Category: Darfur

The NYT had an informative and very thoughtful op-ed in today, by Sam Dealey, described as a writer on Africa for Time. He noted that on Wednesday, Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority had ruled against the Save Darfur Coalition there, judging that the high death tolls the SDC claims in some of its public advertising there “breached standards of truthfulness.”
Here is the ASA ruling.
It had to do with a national print ad campaign that stated, “In 2003, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir moved to crush opposition by unleashing vicious armed militias to slaughter entire villages of his own citizens. After three years, 400,000 innocent men, women and children have been killed … “.
That ad campaign has run in the US, as well as in Britain. And it hasn’t been cheap. Here in the US, I estimate it may well have cost more than half a million dollars.
In the UK, a complaint was launched by the European Sudanese Public Affairs Council against the claim made in the ad; and it was that complaint that was upheld by the ASA. The ASA ruling presented much of the evidence it considered, and concluded:

SDC & AT [the Aegis Trust] were entitled to express their opinion about the humanitarian crisis in Darfur in strong terms, we concluded that there was a division of informed opinion about the accuracy of the figure contained in the ad and it should not have been presented in such a definitive way.
The ad breached CAP Code clauses 3.2 (Division of opinion) and 8.1 (Matters of opinion).
Action
We told SDC & AC to present the figure as opinion not fact in future. We urged them to consult the CAP Copy Advice team for help in amending their ad and we also advised them to state the source for such claims in future.

Of course, this is not the first time that Save Darfur campaigners have used unsubstantiated (and improbably high) casualty figures in order to enhance their case. In June last year I noted that Ruth Messinger had stated quite baldly in a letter to the NYT that “Half a million are dead… ” I presented some of the counter-evidence to her claim, and also pointed out the need for rights-abuse reporting always to be very careful and where necessary err on the side of caution.
In his NYT piece today, Dealey is absolutely right to note that this sloppiness with the figures has real consequences on the ground in Darfur. He writes of SDC:

While the coalition has done an admirable job of raising awareness, it has also hampered aid-delivery groups, discredited American policy makers and diplomats and harmed efforts to respond to future humanitarian crises.

He then looks quickly at all the considerable (though not definitive) evidence that’s available, and concludes that: “Combining these estimates suggests Darfur’s death toll now hovers at 200,000 — just half of what Save Darfur claimed a year ago in its ad and still claims on its Web site.”
He adds:

whether 200,000 or 400,000 have died, the need to resolve the conflict in Darfur is the same. But Save Darfur’s inflated estimate — used even after Dr. Hagan revised his estimate sharply downward — only frustrates peace efforts.
During debate on the House floor last month, for example, Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee claimed that “an estimated 400,000 people have been killed by the government of Sudan and its janjaweed allies.” Ms. Jackson-Lee is hardly alone in making that allegation, and catering to the Sudanese government’s sensitivities may not seem important. But the repeated error only hardens Khartoum against constructive dialogue. If diplomacy, not war, is the ultimate goal for resolving the conflict in Darfur, the United States must maintain its credibility as an honest broker.
Inaccurate data can also lead to prescriptive blunders. During the worst period of violence, for example, the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaster estimated that nearly 70 percent of Darfur’s excess deaths were due not to violence but to disease and malnutrition. This suggests that policy makers should look for ways to bolster and protect relief groups — by continuing to demand that the Sudanese government not hamper the delivery of aid, to be sure, but also by putting vigorous public pressure, so far lacking, on the dozen rebel groups that routinely raid convoys.
Exaggerated death tolls also make it difficult for relief organizations to deliver their services. Khartoum considers the inflated numbers to be evidence that all groups that deliver aid to Darfur are actually adjuncts of the activist groups that the regime considers its enemies, and thus finds justification for delaying visas, refusing to allow shipments of supplies and otherwise putting obstacles in the way of aid delivery.
Lastly, mortality one-upmanship by advocacy groups threatens to inure the public to both current and future catastrophes. If 400,000 becomes the de facto benchmark for action, other bloody conflicts around the globe — in Sri Lanka, Colombia, Somalia — seem to pale in comparison. 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.
Two-hundred thousand dead in Darfur is egregious enough. No matter how noble their intentions, there’s no need for activists to kill more Darfuris than the conflict itself already has.

