Albany Blog

To a considerable extent, crises in far-off lands are defined by foreigners and not by those living through them, which then creates a perceived moral imperative to do something about it. Darfur became Darfur when the West got involved, and continues to dominate its parameters.

The media were slow in picking up Darfur, and were led to the story by human rights organisations (HROs). Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Crisis Group provided much of the facts and background – and morality – that amounted to enough of a groundswell that the mainstream Western media felt emboldened enough to run another Africa story.

Of course, 2003 had been a very serious year in terms of conflict and bloodshed, but it is often the case that the Western media are slow (or reluctant) on the uptake, defining the crisis themselves and arriving once a lot has already taken place. Essentially, the media selected their narrative from the more complete story supplied by the HROs, leaving important ideas out and rendering an incomplete and essentialised picture.

Regarding the story of Darfur, there is a clear relationship between the media and HROs. In fact, from January – May 2004, which was very much the early stages of media reporting of Darfur in Britain, the Guardian, Independent, Times and Daily Telegraph had all reported Darfur, and each quoted from Amnesty, HRW and the ICG. To better appreciate the import of this, a few characteristics of the HROs need pointing out.

The developed branch of ethics that governs journalism has limited equivalent in human rights reporting. Such reports are a form of lobbying, insofar as the points they wish to make are not tempered by an ethics-mandated need for balance, or a journalist’s requirement to ‘tell both sides of the story.’

The organisations themselves are perfectly candid about what they provide: “strategic, targeted advocacy” and “moral groundwork” (HRW), “campaigning” and [the means to] “exert influence” (Amnesty), and “policy prescription and high-level advocacy” (ICG). No media organisation would officially claim such things.

Thus in reading these reports, the reader is led to a viewpoint in the absence of both moral ambiguity and the shades of grey that often characterise conflict. In the case of Darfur particularly, it is clear (and unchallenged) who is to blame (the Sudanese government), so in this sense such reports contain a prosecutorial element.

Such reports use extensive victim testimony, packaged for publication by the author in the majority of cases, which combine with the reportage to give factual and moral certainty to events. The single explanation offered gives the impression of a ‘complete’ picture, but contains no space for the accused to present their side of things as victim-perpetrator narratives usually do.

One further point is coverage; news is where the journalists are, not the other way round – and the same can be said of the HROs. They can, and do, also leave stories untold.

When looking at the genesis of a narrative that had hitherto been below the media’s radar but squarely in the NGO field, there are two main points to be made.

Firstly, the media were both unwilling and unable to do much fact-checking. Access and inclination was a problem, and so accepting at face value factual information contained was necessary. Much of the early reporting was clearly sourced to various NGO reports.

It is worth adding, however, that these reports were not necessarily or intentionally misleading or factually incorrect, although sincerity and distortion are not mutually exclusive. The most likely scenario is that the media simply were not in a position to check the facts given in these reports. That would imply considerable time and resource expenditure, which was very unlikely to be given the OK when the media were not keen on Darfur in the first place.

Secondly, the dominant narrative adopted by the media was selected from a fuller account provided by the HROs, meaning that parts were left out.

For example, a report from Amnesty (27 November 2003) contains ideas such as Arab non-participation in the conflict, and another (17 February 2004), also from Amnesty, reports allegations of abuses – such as killing, looting and kidnapping – committed by the armed rebel groups. Such ideas were lost under the weight of the essentialised narrative that, from a distant Europe and US, simplified the conflict to Arab vs African.

Similarly, when mentioned, Chad was contextualized as somewhere that borders Darfur and a locus of refugee camps housing Darfuris. Little mention was made of the complex, politically significant ethnography of the two areas and fractious history of Chad-Sudanese relations. These are the ambiguities and shades of grey that are more consistent with conflict.

The elements selected tend to fit in with the Western media’s broader iconography of an African disaster: distant, bloody, man-made and interminable. One of the Times’ earliest editorial headlines on Darfur (27 May 2004) was “Africa’s latest atrocity,” while the phrase “the horrors of Darfur” first appeared around mid-2004, and was still in use five years later.

Thus the media narrative has tended to render Darfur’s identity politics fixed as opposed to fluid, which is of course what they are. This then became fed back into the conflict, contributing to its perpetuation. 

Human rights reports fulfil a valuable role, but should be seen as complementary, not an alternative or identical to a journalist’s research. Even then, important nuances that appeared in the early Darfur human rights reports were overlooked.

