Sadly, some dying people are more equal than others

THE big problem with living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is that you've got to die really grossly before you rate a mention in the international press. Particularly if you're competing against a single comatose American.

A couple of weeks ago, The Sydney Morning Herald ran a tiny news brief in its foreign pages: "Militiamen grilled bodies on a spit and boiled two girls alive as their mother watched, United Nations peacekeepers have charged, adding cannibalism to a list of atrocities allegedly carried out by one of the tribal groups fighting in northeast Congo, the Patriotic Resistant Front of Ituri."

That was it. A single, overloaded sentence. A search by the News Limited library found no other mention of the incident in any other leading Australian newspaper. You'd think watching your daughter get poached in water and oil before being devoured would be worth a little more. A couple of paragraphs, at least. But that's what you get for living in a place where too many people with dark skin die horribly. Where's the surprise factor? Where's the audience appeal?

It's very different in the US. Over there, Mary Schindler is also watching her daughter die. She's the mother of Terri Schiavo – a woman being starved by the state after dieting her brain to sludge. But unlike those nameless sisters in the Congo, the pros and cons of killing Schiavo have been debated around the planet. When Terri finally passes on to that big weight-loss clinic in the sky, she can rest assured that at least people cared. Even if some of them chose to express it by removing her tubing.

Critics of the mass hysteria surrounding the Schiavo case have been quick to point out the hypocrisy of a nation that also sanctions the execution of mentally ill prisoners and the explosion of infants in Iraq. But it's naive to expect everyone to respond the same way to every death. It's all about proximity. The death of a stranger's kiddy is very different to the death of your own.

What's disturbing, however, is the role the media and entertainment industry play in creating an illusion of proximity.

Thanks to blanket media coverage, Schiavo is now a neighbour. We know intimate details about her life that make us feel like confidants. Like the fact that she was an unhappily chubby teenager and that her 1990 collapse was the result of bouts of bulimia and attempts to survive on liquids alone. There but for the grace of mental stability go so many of us seduced by the illusion that weight loss equals happiness. Schiavo is clearly one of us.

Those Congolese sisters, however, remain nameless foreigners. Statistics only. Barely worth a "can you believe it?" around the water filter.

This combination of ignorance and lack of interest comes at a huge price.

Experts regard the crisis in the Congo as the world's deadliest. According to a study released late last year by New York's International Rescue Committee, 3.8million people in eastern Congo have died since 1998. Humanitarian aid for the region was $241.8million in 2004. Compare this with the heavily reported Boxing Day tsunami, in which 225,000 people died and $6.5billion has been pledged in support.

Our response to the expired will never be egalitarian. But to avoid accusations of living in a persistent vegetative state, we should have a robust argument to justify why we give some dead or soon-to-be-dead people so much more attention than others.

Like unwanted fetuses, the brain dead and the suicidal terminally ill, for instance. I'd love to know why right-to-lifers think these humans (who either don't know they're alive or are actively choosing not to be) warrant so much more time and money than those boiling Congolese sisters, who are bound to have been all too aware of their fate and must have protested most terribly.