I agree with nearly everything he has written there. I’ll just note that, on this page, the SDC website doesn’t say absolutely definitively that the genocide has killed 400,000. Rather, it uses the decidedly slippery formulation of saying that it “has… already claimed as many as 400,000 lives.”
“As many as… ” is not any kind of a scientific or systematic quantity. If SDC wants to be taken seriously as a good-faith participant in the discussion over Darfur, they should quit their partisan and fear-stoking exaggeration and go with the same figures that the best-informed people in the humanitarian-aid community are using. (They might also note that not all of the killing and mayhem is caused by the Government and its allies. A non-negligible part has been caused by the anti-government forces– and some of them have had their anti-government belligerence hardened by the prospect they might expect extra political help to be whipped up on their behalf by outsiders from the SDC.)
I would also note, regarding what Dealey wrote here: “If diplomacy, not war, is the ultimate goal for resolving the conflict in Darfur, the United States must maintain its credibility as an honest broker” that for the US to maintain its credibility is important in any case, not just when there’s a prospect it might be involved in some way in the Darfur peace negotiations. (Which actually, I don’t think there is, much, these days… After the Somalia debacle, I don’t think the Bush administration has much credibility as an honest broker in most of Africa.)
But we need to remember that exaggerated claims about rights abuses have also frequently been used to goad countries into wars. (Remember the Kuwaiti babies in 1990?) Waving the bloody shirt is a time-honored tactic of the war-mongers. That’s why it is always very important to stay sober, calm, and very, very close to the evidence when reporting rights abuses.
There was one small pro-Darfur organization in this country, Damanga, which last year was openly urging the US to engage in a policy of “regime change” in Sudan as a response to the suffering in Darfur. Luckily, Damanga did take that call for warmaking off its website.
Anyway, I am glad that the ASA made the ruling it did. If you read the whole ruling, and the whole of Sam Dealey’s article, you can get a fairly good idea of what the best evidence about the casualties is, and where it’s coming from.

Yesterday’s NYT had a fascinating piece of reporting (also here) by Jeffrey Gettleman, datelined from “Artala, Sudan”. As he makes clear, Artala is located in south-western Darfur– and the story is about a number of formerly displaced villagers from the area who have chosen to return to their home villages and rebuild rather than staying in the IDP camps to which they had earlier fled.
As I’ve written here a number of times before (e.g., here), providing the conditions in which Darfur’s villagers can return to their home areas and rebuild in security and peace is the best way to “Save Darfur”– though a vocal and extremely well-funded information campaign in the west has been trying to persuade us that other, much more hostile and polarizing actions like bringing prosecutions against Sudan’s leaders or finding other means to punish them, insisting on a forced entry of international troops into Darfur, or even (by some coalition members) urging “regime change” in Sudan itself, are the best way to “Save Darfur.”
Having seen, just back in July, the misery of Ugandan Acholis forced to live in “Internally Displaced Persons” (IDP) camps for ten years now, forcibly prevented from returning to their homes and from cultivating their crops, and thereby forced into an existence of dependency, displacement, and chronic mental distress, my conviction that enabling a peaceable return to the homestead is the best outcome for most such people has only been strengthened.
Gettleman’s story is therefore a modestly hopeful one.
Let me just quote a few paras from his lead:

Omar Abdul Aziz Gader cupped his hand over his eyes and scanned a landscape of scorched fields and mud huts reduced to rings of ash.
Where others might have seen a wasteland, Mr. Gader saw home.
“It’s good to be back,” he said.
As a displaced person from Darfur, Mr. Gader found his options were not great. He could have stayed in the packed, increasingly unruly camp where he had been living for the past two years, or he could have ventured back to Artala, his native village, which was burned to the ground by nomadic raiders.
He decided to go home in September after learning that his corner of southwestern Darfur was actually rather peaceful, a place where nomads and farmers had begun to take halting steps toward reconciliation.
Much of Darfur, a vast swath of territory in western Sudan, is still a battlefield, with vicious fighting between the Sudanese government and rebel forces, and masses of people fleeing their villages each day.
But there are other parts, lesser known, where people are heading the other way, going home.
It is a journey that is also difficult, with homecomings that may prove to be short-lived. But aid workers estimate that there are several thousand returnees like Mr. Gader — and many more on their way.
Mr. Gader says he is looking ahead, building a new hut and planting onions, though at times the past seizes him…

It looks like a great piece of reporting. Gettleman doesn’t sugar-coat the difficulties returning farmers like Mr. Gader face as they return home. But neither does he seem to sugar-coat the difficulties of life in the IDP camps, either… Indeed, he refers to Mr. Gader having faced a degree of social pressure (or worse) in the camp, that sought to “persuade” him not to return home:

Mr. Gader, 32, spoke in hushed tones of camp politics and how some of the displaced people had called him a traitor for even thinking of going home, because they said it bolstered the government’s claim that things were not so bad. Mr. Gader, who lived in a huge camp in southern Darfur called Kalma, with an estimated population of 100,000, said he, his wife and his two children had to leave in the middle of the night.
“We basically escaped,” he said.
Aid workers and camp dwellers say camp elders have a vested financial interest in keeping as many people as possible in the camp, because the elders can make money by siphoning food aid and selling it in local markets. But the returnees are learning that home is a complicated place, too.

This reminds me a little of the situation that developed in the IDP camps and cross-border refugee camps in and around Rwanda in late 1994, when forces loyal to Rwanda’s ousted government of anti-Tutsi génocidaires kept two million or more displaced Hutus forcibly within the camps that had developed there and fought hard to try to prevent them from returning peaceably to their homes.
Under these circumstances, I am delighted that there are parts of Darfur where the situation has been improving so much that people in the camps are prepared to brave the intimidatory tactics of “camp elders” and go back home.
If you are interested in Darfur at all, I urge you to go and read the whole of Gettleman’s article there. It has many telling vignettes. Above all, don’t imagine that the ideologically bowdlerized version of his story that has been put up on the website of the “Save Darfur” coalition gives anything like an accurate representation of the whole article.
… This coalition has meanwhile been spending massive amounts of money on large numbers of full-page ads in major US newspapers that are, essentially, a fairly exploitative form of “waving the bloody shirt” mobilization. One full-page ad in the NYT costs, I believe, $48,000. I must have seen a dozen such ads– between the NYT and the WaPo– in the past month or so, and I’m sure they’ve been running them in many other papers nationwide. Perhaps the members of this coalition would have done better by actual Darfuri women and men if instead of running these ads they had put that money into the kinds of programs Gettleman was writing about: programs that have already helped thousands of Darfuris return to their homes?
… People in comfortable life-situations in western countries like to talk a tremendous amount about “accountability”. But the form of “accountability” they talk about is nearly always: (a) backward-looking and (b) very selective. I am very concerned about accountability, too. But the kind I’m more concerned about is forward-looking accountability: the accountability that people should have to each other to end current oppressions and build a better, more equitable and life-affirming social order going forward. And quite frequently, when people are in crisis situations, attempts to establish western-style, backward-looking “accountability” can actively impede the chances of being able to build such a better order. (Think of, for example, the effects of the Saddam trial in Iraq, or Rwanda’s many attempts to establish its very selective– but also, very extensive– forms of “accountability” for the horrendous inter-group violence of 1994… )
It strikes me that the situation in Darfur is now giving us further examples of these (always difficult) kinds of decisions being faced…
But meanwhile, I have to say I was really delighted to learn from Gettleman’s article that there are parts of Darfur where rebuilding– including some non-trivial social rebuilding– is already taking place.