The selectivity and essentialised conception that characterises the passage of Darfur’s narrative from human rights reporting to the mainstream media need not be anything particular to Darfur, for the media generally operates in this way.

However, Darfur stands out because it was (eventually) embraced remarkably fully by a media that described predominantly in black and white a conflict that simply could not be described in those terms.

Guy Gabriel is a journalist and adviser to Arab Media Watch.

Writing in the New York Review of Books recently, Pullitzer winner and Darfur advocate Nicholas Kristof noted that “Darfur fatigue” had set in, and that “the [Save Darfur] movement has lost its steam.”  A close analysis of the frequency with which the media mentions Darfur in recent months suggests he is right about the fatigue. Once the fuss in the media over the application for indictment of Sudan’s president Omar Bashir had died down by September 2008, the rate at which Darfur was mentioned in the press plummeted.

At no other time during the conflict had the frequency with which Darfur is mentioned in the press dropped so low as during the latter half of 2008. There was a spike in media interest in March 2009 as the indictment itself was reported, but frequency has dropped off significantly in the subsequent months. The interest that maintained Darfur’s place in the media for much of 2004 is long gone. “If it bleeds, it leads,” as the journalist’s aphorism goes – and a lack of blood subdued media interest in Darfur.

Is this an indication that Save Darfur has lost its steam? Any answer to this must firstly take into account what outcome it was reasonable to expect. Other Save Darfur suggested actions, such as “lobbying your member of Congress, educating others, planning a local event” can be evaluated at some other stage. Darfur may have slipped out of the news, but the low frequency with which it is mentioned in the press need not be particularly remarkable; it can be put down to the usual media cycle in which interest in a subject ebbs and flows, and it can also be put down to the compassion fatigue that has always afflicted public interest in ongoing crises.

There is nothing specific to Darfur that accounts for this fatigue; it is merely a variant of the broader concept of compassion fatigue which afflicts all news stories. Palestine has long been a cause celebre with a huge and diversified (albeit generally disconnected) advocacy movement, in which Operation Cast Lead was front-page news, whereas the drip-drip of the attritional blockade of Gaza scarcely got a mention.

Simply put, there are so many bad situations and crises in the world that people get bored of repetition; the media ran out of descriptive hyperboles some time ago. One other factor to consider is that in media terms, there is only enough public appetite for one crisis at a time, and thus the media is obliged to undertake a sort of triage when deciding what to cover. Of course, advocates and activists seek to arrange things such that theirs is the crisis that gets the attention, but there is no predicting (or accountability for) what direction an editor feels inclined to take.

Furthermore, the media are better convinced of something’s (ongoing) newsworthiness by official interest. While the US government declared genocide in 2004, their conviction was not wholehearted; certainly not enough to do anything of substance about it. They were immeasurably distracted by Iraq, and so then were the media. Today, phrases from US officials such as the “remnants of genocide” will subdue media interest as much as anything, because it suggests there are only remnants of a story.

An interesting aside is that in the absence of much interest by the Western ‘intervening’ governments and the media, it has fallen on celebrities to be the ‘certifiers of disaster,’ a curious twist on the foreign correspondents that would previously stand before a scene of desolation and certify to the world the gravity of the crisis.

In the context of the increasing trend towards the blurring of hard and soft news (’infotainment’), it is worth noting that Darfur’s attraction to so many celebrities has helped sustain it in the media. However, notable in the case of Darfur is the unprecedented advocacy movement that has sought to place it as high up the agenda as possible, and to keep it there.

A reflective Kristof asks “did the Darfur movement lose its way? Does it know what it’s doing?” While some may take this as an admission of incompetence, it may equally be understood as a call to clarify its objectives and accept limitations. In terms of the media, it is inherently difficult to sustain interest over a long period of time, particularly when not much seems to change. In the case of Darfur, things have been changing of course, but the dynamics of the conflict have not been well reflected in its reporting. The widespread interest in the International Criminal Court involved regular, professional press releases and reporting from press conferences in The Hague, not so much Darfur.

