THERE is no news today from the Congo.

This may not surprise anyone, given the 30 or so US citizens killed in Saudi Arabia, the couple of hundred or so people who have died of Sars in the Far East, and the couple of thousand or so bodies found buried by Saddam in Iraq. Then there's the threat of terrorist attacks in Kenya and dirty bombs being smuggled into Britain any day now.

But if there were news from the Congo, it would be much, much worse than any of the headlines which have been giving us horrors this week.

It would tell of several hundred or so slaughtered around the town of Bunia, and of 10,000 or so driven from their homes. It would say that 2,600 or so people are dying every day in the east of the country from war-related disease and malnutrition, and it would confirm that 16 million or so are living on the brink of starvation.

This is the world's biggest war and yet we know nothing about it.

Its causes, though, sound vaguely familiar.

First came mass slaughter by the Belgian colonists; then came independence and civil war which was followed by corrupt self-government led by President Mobutu Sese Seko.

Mobutu declared that he was anti-Communist; US President Ronald Reagan declared Mobutu to be a friend, and the Americans were allowed to use the Congo as a base from which they could undermine Marxist Angola next door. But once the Cold War was over, the Americans didn't need Mobutu and so they dropped him. The area - western central Africa - collapsed.

In 1994, extremist members of the Hutu tribe killed one million members of the Tutsi tribe in 100 days in Rwanda. The Hutus responsible fled over the border into the Congo where Mobutu gave them shelter.

Rwanda invaded the Congo. As did Uganda in support of Rwanda. Zimbabwe invaded to assist the Congolese; Angola invaded to assist Zimbabwe; Burundi piled in to support Uganda in its support of Rwanda. Serb mercenaries also turned up.

Congolese tribe turned on Congolese tribe, the most brutal being the Mai Mai. Armed with machetes these traditional warriors were lethal. They liked to wear the severed hands of their victims tied around their necks to mimic the 19th century Belgian colonists who sliced off the hands of rubber production workers who failed to hit their quota.

The net result is that since 1998, when President Mobutu was overthrown, the war has cost the lives of three million people. Or so.

Even Mother Nature has weighed in. About 50,000 or so Congolese are slowly poisoning themselves by drinking water turned acidic by the sulphurous eruptions of a volcano.

A couple of local legends give some idea of the Congo. In one, it took a Red Cross worker an hour to shake hands with five elders of a remote village - they were so poor they had just one set of rags between them but so proud they refused to be seen naked by the stranger. In another, the Mai Mai butchered a young boy who had concealed his pet guinea pig from them.

Yet no one has heard of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and there is no news today about how the war there is going. Certainly, there are no headlines about any world leader drawing up a roadmap to peace for the world's worst war.