I have a lot of respect for Gerard Prunier, a French Africanist with broad knowledge of the recent history of central and eastern Africa. I thought his 1995 book The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide was the very best study of that whole terrible episode. When I interviewed him in Paris in 2001 he was patient, articulate, and extremely informative.
Now he has what seems to me an equally informative article on the Darfur crisis on the Open Democracy website. He gives quite a lot of background about the nature and troubled history of Darfur-Sudan relations. His prescription for what might be done to improve the lot of Darfur’s people is, regrettably but probably realistically, rather depressing and very thin:

What, then, is to be done? In the real world, the options are grim. It is possible to let things run their course and see the ethnic cleansing result in several thousand casualties more. This is still the most likely probability, given the incapacity of the international community to think beyond a ritualistic wail for a UN force to be deployed (which, even were it to be deployed, is unlikely to be effective).
Another option would be to accept the fact that a major historical process is at work in a key corner of the continent and that it can be brought to a close only by the Sudanese themselves, not by foreigners. The ensuing logic of intervention would be to take sides in favour or against some of the actors in the conflict. This would in turn involve a clear, realistic judgment of their political character…
In any case, there is no room for self-delusion: a true negotiation about the future of Sudan and the relative place of its various populations in an ensemble that still remains to be defined will in no way resemble the shadow theatre of Naivasha or Abuja [the locations of previous negotiations on the issue.] It can only come after political-military control and positioning on the ground have been redefined by the combatants themselves, rather than being artificially manipulated by outsiders (and outsiders, moreover, who are not even ready to honour the commitments they have made once the Sudanese they have “persuaded” into signing raise this issue).
A true negotiation would also mean that the type of centralised, Nile valley “Arab” regime which has ruled Sudan since 1956 under one guise or another will also have to go. Its replacement must be a federation of some kind, though the creation of such a model will require an immensely difficult and detailed task of institution-building. The multi-ethnic nature of the country will have to be turned into a reality and not – as is the case at present – remain a polite fiction hiding the reality of “Arab” cultural, economic and political domination.
None of this will be easy or peaceful. The elections scheduled for 2009 in Sudan will be an important political benchmark of progress in this direction, though if the present regime remains in charge it is unlikely that they will be free, fair or honest.
Even amid such a long-overdue comprehensive overhaul of an unjust and obsolete political system – still a distant prospect – Darfur will remain a particular case. Its citizens will have to choose whether they accept their common regional bonds or whether they prefer to follow the beat of a distant drummer on the banks of the Nile. Their future, their lives – or possibly their deaths – will depend not on short-term technical fixes but on themselves: on the choices they make and on the means put at their disposal to achieve them.

A few readers have challenged what I wrote here recently, when I challenged Ruth Messinger’s claim that “Half a million people are dead and 3.5 million are displaced” as a direct result of the genocidal violence in Darfur. In that post I noted that the WaPo’s Emily Waxreported from the Chad-Darfur border at the end of April that “tens of thousands” had been killed during the genocide, and said my judgment would be to prefer Wax’s figure over Messinger’s.
I’ve done a little more online research on the issue. A WaPo editorial noted on April 24 that, “On his recent visit to Sudan, Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick… said that the State Department’s estimate of deaths in Darfur was 60,000 to 160,000.”
The editorial claimed that range was far too low, and continued: “Other authorities suggest that mortality is likely to be closer to 400,000.” The sources they used for that included various extrapolations from limited samples taken by NGOs.
In this report from Khartoum yesterday, Evelyn Leopold of Reuters wrote,

Since 2003, at least 200,000 people in Darfur have died from bullets, hunger or disease, 2.5 million have been thrown out of their homes, many burned to the ground, and hundreds of women have been raped, mainly by Arab militia after a rebellion broke out. The Sudan military had armed militia although it is no longer certain if they control their allies.