This general area demonstrates a contradiction between the common headline assertion of “ongoing genocide” and Save Darfur’s acknowledgement that the conflict is “very complex and constantly changing” (two factors that in themselves are anathema to media coverage). The ICC process against Bashir, championed by Save Darfur and covered widely by the media, dropped genocide charges in March 2009, creating a further non-sequitur in an editor’s conception of Darfur. No editor is expected to be an expert on Darfur. Even prior to this, fairly divergent opinions on death toll figures for Darfur suggested the narrative was not as coherent as other major news stories.

If there was a united and generally coherent position on what has happened in Darfur – in the same way that famines are able to broadly unite observers and advocates on the course of action to take – the cracks now showing in the narrative that have led (among other things) to this hint of introspection would barely be showing.

The dominant themes adopted by the movement – genocide, evil etc – do lend themselves well to media attention, but it is formulaic. Elements of the morality play were prominent (in George Clooney’s words, “it comes down to simply right and wrong”), as was historical analogy: around one in five articles in 2004/05 mentioning Darfur also mentioned Rwanda. One does not explain the other.

If the media notices that attention spans are getting shorter (sadly, a general trend in news consumption), then they will shorten the news, meaning that competition for space becomes fiercer. Darfur has engendered many creative ways of gaining attention when more conventional methods have struggled, as the Save Darfur dog’s bowl and the ‘Stop Genocide’ thong attest to. However, of course, credibility is a problem: thongs and serious news do not sit well together.

One final observation on generating media coverage is how it is phrased: by “generating coverage in the media about the crisis,” you will “help build the political power needed to end this conflict.” This sounds a bit unfair: because coverage has been at a low ebb lately, does that mean activists are to blame because they have not tried hard enough to “build the political power needed”? But essentially, here Save Darfur is providing itself with a lifeline – the encouragement and way forward: work harder to generate that media coverage. Nonetheless, Save Darfur slogans such as “massive response”, “inspiring action” or “speaking truth to power” ring a bit hollow due to their vagueness. On the other hand, the more specific entreaty of “generat[e] media coverage” is hard to do per se, even more so now that the fatigue has properly set in.

In terms of the media, losing steam is a very hard thing to guard against, even before the introspection has begun about how, as Kristof suggests, “we have failed to foster the political will to bring about change.”

Guy Gabriel is a journalist and adviser to Arab Media Watch.

A few days ago South-Central Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government desperately asked its neighbours to send troops to help prevent the capital, Mogadishu, from falling to Al-Shabab forces. The SOS came after a series of attacks killing the minister of security and head of police. The brief hope the appointment of a new government last January offered is quickly vanishing in the same violence that has haunted the country for the past 18 years.

But why is Somalia, whose political turmoil is accompanied by one of the worst humanitarian crisis in recent history, is still largely absent from international media? Why Darfur continues to capture the attention of ordinary people, foreign offices and Hollywood celebrities, despite a dramatic drop of violence in the region, and the raising killings in Somalia pass largely unnoticed?  One obvious answer lies in the reluctance of big powers to engage with yet another crisis in the Islamic world. Another, more subtle, reason has to be found in the way the humanitarian and political mayhem in Somalia have been framed so far.

In the past years, together with a team of international and local researchers, I have been conducting research on the perception of the conflict in Darfur among Darfuris as well as in the international media. The results can be found here (http://www.stanhopecentre.org/2007/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=146&Itemid=1)/ .  This research has helped provide insight on how the narratives constructed around the conflict have dramatically affected the willingness and capacity of the international community to respond to the crisis. I will use these findings, coupled with the sharp insights of Mahmood Mamdani’s recent work on the Darfur crisis and the role of the Save Darfur Coalition, to understand if and how the emergency in Somalia can be framed in a way that has the power to attract the attention it needs.

Since 2005 the Save Darfur Coalition, a group of faith based organizations and NGOs, has advocated a greater involvement of the US and other governments in the conflict in the Western region of Sudan. The coalition has been very successful in gaining international attention.  It has, however, come at the expense of a counter-productive framing the conflict and its actors. This narrative has created victims and villains, forgetting that in too many cases the victims are in the villains’ camp. It has given the opportunity for inexperienced and self-righteous individuals to behave like heroes, just because they were siding with those that were said to be the “good guys”. At the same time, this strategy has been exceptionally capable in putting Darfur on the global map. For Somalia, the challenge that presents itself is: are there ways to construct a narrative of a conflict, as to attract greater attention towards it, without creating a simple story of villains, victims and heroes?

Three aspects of the international media’s coverage of the Darfur crisis suggest possible insights for Somalia.

