Darfur: “The World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis”
The media profile of Darfur shot up enormously once the label “˜the world’s worst humanitarian crisis’ was applied, although technically the phrase used was the “world’s greatest humanitarian and human rights catastrophe.” This is commonly standardised to “˜world’s worst…’
In a press conference in Nairobi on 19 March 2004, with the 10-year anniversary of Rwanda approaching, Mukesh Kapila, the then-United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan, applied the label to Darfur, and added:
“The only difference between Rwanda and Darfur is the numbers involved of dead, tortured and raped.”
Dr Kapila had been part of one of the first British government medical teams into Rwanda in 1994.
This is strong language, which USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios was to describe the following month as “very apocalyptic” in a special State Department Briefing (27 April 2004), but it had the desired effect: to gain the media attention that was needed to counteract the lack of diplomatic interest Kapila felt he was getting in publicising Darfur.
One explanation for this points towards the fact that the situation in Darfur conflicted unhelpfully with the more upbeat direction that the North-South was heading in.
Around four months earlier, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland described Darfur as “one of the worst in the world” (5 December 2003), but this assessment failed to register particularly deeply.
In an interview a few years ago, Kapila described the difficulties he faced in 2003 in bringing the situation to the attention of the wider international community, and reported the resistance he met within the UN itself. According to him, “senior people in the Department of Political Affairs in the United Nations Secretariat accused [him] of being unstable and hysterical.” His stance on Darfur effectively ended his career in the mainstream of the UN, he suggests.
Nonetheless, Kapila describes the media response as “electrifying” – but added, referring to the subsequent diplomatic response:
“I consider that a failure because of course the job had been done…A mass murder was more or less over.”
Egeland suggests in his memoir, A Billion Lives, how Pakistan’s presidency of the UN Security Council kept Darfur off the agenda, as Sudan was an ally. He also criticises the unsustainability of the wait-and-see approach in Western capitals.
However, Egeland reports that while political pressure was still weak and ineffective, the “only positive development” was the generous funding that had been unlocked.
On 15 September 2003, the Greater Darfur Special Initiative was launched, which requested a comparatively modest $23 million; on 9 April 2004, the UN launched the Revised Appeal for the Sudan Assistance Programme (ASAP 2004) that requested in excess of $115 million, which included programmes to provide food aid, health care, agricultural assistance, relief supplies including shelter, water and sanitation, education, protection and coordination. The US was by far the largest donor.
Egeland describes how the “nothing less than heroic” efforts of almost 14,000 Sudanese and international aid workers have resulted in substantial improvements in malnutrition levels and mortality rates. Over half a million tonnes of food were delivered in 2006 alone.
Despite the undoubted success in unlocking significant funding, one observation is that such formulae in the media are quite resistant to change – the media tend simply to lower their voices rather than introduce a more complicated and nuanced view – giving the impression that unchanging situations exist in perpetuity, thereby ignoring successes which are a vital part of the evaluation process.
With Darfur being described as “˜the world’s worst’ as recently as last month, legitimate questions can be asked as to what does a descriptive, and sensationalist, formula such as this create in greater proportions: heat or light? Or at the very least, one can question whether the ratio of heat to light is balanced enough to promote the most effective response.
The inevitable requirement for triage in responding to natural disasters or complex emergencies means that the process is influenced by a number of factors other than need alone, such as media attention and pressure, resulting in the neglect of those upon whom only a weak spotlight is shone, if at all.
Darfur is not the first time that the label “˜the world’s worst’ has been applied. Below is a list of the last two decades’ hotspots, using examples taken from the British media, though none can seriously challenge Darfur for prominence. Notably, Somalia was described as “˜world’s worst’ as far back as 1992, and reappears now, almost 18 years later.
1990: Angola
1992: Somalia
1994: Rwanda
1996: Zaire
2001: Afghanistan
2002: Zimbabwe
2004: Darfur
2005/ 06: Congo (less popular choice than Darfur, but UN said it all the same)
2007: Somalia
2008: Congo
2009: Somalia / East Africa (Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and Uganda).
Occasionally, non-African countries such as Tajikistan and Colombia are mentioned in connection with the “˜world’s worst’, but such a statement is normally qualified by a regional specification: “world’s worst…in Asia,” or “world’s worst…in the Americas.” Only Afghanistan in 2001 has been able to wrench the title of outright “world’s worst…” from the African continent.