And in this June 4 report, also from Khartoum, AFP’s Charles Onians wrote:

In 2003, the SLM alongside the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) launched a rebellion in the western region of Darfur, prompting a heavy-handed crackdown by the Khartoum government and its proxy militia called the Janjaweed.
Since then, the conflict has left around 300,000 people dead and 2.4 million homeless.

Since Leopold and Onians are currently on the ground in Sudan, and presumably in good contact with the many aid workers and international diplomats there, I would be inclined to go with their estimates at this point.
I really liked the way Onians framed his little casualty report– putting the casualties clearly in the context of the armed political conflict of which they are such a tragic result, without trying to claim that they were “all” the victims of either one side or the other.
So maybe I would go with his casualty total, or say something like “somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 deaths.” This is considerably more than “tens of thousands.” But I also think it’s important not to convey the false impression (as Messinger did) that all the deaths have been inflicted by one side in the conflict.
Each one of these deaths is a tragedy. How many unrecognized Mother Theresas, how many Yo-Yo Ma’s had their lives snuffed out in those brutal circumstances?
Let’s all do whatever we can to help end the conflict that made such brutality possible.

Estimating the casualties in a situation of inter-group conflict and mass mayhem is always difficult. But in a letter in today’s NYT, Ruth Messinger, the Executive Director of American Jewish World Service writes about Darfur that, “Half a million people are dead and 3.5 million are displaced, the victims of a genocide that uses rape, murder, assault, displacement, hunger and illness to claim its victims.”
I note that in an article at the end of April, the WaPo’s generally excellent and very careful Africa correspondent Emily Wax, reporting from the Chad-Darfur border, wrote only of “tens of thousands” dead from the genocidal violence in Darfur. Since then, there have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of additional (mainly civilian) deaths– many of them having been caused by inter-necine fighting amongst the anti-Khartoum rebels. (As I noted here and here.)
Whom should we trust? Emily Wax, writing from the borderlands there, and based on her lengthy field reporting, knowledge of the situation, and contact with aid workers and community leaders of all persuasions– or Ruth Messinger, sitting in her office in New York City?
I have never previously seen any estimate as high as “half a million dead.” I have earlier seen estimates of 200,00, and 400,00 dead, that I already thought were very high. But they, at least, were described as “estimates.” Ruth Messinger now states as bald fact that “half a million” are dead because of the genocidaires there.
This matters. It is a basic principle of reporting of human rights abuses not to exaggerate, and where there is uncertainty always to err on the side of caution in one’s estimates. Exaggeration of casualty figures or of any other dimension of the abuses does not help anyone. Indeed, by making the person who exaggerates far less credible in general, it weakens the fabric of responsible human rights reporting and ends up doing a disservice to those people whose rights have been abused.
I see no possible basis in any reports that I have seen for any estimate anywhere near as high as “half a million deaths.”
Messinger wrote her letter in response to this op-ed by Alan Kuperman, that the NYT ran May 31 and that I commented on here.
This part of her letter seems a little confusing to me: “We do not tout the rebels as freedom fighters, nor have our actions fueled the genocide. That has been done by the Sudanese government…” (What? The Sudanese government has been touting the rebels as freedom fighters? H’mmm.)
I applaud her call that, “all armed actors … lay down their weapons, end the conflict and provide safe space for both civilians and humanitarian aid agencies that are saving lives.” But I really fear that by (a) exaggerating the number of those killed by the pro-government side beyond any reasonable estimates, and (b) making no mention whatsoever in her letter of the suffering caused by the rebels, she is being quite unfair and also further stoking the sentiments and energies of those who still want to act militarily against the Sudanese government and its allies.
Also, though Messinger’s letter was in response to the Alan Kuperman op-ed, she did nothing to challenge any of the very specific points he made about the dynamics of the situation inside Darfur.