First. Numbers. In the case of the reporting on the conflict in Darfur, a striking feature was the persistence and consistence of the number of casualties. In our research we analyzed the local and international press and in almost every article about Darfur on the BBC or CNN, even those about recent events, there was a background note with the number of casualties. This is a way to hammer a common and recursive narrative into the head of the reader.

The number of casualties did change over time, but it did it through a sharp and dramatic increase and not incrementally. Until 2007 the official figure commonly cited by the news was 200,000. Staring from 2008 this figure suddenly jumped to 300,000 despite that there were no major clashes in Darfur. Following Mamdani’s argument, the reason of this increase has to be found in the ‘politics of attention’ rather than in the real dynamics of the conflict.   So-called ‘experts’ such as those gravitating around the Save Darfur coalition consistently fed the news media with easy numbers and put pressure on international bodies to use their figures.

In contrast, a brief examination of reports on Somalia (sampling around 200 pieces between May 2008 and May 2009 on google news) I could not find any consistence and clarity among the reported numbers of casualties and displacements. There obviously was coverage of the number of deaths during singular events, and in many cases they were high and striking, 119, 45, 34, but there was hardly ever the background note we could encounter in Darfur. To an occasional reader what was going on in Somalia could be easily interpreted as just a dramatic event in a chaotic region of the world. And thus, nothing to act upon.

A lesson is, simple numbers, repeated with consistence and persistence, are a way to alert readers that the whole story goes beyond the single episodes. This story has to be repeated over and over again, always the same, to reach its tipping point. In the era where blogs constantly increase while foreign correspondents disappear, having the ‘right’ numbers circulating in the blogosphere may make the difference.

A second, and much more problematic, aspect of constructing a narrative depends on how the actors in the conflict are framed. The Save Darfur Coalition decided to play the racism card framing the war as one between Arab Muslims and African Muslims. It created a polarization that was easy to interpret, especially by American audiences that already used to the “war on terror” rhetoric where the Arabs are seen as the enemy. Mamdani, as well as Alex DeWaal, illustrated how this division was more fabricated than real.  Just as large, consistently repeated numbers are important for garnering attention, this dichotomy has also allowed the conflict to be framed as a “genocide”.  This word has been successful in creating a sense of urgency.

I am not arguing for the use of this or similarly powerful words, especially when they camouflage reality for the benefit of a partisan campaign. At the same time, however, I think it is vital to be aware of the mechanisms that are used to construct specific narratives. And it is legitimate to ask if it is possible to produce some that do not fall under the paradox of criminalizing people as to be able to help them.

This task is much more daunting than using simple and recurrent numbers. But there are cases when framing an issue with different words without dramatizing it too heavily has still produced a remarkable change. An example is offered by the campaign against Female Genital Mutilation. For a long time this practice was known only in medical circles as female circumcision or infibulation. Circumcision evoked the image of ancestral practices that could not be judged in the name of an apparently legitimate cultural relativism.  But in 1974 a new campaign begun to re-name the practice “mutilation”, creating a new image in the mind of the people the campaign was targeting. An image strong enough to justify the right to intervene and stop FGM, independently from the latitude where the mutilation was taking place.

Somalia does not yet have a powerful narrative. But if it did, what should it look like? If possible, the narrative would come from those affected by the conflict and would not be built over the heads of those who have been the its victims, but through their personal stories. A narrative that, if possible, has the courage of moving beyond black and white. The US president Barack Obama has demonstrated a commitment to a more nuanced foreign policy. Somalia could greatly benefit from it in the future. Any narrative should take into consideration the effects that it will produce in the future, if it succeeds. In Darfur today it is still difficult to assist the Arab nomads, because for many humanitarian organizations they still are regarded as the aggressors or ‘bad guys’.

A final point concerns the narratives that are not constructed, but emerge through the sufferance displayed by images. What is also known as the CNN effect and had in the Somali crisis of the early 1990s one of the most notable examples. It was images of dying children that in 1992 shocked Western public opinion and convinced the US and the UN to intervene in Somalia to stop the famine and the war that caused it. It was images of an American soldier dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 to force president Clinton to withdraw the American contingent from the country. These events exemplify the power of images and world wide coverage, with little context and understanding, to reach audiences’ attention as well as their hearts and pockets. As the example of Somalia illustrates, however, this power is difficult to control, makes foreign policy less thoughtful than what it already is, and condemn local populations to rely to a worrying extent on foreign perceptions. 

