africa: So who's more important than whom?

On April 7, 2003, the New York Times carried a story on a massacre in the Democratic Republic of Congo in which up to 966 non-combatant civilians were slaughtered by warring factions in the east of the country. The story, authored by the Associated Press, ran on page A6 and took up less than a full column of newsprint. Amid the flurry of Iraq war coverage many English-language newspapers made no mention of the Congo massacres. It seems unlikely that the New York Times would give similarly cursory treatment to a massacre of 966 civilians in France, Britain, South Korea or Israel. This disparity leaves us with a question: Is Iraq more important than the Congo?