09/02/2004

Note:  A shorter version of this piece appears in the September/October issue of the Columbia Journalism Review at http://www.cjr.org

    Modern tyrants understand how to control the international media, and Omar al Bashir, the long-time president of Sudan, is a master manipulator.  

    His government’s efforts to prevent widespread coverage of the death and destruction in the Sudan’s western Darfur region succeeded for months.  In January, human rights groups, relief agencies and the United Nations started highlighting the violence that has driven more than 1.4 million people from their homes.  But the crisis didn’t get major press coverage—front page treatment in U.S. newspapers and inclusion in TV nightly news broadcasts—until May.  

    As a result, the systematic killing in Darfur did not generate the public outrage and quick international response required to stop the brutality, which has been called both genocide and ethnic cleansing.  In April, Samantha Power, whose prize winning book, ¬A Problem From Hell, chronicled U.S. tolerance of genocide, said that “the United States and its allies are bystanders to slaughter, seemingly no more prepared to prevent genocide than they were a decade ago” when Hutu extremists killed 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda.

    By May, when major U.S. news coverage began, 200,000 refugees had fled to Chad, a million people had been displaced from their homes and farms in the Darfur region and many villages had been destroyed by the Sudanese air force and a government-backed militia group called the Janjaweed.  Traveling by horse, camel and pickup truck, the Arab-dominated Janjaweed have attacked African tribes, killing men, raping women and destroying means of livelihood by poisoning wells with the bodies of dead animals, burning crops and cutting down mango trees.  Now, U.S. officials estimate, more than 300,000 people in Darfur could die of starvation and disease before the end of the year.

    There are, of course, other reasons why a tragedy of this magnitude has not been well reported in the press.   Coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan has dominated the news and stretched news budgets.   At home, the presidential election campaign has had the same impact.  On top of this, Africa has never been at the top of the list of America’s concerns.

    But the Sudanese government actively prevented coverage.  “The story didn’t gain traction because of the pretty complete travel ban on foreign journalists,” explains Ben Parker of UNICEF, who has worked hard to call attention to the humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur.  

    Some dictators use the international press to promote their stories.  In 1999, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies were bombing Yugoslavia to stop Serb violence against Albanians in Kosovo, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic quickly generated international press coverage of bombs that mistakenly hit civilian targets.  In fact, the Pentagon often learned of miss hits from CNN before it identified them from its own data collection systems.  Saddam Hussein was good at orchestrating press coverage of the human cost of international sanctions on Iraq.  In a country where the media worked under rigid state control, it was easy to photograph funerals of children who had reportedly died from lack of medicine because of the sanctions.

    But in Sudan President Bashir, like North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, has taken a different tack.  He has blocked press coverage of events he doesn’t want the world to see.  He understands that in much of the West, people respond quickly to tragedies they see on television, and they don’t respond to what they don’t see.

    The first international TV coverage of the death and destruction in Darfur ran on Al Jazeera last December, UN officials say.  The government moved quickly to discipline the Arab satellite channel.  It closed Al Jazeera’s Khartoum bureau, confiscated its equipment and put the TV correspondent on trial.  It is not surprising that Reporters Without Borders classifies Sudan a “difficult situation” for news reporting.

    Sudanese authorities have erected an obstacle course for gaining access to Darfur.  It can take up to six weeks or longer to get a visa to Sudan, and sometimes the government won’t grant them.  In April, Sudan initially refused to grant visas to a Darfur-bound team from the UN’s Human Rights Office.  The next requirement is permission to travel to Darfur.  Reporters from The Boston Globe and The Toronto Globe & Mail waited in Khartoum for five days to get permission to go to Darfur.  

    “Getting a visa to get to Khartoum is not easy,” one reporter said in July. “Securing a travel permit is the supreme test of one's patience. It requires days of sitting around in Foreign Journalists' Department, sipping sweet tea with the functionaries there and gently inquiring as to when the permit might come along. ‘Soon’ is always the answer.”  If reporters get permission to travel, they also get a government escort.    

    Once in Darfur, reporters must get permission from Sudan’s Humanitarian Aid Commission and security forces before they can travel.  One photographer complained that “government soldiers have been limiting access” to displacement camps and villages that have been burned, bombed and looted. After their summer visits, both U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan complained that they had been escorted to cleaned up sites in Darfur.  Mr. Annan went to one displacement camp that the government had emptied the night before he got there.

    Another option is to sneak into Darfur from neighboring Chad.  In general, journalists from Europe, where the public interest in Africa is higher than in the U.S., have been more willing to do this than American reporters. In Europe, Le Monde and Paris Match, two prominent French publications, both ran major pieces on Darfur around the turn of the year.  In addition, the British press began to cover the story, and the independent Channel 4 says it was the first European outlet to provide TV coverage from Darfur.

    “Logistics are difficult, but no more difficult than in Iraq two years ago or Afghanistan during the U.S. attack,” says Marcus Bleasdale, a British photojournalist who has spent seven weeks in Darfur this year.  His photos of Darfur, including a haunting picture of mass graves, appeared in the July 5th issue of Time.