Any future UN intervention will certainly be made in these shadows but an early recognition of the importance of appropriately framing the conflict and engaging with the local and international media will have far-reaching and long-lasting implications.

Iginio Gagliardone, Centre for Global Communications Studies.

For Darfuris, 2003 was the year of highest-intensity conflict, but it was a very quiet year for Western media and advocacy, who were very slow in cottoning on to the unfolding tragedy. Why is this? Where were they? Debates rage about the efficacy of organisations such as Save Darfur, which was not established until July 2004, but questions also need to be asked about the role of the media in Darfur, especially in the early stages of the conflict.

During the calendar year following 26 February 2003 (for arguments sake, the attack on Golo is taken to be the start of the conflict), five articles about Darfur appeared in the British mainstream media, three of which were news-in-brief in the Independent (culled from newswires) – a combined total of 165 words. The other two were in the Guardian (both in early 2004). By this stage, the frequency of attacks had peaked, according to statistics used by the Prosecution in preparing their case at the International Criminal Court.

This virtual silence seems counter-intuitive from today’s perspective, as this period of high-intensity conflict set the tone for much of the future media coverage and advocacy as characterised by  Save Darfur. Nevertheless, the very low exposure of Darfur in the British media in 2003 is a matter of record, and is a state of affairs replicated among major publications in the US.

If a particular subject is missing from a newspaper, the explanation is that there is no editorial appetite for it. Undoubtedly, Khartoum opposed reporting from Darfur. In fact, then-minister of information and communication, Al-Zahawi Ibrahim Malik, in March 2003 was already complaining that the media “had magnified events and portrayed untrue facts” (13 March 2003, Al-Khartoum). Amnesty International in July 2003 drew attention to the case of Yusuf Al-Beshir Musa, a correspondent of Al-Sahafa in Nyala, South Darfur, who was arrested and beaten by the security forces “apparently because he wrote about the destruction of Sudan air force planes and helicopters in El Fashir airport by the Sudan Liberation Army.” Having said that, Sudan normally fares better than many other countries in the neighbourhood (such as Ethiopia, Egypt, Eritrea, and Libya among others) in the Reporters Without Borders Annual Press Freedom Index, having kept a cushion of 24-38 other countries in between them and least free country press-wise in the world since these records began (2002). However, its lowest ever ranking was 2003.

Nonetheless, a wide range of sources were available to journalists potentially covering Darfur, which was most certainly on the radar of newswires in early 2003 (among others, Agence France Presse, the Associated Press, Reuters, the Pan African News Agency, United Press International and Integrated Regional Information Networks were reporting Darfur then).

The Arab media has been criticised in the past for its scant regard for Darfur, but it did cover the region in 2003. For example, a report on Al-Jazeera prompted then-Governor of North Darfur Lt-Gen Ibrahim Sulayman to refute on Sudanese TV on 27 February 2003 its claims that a rebel movement had occupied Golo. A further exempli gratia: the attack on Al-Fasher airport was reported by a number of Sudanese outlets (print and broadcast), and regional news agencies and newspapers, including Egypt (MENA), the Gulf (Al-Watan, Qatar), Jordan (Al-Bawaba), the Saudi Press Agency, and the London-based Arabic-language newspapers Al-Hayat and Asharq Al-Awsat.

However, one caveat to mention is that the freedom given to these agencies and their staff to report is another matter, as is the appetite they themselves had to report in any depth; Darfur has never been an ideal reporting environment for a wide range of reasons, not just government obstruction.

The one British newspaper to report the attack on Al-Fashir airport, the Independent on Sunday (27 April 2003), then reported nothing further until nine months later (24 December 2003) because nothing in its opinion happened there that was newsworthy, though this was not the opinion of the various outlets mentioned above.

In fact, it was NGOs that began drawing attention to Darfur – this much is confirmed in one of the early broadsides to a dormant public about Darfur. After several attempts and what amounts to sanitizing for public consumption, the Washington Post published a commentary by Eric Reeves (Unnoticed Genocide, 25 February 2004) in which the opening paragraphs quote both Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International, an organisation that the author writes “has led the way in reporting on Darfur.”

