off the rails.
The second book I can unreservedly recommend is a delightful little book by Peter Godwin called simply:
“Mukiwa”. 
It is nothing mor nothing less tha the story of a young white boy growing up in what was then Rhodesia and my whole family loves it.  Godwin has a second book called: “When a Crocodile eats the Sun”—  written more recently—which details the manner in which Mugabe has corrupted the citizens of Zimbabwe and turned all too many of them into thieves and bandits.     
Peace.

Anarcissie, I happen to know that one of the main proponents of the cause in Darfur, was and is the Roman Catholic Church.
Although the ideal way to settle these conflicts would be through peaceful means, the world community through its inattention to all of the conflict in Africa, has seen to it that war and its ensuing atrocities are common place and at once the norm.
I would imagine that if enough attention was paid to the Congolese conflict that the world would be horrified at the atrocities committed by the rebels and the “good guys.”  There is enough blame to go around in this conflict, yet for all the atrocious acts, no one seems to care one whit, because of the lack of “usable resources,”  meaning oil and metals.
Our eyes must be opened to the humanitarian crises that is Africa, we cannot long remain with our eyes closed to the horrific nature of war carried out on the African continent.  Democracy Now, and Amy Goodman, have played a large part in my education on the conflicts that are occurring on the African continent. Even during the last week, there was a story regarding the healing of women from the brutal rapes that have been occurring under some of the rebels regimes. Yet you will hear nothing about the humanitarian crises in the MSM. I believe that this is so because it involves neither Muslims, nor Americans, only people of African heritage and colour. 
Please spread the word that everyone is valuable and not to be abandoned, either because of the colour of their skin, their heritage or country of origin.
We are ONE! Peace out!

The United Nations is made up of states.  Why, then, would it ever impugn the sanctity and sovereignty of states which do not offend other states?

Other than when the ruling class of one state or set of states has decided to make aggressive war on another—in which case the targets will often be described in the aggressors’ propaganda as perpetrating human rights abuses, among other evils.

What a superb review! Thanks. This makes the ‘selling point’ for me..

•  “There are many reasons why the public debate over issues like Rwanda tends to be so simultaneously superficial and sentimental. It would certainly be much improved, however, were more journalists willing to re-examine their positions in the way that Prunier has done, at great cost to himself.”

There’s little way for a truly professional journalist to avoid whatever bias happens to inform them. That’s pretty standard. What is required from the professional is an acknowledgment of exactly this, and that means revising ones opinion, even at the ‘great cost’ which isn’t really so great when it means maintaining ones personal and professional integrity.

Anyway, I’ll gotta get this book right away.

As an overall thought about these differences of reactions to genocidal conflicts, (and I HAVE been giving this a lot of thought for the past several years now) I’m connecting it (theorhetically) to a breakdown in the efficiency of the United Nations, who should - (again, theoretically) be preventing and punishing these crimes. My own work (at least so far) points to the political part of the breakdown which has prevented the world body from identifying these conflicts for what they are, instead of blowing it off as a ‘civil disturbance’ where the so-called “State” is sacrosanct, even when it is “The State” wiping out their own people.

If the representatives of the World Community can’t or won’t call things what they are, they can’t use the resources available to address them and prevent the carnage.

What can I say?  I come from Africa—most recently from Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.  When I read the quote:

“why is it possible, virtually at a moment’s notice, to mobilize tens of thousands of people anywhere from Vienna to Melbourne to demonstrate in support of the suffering people of Gaza, but virtually impossible to mobilize even a small fraction of these numbers in support of the suffering people of Zimbabwe?”

the question posed is intensely real for me.

Part of the answer, as far as the Darfur/Congo comparison is concerned, is that in the Darfur conflict one of the protagonists is a radical Arab/Muslim group with oil being part of the story.  These two things combined almost guarantee greater attention to Darfur than to the Congo.

The followiing quote from the review sumes the whole situsition in Africa up very neatly:

Prunier suggests, the Congolese war took place because of African leaders’ personal [rather than national—the point is a key one for Prunier] “ambitions, prejudices, and security fears.” 

Mugabe’s “personal ambitions” certainly loom large in the Zimbabwe story and the absence of oil in Zimbabwe and the non-involvement of any Muslims lowers the attention span of the Western world and its media.

I first heard of Darfur through a large placard on the side of a bus in New York City.  It turned out that there were many of them.  They were well-designed and well-printed, definitely mainstream advertising technology if not tremendously imaginative or arty.  Large advertisements also appeared in the newspapers.  Perhaps something similar was done on television.

People who have done any activism (or advertising) know how expensive such advertising is, and how hard it is for even fairly large activist groups to raise the necessary money.  Campaigns to raise the money to expand campaigning often take months or years, whereas the Darfur campaign seemed to spring out of nowhere.  One or more very large donors must have existed.

The Darfur conflict, while certainly horrifying enough, is not unlike other regional religious and ethnic wars; there were several going on at the time (2003) just as there are now.  There is not much visible difference between them for an outsider.  The origins of the conlict and the primary actors are murky; most of what we know about them comes via Western governments and media which have never proved particularly trustworthy.  Of course, some are larger and some are smaller.  As the present review notes, the ongoing civil wars in the Congo involve more participants and more casualties.  Many are equally savage.  One might wonder why the wealthy donors of the Darfur publicity picked on this particular conflict and not, say, the Congo or Sri Lanka.

Perhaps it is not entirely irrelevant that at the time the Darfur conflict swam into American public consciousness, the American invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan had just begun and were subjects of discussion and activism.  Perhaps it is not entirely irrelevant that the victims of the war in Iraq are mostly Arab and Muslim, which must make some people uncomfortable because Arabs and Muslims are supposed to be the bad people.  In Darfur, the participants are entirely Muslim, but one side, the good people according to the advertising, are non-Arab, and the other side is not only Arab but allied with an Islamic-fundamentalist Arab government, thus providing a proper object for abuse and hatred.  The urge to be against a war, almost as common and natural as the urge to fight a war, could perhaps be deflected from Iraq and Afghanistan to Darfur.  I leave the question of the source of the desire to create such a deflection to the imagination of the reader.

Another point in the Darfur cause’s favor for some, no doubt, was that it seemed to be a worthy case for humanitarian-imperialist intervention, along the lines of Bosnia and Kosovo, when imperialism was getting a lot of bad press. 

I think it would be interesting to know who paid for that advertising, and how they came to do it.