The Back Burner: On Our Watch

TL Staff/Andrew Garib, Turn Left | Perhaps the saddest aspect of the ongoing genocide in the Sudanese region of Darfur is our media’s atrocious complicity with the murderous and racist Khartoum government. Over the course of the two-year conflict between the Arab-led Sudanese government and various rebel forces representing ‘African’ victims of Khartoum’s campaign of ethnic cleansing, with few exceptions Western media have done all they can to paint the hideous events in Darfur at their apathetic and amoral whim: as a simple regional ethnic dispute drawn out over decades; as a civil war between two sides equally to blame for mass murder; or as a brutal and prostrated tribal conflict with which we in the West have nothing to do.

Worst of all are the Western voices who, despite the overabundance of evidence condemning Khartoum for its leading role in the genocide, have become mere mouthpieces for the Sudanese propaganda campaign.

Khartoum’s initial instinct in dealing with foreign press interested in Darfur was exclusion. But Sudan’s Arab leadership eventually learned to take active steps to mislead international media outlets about its murderous actions and vile intentions — a grand orchestration of distraction, while many in the media hummed along.

Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir and his media-savvy partners in crime have downplayed their connection to the janjaweed militias, who, other than Sudanese air force’s aerial bombardments of Darfuri villages, have been the primary force in the humiliation and evisceration of the local African population. Throughout the summer of 2004, mainstream press reported (with only restrained suspicion) on Sudan’s struggle with internal sectarian clashes (with headlines like ‘Sudan Agrees to Control Violence’), implying that the violence in Darfur was between independent armed groups Sudan struggled to restrain.

This of course is the kind of dishonesty meant to mask Khartoum’s campaign of genocide, carried out through its support, organization and encouragement of the janjaweed. The Government of Sudan is not a resource-strapped constabulary force in Darfur, but the primary drive behind ethnic cleansing, mass rape and murder.

Yet the Khartoum media charade continues. Last summer, Sudan announced that it would set up committees of female judges, police officers and lawyers to investigate allegations of mass rape, one of Khartoum’s primary means of terrorizing the Darfuri population. And in a gesture of goodwill during peace talks, the government insisted it would reduce the number of militia in Darfur, when in fact it increased it — many of its janjaweed militamen melting into Sudan’s regular forces, or, in an Orwellian twist, conglomerating into local police forces meant to protect refugee camps and villages.

By being proactive in its approach to the media, Khartoum has frequently set the agenda regarding Darfur. Khartoum demands increased humanitarian aid when its own militias stop the flow of food to those it is systematically starving to death; it welcomes the full cooperation of an impotent African Union observation mandate, but warns (indirectly through ‘impromptu’ rallies and other staged media events) that ‘Darfur will be a foreign graveyard’ if other international forces intervene; and Sudan accuses the United States, in its fair-weather pressing for sanctions and other action against Khartoum, of distracting the world’s attention away from troubles in Iraq — this as ‘Sudan stresses commitment to peace deal with rebels’ in an Agénce France-Press headline while prosecuting its genocide project in Darfur. Sudan has even had the gall to fly in international press to cover staged local events painting Sudan’s government and its allies — including the infamous janjaweed leader Musa Hilal — as the champions of law and order.

While many of the most respected journalists have sliced through Sudan’s media manipulation scheme, others have appallingly justified neglecting their obligation to expose the truth with the finesse of Khartoum’s finest spin-doctors. In this business, TL Staffers have found, the best only learn from the best. End.