This was an accurate observation. For example, Amnesty noted the “deteriorating situation” in Darfur in February 2003. The International Crisis Group likewise pre-dated mainstream media interest with Sudan’s Other Wars (25 June 2003), as did Sudan: Empty promises? Human rights violations in government-controlled areas (15 July 2003), again from Amnesty. A 3 February 2004 report, Darfur: “Too many people killed for no reason”, yet again from Amnesty, coincided with the start of much greater media interest in Darfur.

However, the reports produced by NGOs are not categorised in the same way as articles produced by journalism. While newspaper reporters are by definition (textbook, at least) ‘objective’ and required to provide ‘both sides of the story’ (in news articles, as opposed to opinion pieces), NGOs have no similar, developed branch of ethics requiring them to do so. In fact, they profess to lobby for a particular outcome: Amnesty campaigns for “human rights for all,” while the ICG says it provides, among other things, “sharp-edged policy prescription and high-level advocacy.” No newspaper or news agency would claim the same.

Undoubtedly, this is a vital role to fulfil in civil society, especially in areas, such as Darfur, where the media simply cannot cover everything, if at all, to the tastes of a wide range of consumers. Darfur in 2003 was at best an esoteric subject, at worst almost completely ignored by the mainstream. However, it also needs to be said that it is entirely legitimate for journalism to draw upon secondary post-event accounts as source material, such as interviews, recollections, contemporary photos etc – but this is not the same as being eyewitness to something.

The question we are left with is what quality does NGO-led news agenda-setting bequeath the journalism on Darfur once they have caught up? Inevitably, subsequent (Western) journalism is qualified by its absence in the early period, as it was obliged to build on foundations provided by others that operate in a different way to it.

In contrast to Darfur, the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq in the same year received global blanket coverage that pushed the boundaries of journalism and of credulity at times. This comparison merely makes the point that if there is an editorial appetite – such as the US-led coalition removing one of the West’s great bogeymen – the media consumer can be made to feel that there is nothing he or she does not know about a subject. This in Darfur came much later.

It is worth adding that news from Iraq (which was very well-attended by journalists) – in 2003 and ever since – is still contested in areas for its legitimacy of journalistic practices, such as embedding and venturing no further than the Green Zone for whatever reason.

Guy Gabriel

(This article first appeared in on the Making Sense of Darfur blog on 28 April 09.

http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/darfur/2009/04/28/darfur-and-the-media-in-2003/)

For Darfur watchers, the death toll is as much a political statement as an expression of fact. For those with just a passing interest in the region, ascertaining the number who have died involves making judgements on the credibility of estimates, given that these can vary by hundreds of thousands, depending on the source.

Bitter battles were fought over the number killed in Iraq and Lebanon 2006, with no resolution on the former, and recurrent objections on the latter. The battle for the death toll during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza is underway, with protracted disputes over accuracy expected. This does not bode well for accurate information from Darfur, an area over 1,200 times the size of the Gaza Strip and with far greater access concerns. The estimates for the number of people who have died in the Darfur conflict range from 10,000 to 500,000 (occasionally more), with many other figures in between. While ballpark figures are accepted and extensively used (by humanitarian actors, advocates, policy-makers and the media), the range between these figures is more than enough to create doubt. From this doubt stems the politicised environment of death tolls.

Given the size of Darfur and the persisting difficulties in conducting methodologically sound fieldwork, it is a near-impossible task to produce a responsive, accurate death toll from mortality data, however it may be collected. Figures rely on sample interviews, assumptions, limited contextual information, and ultimately, extrapolation – meaning that those with a political interest in contesting these figures have ammunition with which to object.

It is a bold writer that opts for a lower figure – the closer the estimate is to that of the Sudanese government (10,000), the more that writer will be cast as an ‘apologist’. In truth, it is very rare to see anyone apart from the Sudanese government quote lower than 200,000. Sam Dealey, then-Africa correspondent for Time magazine, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times (12 August 2007) about the subject of Darfur death tolls, suggesting that the upper range numbers are likely to be excessive. He wrote of “mortality one-upmanship” between advocacy groups, and concluded that “ultimately, the inflated claims fuel a death race in which aid and action are based not on facts but on which advocacy group yells the loudest.” This sparked a furious response, not least from Eric Reeves, activist and upper-range-figure advocate, who produced a 1,800-word rebuttal the next day denouncing Dealey as “a disgrace to journalism, and to the New York Times opinion pages.”

