GENOCIDE IN DARFUR: A Story Slow to Spread

by Andrew Bast

Rebel groups began slaughtering innocents in the Darfur region of Western Sudan in early 2003, yet the fighting that more than two years later would be deemed genocide took almost as long to make the headlines. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof put it, “If only Michael Jackson’s trial had been held in Darfur.” In a month of 2005, on CNN, Fox News, NBC, MSNBC, ABC and CBS he counted 55 times more stories about Michael Jackson.

By that time, there was no excuse. President Bush had named the genocide as such. People, however few in scale, were aware of the conflict. The cat was out of the bag.

“Networks were very slow,” said Kenneth Bacon, president of Refugees International and a former Pentagon spokesperson. “During the opening years of the conflict, it wasn’t easy to get in there. Since, the coverage has gotten better. Now, the Today Show has run specials we wouldn’t have expected a few years ago.”

Initially, the problem was twofold. After the fighting broke out, the government in the capital city of Khartoum knew all too well that the unfolding war was a story that would be told with images, so they made it very difficult, if not impossible, for cameras to cross the border. News agencies had an extremely difficult time acquiring visas and official travel documents.

When it deemed necessary, the Sudanese government went to extremes. After Aljazeera ran a report on the horrid situation in Darfur, the government closed the agency’s Khartoum bureau, confiscated equipment and jailed a correspondent. They claimed Aljazeera was propagating lies and distorting the facts.

The second problem lay at home. In the US, the war in Afghanistan was on, and the country’s focus centered on the invasion of Iraq. In Bacon’s words, “There are only so many television cameras around. There are only so many minutes for international news.”

European news agencies, however, took a different route. Specifically, they snuck into the country through Sudan’s western border with Chad. For instance, BBC’s The World offered reports of the crisis by year’s end, 2003. In the States, Scott Pelley first filed a story a year later, in October, 2004.

The turning point came when then Secretary of State Colin Powell traveled with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to the region in the Fall of 2004 and came back with a dire assessment. With Bush’s declaration soon thereafter, stateside, the tide began to turn.

While informative and telling reports about the crisis are now widely available, still a journalist like Kristof names an affliction. His relentless, albeit sometimes horrifying, columns about the genocide read almost strangely on the page. Without sanitization, the story of a genocide is difficult to digest. Yet, is it any easier to watch spots on the child-molesting King of Pop?