A few minutes ago, I was looking at the main page of Wikipedia. When I saw that today's featured article was about Sealand, a micronation near to my heart, I thought about writing about it, especially in light of this extremely short but intriguing London Times article.
Then I looked across the page and saw that Chad declared war on Sudan a few days ago. Or rather, the Chadian government declared that a state of war existed between it and Sudan, because of alleged Sudanese support for Chadian rebels.
Since declarations of war are generally big deals, I was surprised that I had not heard anything about it. After reading some of the sources linked in the Wikipedia article, I headed over to the New York Times. While there was a recent article about Sudanese refugees in Cairo (a story which Ethan Zuckerman wrote about in late October). The latest article on the New York Times' Chad page is more than a week old, and focuses on the rebel attack that caused the declaration of war. To the Times, the conflict does not exist. BBC News Online is only slightly better; their lead Africa article is about Chadian President Idriss Deby's latest comments.
I suspect that other American news sources will have similar blind spots toward Chad, especially since the majority of the sources in Wikipedia are foreign.
A quick search of the Wikinews front page and the Indymedia front page also do not turn up any stories… maybe it really is just an objectively unimportant war :-/
Perhaps you should start a story on Wikinews or something, maybe mentioning the lack of coverage?
I think the "problem" is that it is not a "shooting war" - the Chadian and Sudanese armed forces are not actually attacking each other. At the same time, I would not call it unimportant - if the friction between the two countries were to break out into war, it is possible that it could expand into a larger regional conflict as neighboring countries attempt to influence the outcome, as occurred in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Also, if you still have any interest in starting your own country, you should DEFINITELY check out Seastead.org. I've met the fellow behind it, and he's very competent and convincing… he also happens to work for Google, so I don't doubt that he'll eventually raise enough money to put his plans into action.