Darfur: Body Counts and Bad Faith

A friend in the US forwarded this op-ed piece from the New York Times – ‘An Atrocity That Needs No Exaggeration’, by Sam Dealey, 12 August 2007 – reporting a recent decision by Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The ASA upheld a complaint by the European Sudanese Public Affairs Council about an advertisement placed in major US and UK newspapers by the Globe for Darfur campaign and the Save Darfur Coalition, which had alleged that ‘400,000 innocent men, women and children have been killed’ in the province. The claim of 400,000 killed was a matter of opinion, not fact, the ASA ruled. Coming just a few days after the UN Security Council passed resolution 1769, authorising a major military deployment to Sudan, the ASA’s 8 August ruling raises awkward questions about the role of charities and campaigning organisations in agitating for action by the international community.

It also raises questions about the role of the media. As Mahmood Mamdani (‘The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency’, London Review of Books, Vol. 29, No. 5, 8 March 2007) argues: ‘Newspaper writing on Darfur has sketched a pornography of violence.’ Such coverage is designed primarily to produce a frisson of moral outrage rather than to provide clarity and understanding. (For a hard-hitting commentary by Brendan O’Neill on the media’s role over Darfur click here.)

Notwithstanding the fact that it reported the recent ASA adjudication, the New York Times is hardly above criticism in the matter of confused and misleading body-counts in its coverage of Darfur. As Mamdani points out, the paper’s chief ‘crusader’ on the issue, columnist Nicholas Kristof, has produced a bewildering array of estimates which seem to fluctuate up and down without reason: ‘First he projected the number of dead at 320,000 for 2004 (16 June 2004) but then gave a scaled down estimate of between 70,000 and 220,000 (23 February 2005). The number began once more to climb to ‘nearly 400,000’ (3 May 2005), only to come down yet again to 300,000 (23 April 2006).’

Why was it left to the bureaucrats of the ASA to pass judgement on the accuracy of an advertisement which appeared in major British and US newspapers? Perhaps few journalists at these papers were inclined to investigate the issue – or even to report the ASA’s ruling – because their own attitude to the question of the death toll in Darfur has also been somewhat cavalier.

In the Independent, for example, columnist Johann Hari has pushed hard for international action in Sudan, plucking estimates from somewhere (he rarely gives sources) to suit his case. ‘Sudan’s fundamentalist National Islamic Front government in Khartoum has murdered 30,000 human beings and ethnically cleansed 840,000 in the past year’, Hari wrote on 23 April 2004. By 25 August, the number killed had risen to ‘At least 50,000’, and to ‘At least 75,000’ by 27 December 2004. Less than a year later, Hari wrote of ‘the mass slaughter of 400,000 innocent Muslims in Darfur’ (4 October 2005) – a number which then fell to ‘more than 300,000’ (11 May 2006), only to settle at ‘tens of thousands...in permanent exile or a mass grave’ by 30 July of this year. Consistency is apparently not an issue at the Independent.

One might have thought that before levelling the serious charge of ‘genocide’ journalists would want to be sure of their facts. Yet Hari is not alone. In the Guardian/Observer, another enthusiast for intervention, Mary Riddell, has produced an equally confusing array of estimates (again almost never citing sources). On 31 December 2006 Riddell wrote that ‘As many as 300,000 people have died in three years’, but within a month she had upped the ante to ‘An estimated 400,000’ dead (28 January 2007). Inexplicably, the death toll then fell sharply to 200,000 in her 25 March 2007 column, where it has stayed ever since. Riddell evidently feels no compulsion to explain how ‘a three-year conflict that has killed 300,000 people’ (17 September 2006) has become ‘barbarism...[that] has claimed more than 200,000 lives over four years’ (5 August 2007). Still less has she felt the need to back up the 400,000 estimate that came and went in between.