One interesting caveat to mention is the tsunami that rose off the west coast of Sumatra on 26 December 2004. In the media, the description “˜the world’s worst humanitarian crisis’ was very uncommonly applied, which in a sense is counterintuitive, given the sheer scale of the disaster.
Egeland describes the global response to the tsunami in his memoir. At the first OCHA press conference at midday on 27 December 2004, the room was full beyond the usual UN accredited journalists – a “remarkable” turnout – with many approaching him at the end and urging him to conduct daily press conferences, which he did for the next 30 or so days. The story was automatically huge.
In terms of generosity of response, Egeland recalls “fund raising [was] setting new records each day,” such that they had “a hard time recording the rapid increase in relief funds.” This amounted to a total of $13.5 billion, meaning $7,100 for every affected person. By comparison, $3 dollars were spent on each person affect during the 2004 floods in Bangladesh.
Although there were plenty of lessons that could be learnt from the response, The Tsunami Evaluation Coalition reported that “palpable evidence of recovery” was visible within a few months thanks to the efforts of all those involved. In addition, following the immediate period of the aftermath, former US president Bill Clinton became UN special envoy for tsunami recovery, a very high profile figure that could keep the longer-term recovery and reconstruction in the world’s attention.
What this suggests is that the label ‘the world’s worst’ has as much to do with salesmanship, publicity-seeking (not in any negative sense) and advocacy as it does cold, objective statement of fact. Congo advocates (among many other candidates) have always wondered why the comparative silence on their cause.
The tsunami was not described as “˜the world’s worst’ because the magnitude of the disaster was painstakingly obvious, with no triage required for it to top agendas. On this occasion there was no obstructive hierarchy of sceptical diplomats, politicians, journalists, editors or readers in need of convincing of its newsworthiness. The world swung into action in a way it doesn’t to other, more complicated situations which, as Darfur has shown, really take some effort to publicise.
I applaud Guy Gabriel for his thorough documentation of how Darfur came to be known in the West as the “world’s worst†humanitarian crisis. While analyzing this history may draw accusations of trivializing the suffering of Darfuris, it is nonetheless important if we are to understand how Western media function in regards to humanitarian crises.
Mr. Gabriel correctly notes that “Congo advocates (among many other candidates) have always wondered why the comparative silence on their cause†in comparison to Darfur, even while, as he also mentions, UN officials have indeed applied the “world’s worst†label to the Congo in the past. That conflict, of course, has failed to resonate with Western media, or celebrities, as has Darfur. With a death toll greater than any conflict since World War II, objective criteria do not seem to be able to account for this failure.
Even more striking is the case of Iraq. Though the Iraq War and subsequent occupation span a similar time period to the Darfur conflict, and the estimated death toll for Iraq is several times that of Darfur, I have yet to find a single instance of a major Western media organization or mainstream political figure or commentator labelling it as the “world’s worst†crisis of any kind. In fact, a Google search for “Iraq ‘world’s worst humanitarian crisis’†yields, even at the top of the search results, links that are mostly about Darfur. Why?
The inescapable conclusion is that Darfuri suffering resonates in the West’s political climate because it can be blamed on the “Arab†and “Islamist†government in Khartoum (fitting in nicely with the rhetoric of the supposed “War on Terrorâ€), backed by their intransigent allies in Beijing, Washington’s up-and-coming rival for superpower status. In this way, the Darfur conflict can be presented in such a way that it makes sense within the dominant paradigms of how the West, and particularly the U.S., views the world.
Labelling Iraq as the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis,†on the other hand, would call into question the U.S. neocolonial project in Iraq, and cast doubt as to whether we are really helping Iraqis, or even trying to. Such thoughts are unthinkable in respectable circles, where the recognition of human suffering is directly proportional to the extent to which it furthers geopolitical interests.
The question of whether Darfur really is, or was, the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis†on objective grounds is not a particularly interesting one, though the fact that the label is readily applied to Darfur and not other crises can tell us a great deal about how the Western media cover humanitarian tragedies, and the worldview that they promote.
Further, relatively extensive as it has been, Western media coverage of Darfur has certainly raised awareness of the conflict, though with important costs. Typical Western reporting on Darfur – often lacking in context, failing to empower Darfuri voices, and with a general undertone of fetishization of Darfuris as one-dimensional agents of suffering, awaiting rescue from benevolent Westerners – does a disservice to Darfuris, who at the end of the day do not benefit from being used as propaganda proxies for bashing Western political enemies and affirming supposed Western humanitarianism.