At times, then, the question of the death toll forces its way into the media, but does not sit comfortably or consistently there, as the inconsistent figures reveal a logical uncertainty when the media aims to present fact. An advert placed by Save Darfur and the Aegis Trust in a British newspaper in summer 2007 stated: “After three years, 400,000 innocent men, women and children have been killed.” On 8 August 2007, the British Advertising Standards Authority upheld a complaint by ESPAC (the European-Sudanese Public Affairs Committee) that this figure was opinion, not fact. The media, mindful of the imperative of fact, opts for a figure it can back up. The upper figure from a range provided by an institutional source usually suffices; currently, the most common figure is the UN’s estimate of 300,000. An article that mentions the figure given by the Sudanese government is rare.
However, the use of these figures in the media is inconsistent; both individual journalists and newspapers themselves vary in the numbers they use. For example, a journalist for Britain’s Times newspaper used both 200,000 and 300,000 in articles published in February and March 2009 respectively, having previously used 300,000 for most of the previous year’s reporting. The same discrepancy can be seen in the Guardian, which predominantly quotes the 200,000 figure, but sometimes publishes 300,000.
Given the simplification (Arabs vs Africans) used to portray Darfur in many sections of the media, it is worth noting that who and how those included in the overall figure died remains largely unknown and unconsidered: Arab, non-Arab, Sudanese government, civilian, be it in government, rebel, or inter-tribal attacks.

Does use of upper-end death tolls encourage the Sudanese government to harden their stance regarding admitting and facilitating the function of aid organisations in Darfur? This is a hard question to answer substantively, but instinct would agree. Moreover, would the humanitarian situation in Darfur have been eased by the universal quoting of a low-end figure? Would the Sudanese government have been more inclined to let aid agencies stay? In a way this is a moot point now that the indictment of Al-Bashir has taken place. Those actors who hope to influence the death toll – and the displaced and those in need of humanitarian aid – now have a much more complicated opportunity to do so.

Guy Gabriel is an adviser to Arab Media Watch

 Opinion is split on whether the indictment for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of President Al Bashir of Sudan is a good or a bad thing for peace in Darfur. Given the scale of the tragedy there however, it’s perhaps understandable that much of this debate is highly polarised, based as it is so often on an overly simplistic understanding of what’s really happening. There is no question that the intervention of the ICC has further complicated what was already a highly complex situation. President Bashir’s response in expelling the principal aid NGO’s in Darfur has already added to the misery of those most vulnerable and is another chapter in a seemingly endless litany of events which defy easy explanation.

In May last year for example, the Darfur conflict finally came to Khartoum as rebels from the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) attacked the capital leaving their wreckage and dead bodies in the streets of Omdurman.  A few months later seven peacekeepers from the joint African Union and United Nations mission in Darfur (UNAMID) were killed and 22 wounded as they returned from a patrol to investigate rebel claims that two of their fighters had been killed in North Darfur. This attack, the worst suffered by the Mission so far, was highly organised and carried out by some 200 gunmen equipped with heavy calibre weapons against which the lightly equipped peacekeepers had little protection. Alas more peacekeepers have been killed since then as UNAMID try to make sense of a seemingly senseless situation.

The prevailing narrative has it that the Darfur conflict is essentially an ethnic war resulting from longstanding enmity between African farmers and Arab nomads, principally centred on the competition for land and water. That the rebels represent the Africans and that the Arabs are supported by the Sudanese government who prosecute the war through a surrogate militia known infamously as the Janjaweed. Meanwhile, the Chinese government, which buys two thirds of Sudan’s oil, stands idly by and chooses not to use its influence to pressurise the Khartoum regime to stop atrocities and the wholesale abuse of human rights.

While this black and white characterisation of the situation in Darfur is superficially true, the reality is much more complicated and multi-layered. What is clear though, is that over 2.5m people have been displaced and now live in makeshift camps and some 200,000-300,000, depending whose figures you believe, have been killed or have died from starvation and disease as result of the war. Whatever the narrative, there is no question that this is an immense human tragedy.