    U.S. news coverage started in late 2003 on “The World”, a weekday radio program produced by Public Radio International, the BBC and WGBH in Boston.  Last December “The World” carried a statement by Mukesh Kapila, the U.N.’s coordinator for Sudan, that raised the possibility of ethnic cleansing—in this case a determined effort by largely Arab, government-backed forces to drive African people from their land.

    “Considering the thousands of people that have died and the reports of massacres that we are getting it gives rise to serious concerns about whether or not this conflict is approaching what can be called ethnic cleansing,” Mr. Kapila said.  “The only way to find out is to have access to be able to make investigations on the ground.”

    In January, The New York Times ran a story from the Chad-Sudanese border   highlighting the tragic irony of Darfur—that as a 21 year civil war between government forces and rebels in southern Sudan as ending, a new, equally vicious civil war was raging in the western part of the country.   The story didn’t run on the front page and, like The World reporting, did not generate much news coverage in the U.S.  

     However, based on a steady stream of information from the U.N. and human rights groups, the Darfur crisis began to generate editorials and op-ed pieces in major news papers.  Refugees International issued its first report, “Continuing Displacement and Incalculable Death in Darfur”, on February 17.  The International Crisis Group issued a major report in March and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which had been warning of violence in Darfur for a year, issued major reports in April.  

    In the absence of TV images and front-page coverage, opinion pieces played a major role in raising awareness.  In late February, The Washington Post ran an op-ed entitled “Unnoticed Genocide” in which Smith College professor Eric Reeves asserted that “Darfur has remained practically a non-story in international news media.  One big reason is the fact that the central government in Khartoum…has allowed no news reporters into the region.”

    In late March Nicolas Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times, wrote several pieces from the border between Chad and Sudan.  His columns carried no pictures, but his descriptions were graphic. “The most vicious ethnic cleansing you've never heard of is unfolding here in the southeastern fringes of the Sahara Desert,” he wrote in a March 24th column. “It's a campaign of murder, rape and pillage by Sudan's Arab rulers that has forced 700,000 black African Sudanese to flee their villages.”

    In early April, while the world was marking the 10th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, both President Bush and Kofi Annan issued statements criticizing the government of Sudan for brutality in Darfur. Although it was Mr. Bush’s first statement on Darfur, members of his administration, particularly Roger Winter of the U.S. Agency for International Development, had been highlighting the war in Darfur for months.

    The statements from President Bush and Secretary General Annan helped convince the government of Sudan to agree to a cease fire in Darfur, as well as improved access for humanitarian supplies.  In late April the Khartoum government also expanded press access, allowing teams from the BBC and The New York Times to enter Darfur.  The government may have allowed the access because it believed its own denials of violence and humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur or because it thought the worst was over there.  

    On May 4th  The Times ran a front page story, illustrated with several vivid, color photographs. TV coverage also started in May.  The NewsHour on Public Television ran a lengthy piece from Chad. ABC’s “World News Tonight” carried a piece from Darfur later in the month, and ABC’s “Nightline” devoted an entire show to Darfur in June.

    Still, access remained limited.  Emily Wax of The Washington Post waited nearly a month in Khartoum for permission to go to Darfur.  The permission never came. However, she was able to slip into Darfur with three VIP visits to Darfur in late June—the French foreign minister, a U.S. congressional visit by Sen. Sam Brownback (R, KS) and Rep. Frank Wolf (R, VA), and Mr. Annan.  On June 30 The Post ran her chilling account of rape in Darfur, under the headline: “’We Want to Make a Light Baby’ Arab Militiamen in Sudan Said to Use Rape as Weapon of Ethnic Cleansing.”

    News reports re-enforce early accounts by human rights groups and U.N. officials that ethnic cleansing is taking place in Darfur and that civilians are the targets of government attacks.  The reasons for the current conflict involve a complex mix of political, ethnic, environmental and economic causes, but the results are remarkably simple—Darfur is the worst humanitarian and human rights crisis in the world today, and it went on for months before getting the coverage it deserved.

    In high profile July meetings with Secretary Powell and Secretary General Annan, Sudanese officials promised to reign in the Janjaweed militia and allow greater humanitarian access.  Yet 14 villages were attached and burned shortly after Secretary Powell left and a humanitarian convoy was attacked after Mr. Annan’s visit.

    In Darfur there are still many images that the Sudanese government wants to keep off TV and the front pages.   

    There are two lessons from Darfur.  First, the growing public knowledge of the crisis in Darfur shows that it is possible to inform the world of severe human rights violations without TV, but it takes a long time to do so.  In Darfur, thousands of people  died and more than a million people were displaced as the world was waking up to what was going on.

    The second lesson is more disturbing.  Although human rights groups and even U.N. officials have been warning of ethnic cleansing for months, the world still has not moved quickly to stop the death and destruction in Darfur.

Ken Bacon is the president of Refugees International.