Kevin
Thanks for your comment. It’s an interesting comparison with Iraq. I think you would extremely unlikely to read that Iraq is ‘the world’s worst humanitarian crisis’, because everyone knows about the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation.
Thus to describe Iraq as ‘the world’s worst…’ would contain an implicit recognition that we are responsible, and that is a bit too much for most readers, who after all, want the news they buy to be palatable. There is a general Western notion in approaching crises in far off lands that the West remedies, not causes.
With such a prominent Western presence in Iraq, it is seen that help is already there, and a distant readership are less interested in the details of what that help entails, or its performance and efficacy.
I tend to view the use of the label ‘the world’s worst…’ as a formula used by advocates to overcome an obstructive or disinterested hierarchy of sceptical diplomats, politicians, journalists, editors or readers in need of convincing of a particular story’s newsworthiness. In Iraq, the whole world was there, as was enormous funding.
But the problem with it is that the media are quite resistant to change – the media tend simply to lower their voices rather than introduce a more complicated and nuanced view – giving the impression that unchanging situations exist in perpetuity, no matter what aid or relief is given and its successes.
Thank you for the excellent article Guy.
I think that that media in the west likes to concentrate on disasters which they are not directly implicated in. Like Kevin mentioned the Iraq conflict started at almost the same time as the conflict in Darfur. But yet the way the media has covered each conflict couldn’t have been any more different. While the conflict in Darfur was extremely emotionalised with pictures of crying women and malnourished children. The reporting from Iraq was very detached a woman weeping the loss of her family in an air strike would be voiced over, air strikes shown from a distance but yet no fallow up of their affects. While the death toll for Darfur is mentioned in almost all related articles, the death toll for Iraq which dwarfs that of Darfur is rarely mentioned.
Darfur I believe was very convenient for the western conscious a welcome distraction from the west’s own aggressions, and at a time when the west was waging war against an Arab country, Darfur allowed for the vilification of Arabs and make them seem as if they were the transgressors.
Often the Israeli media will attempt to use Darfur as some sort of justification for crimes against Palestinians.
Guy:
You are right of course to note that everyone in the U.S. knows that we invaded and are occupying Iraq, but what is at issue here is the not the mere recognition that it is happening, but rather what the media tells us about the actual nature of the invasion and occupation.
In this vein, a public opinion survey conducted in the U.S. in early 2007 by the Associated Press asked participants to estimate the number of civilian deaths in Iraq since the U.S-led invasion; the median answer was a shockingly low 9,890 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17310383/), which of course is a reflection of how the U.S. media portrays the war and occupation, and ignores or downplays civilian suffering.
As noted in AlterNet, “That’s less than a third of the number of civilian deaths confirmed by U.N. monitors in 2006 alone†(http://www.alternet.org/story/62728). Of course, the Lancet study, which was published even before the AP survey (October 2006), arrived at over 650,000 “excess deaths†in Iraq since the invasion (this does not just include civilians, though nobody is alleging that anything remotely as low as 10,000 out of 650,000 deaths have been civilians). These numbers, of course, have climbed dramatically since.
If we want to be serious about it, this looks statistically worse than ridiculous claims by Sudanese officials about the death toll in Darfur (Omar al-Bashir has frequently put forth a number of 10,000, though at least at times it is unclear whether he is referring to total deaths from conflict, including famine and so forth, or just those who have been killed in combat). That this passes without comment tells us a great deal about the Western elite.
An actual portrayal of U.S. policy towards Iraq, or any number of other places – Palestine, Colombia, and so on – would of course be jarring to many newspaper readers, but this does not explain why mainstream media fail to address such issues. The large corporations that own mass media in the U.S., and the journalists who pass through the ideological filters in order to gain employment with them, view the world through the lens of U.S. statecraft. Even if they believe it, they will not publish, or write (with perhaps a few marginal exceptions), that the U.S. unleashed the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis†by invading Iraq because that would rouse opposition to their foundational belief in U.S. hegemony. It would be strange to expect otherwise, that a massive corporation in the world’s superpower would fill its newspapers’ pages with harsh criticisms of the state which protects it and allows it to amass such tremendous amounts of power.