But what is the reality in Darfur?  Well if you talk to ordinary Darfurians, as I have for the past two and a half years, they will tell you that the genesis of the crisis reaches back to and beyond the 1984 drought from which they never recovered.  A growing population combined with dwindling resources produced the conditions for conflict. Under-investment by successive governments aggravated these conditions, bolstering feelings of neglect, resentment and lack of representation in both central and regional government. Add to this volatile mixture a breakdown of the traditional mechanisms of conflict resolution which has further exacerbated tribal rivalries, not just pitching Arabs against Africans but Arabs against Arabs and Africans against Africans. But even this is an oversimplification. Who, for example, actually represents the people of Darfur, as the two rebel movements who sat at the negotiating table in Abuja in 2006 have subsequently divided and subdivided into over 30 factions and some of these have even begun to fight each other? Furthermore, some militias and armed groups who claim not to have been paid what they are owed have taken to banditry to sustain themselves. Car hijackings occur regularly and the humanitarian agencies have cut relief supplies as a consequence of attacks against their convoys. Last year alone banditry resulted in the theft of 60 World Food Program (WFP) contracted trucks.  Many of these trucks are still missing and their drivers unaccounted for, two drivers were killed and over 700 tons of the food they were carrying was stolen. In the midst of all this turmoil, fighting has escalated on the border between Chad and Darfur, displacing even more innocent Darfurians; UNAMID, the force sent to protect them finds itself under attack and the humanitarian NGOs who deliver most of the aid to the refugees have been expelled by the Government for allegedly supplying information to the ICC. No wonder the problem is proving so intractable.

UNAMID’s predecessor the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) came under much criticism for allowing the situation to deteriorate under its watch. But what could we honestly expect a force of less than 7,000 soldiers and police to achieve in an area the size of France, short of equipment, starved of resources and with a weak and creeping mandate? Let’s get real. Compare their strength, for example, with the force of 50,000 that went into Bosnia, a country barely the size of Belgium. The African Union (AU) held the line while the rest of the international community, principal amongst them and contrary to popular perception the Chinese, convinced the Sudanese government to accept a larger and more capable force. The result was the authorisation of a 26,000 strong UNAMID, which took over on 1 January 2008. However, generating and deploying this force has brought with it its own set of challenges. 

Although UNAMID has an impressively robust mandate, shortly after I left and six months into its mission it still numbered only around 9,000. The best estimates then were that it might get to 80 per cent strength by the end of the year, well by the beginning of March this year they had still not reached this target.  Until they do it will be extremely difficult for them to make a significant difference across such a vast and inaccessible area. The mission is also still short of the force multipliers that would enable it to use its limited numbers more effectively. In particular the air mobility necessary to move troops rapidly and the increased reach and firepower that would come with the armed helicopters they were promised well over a year ago and which would have prevented many of the recent attacks against them.   This is exactly what undermined the credibility of AMIS and which UNAMID was supposed to overcome.

But security is not just about the size and capacity of the peacekeeping force. Peacekeepers must have a peace to keep, so where is the parallel political track? Given the complexities of the situation, even obtaining an effective ceasefire is proving extremely difficult. With the fragmentation of the rebel movements, the fighting on the border and the breakdown of law and order, it is difficult to know where to start. Trying to obtain a political agreement that deals with the root causes of the conflict in such an environment is a very tough challenge. Although recently mediation efforts between the Government and the JEM do seem to have made some progress as a consequence of the Doha talks the ICC indictment has again raised questions as to whether this can be exploited. 

So without security and uncertainty over the prospect of progress towards a political agreement that might provide the basis for it the third element essential to sustainable peace in Darfur, moving from humanitarian aid to reconstruction and development, seems a long way away. The situation looks bleak and this is reflected in the commentary both locally and internationally. A pall of pessimism hangs over Darfur which further depresses the opportunities for progress.

Where do we go from here? First, it is incumbent on troop contributing countries to commit and deploy units with the required technical capabilities. But we should stop fixating on numbers and concentrate on capability. Helicopters, for example, particularly the armed variety, delivered now would do much to extend UNAMID’s reach and firepower.  Engineering and logistical units are also urgently required to facilitate the speedy deployment of the remainder of the force. Second, the political process must be re-energised , especially at the grass roots and amongst Darfurian civil society who need to escape the negativity of the current narrative and feel the prospect of progress. As a tribal leader in South Darfur recently told me, “Forget the Government and the Movements it’s time our voices were heard.” Finally we need to break the vicious circle of violence so graphically characterised by the killing of UNAMID peacekeepers and the intransigence of the government and rebel movements which obstructs the delivery of humanitarian aid and prevents the reconstruction and development that is so urgently needed.