The Darfur deception - In trying to spur intervention and raise donations, activist groups are oversimplifying the African conflict.
The Sept. 29 killing of 10 African Union peacekeepers in south Darfur by a splinter faction of one of the main anti-Sudanese government insurgent groups was shocking -- but especially so to those who have only followed the Darfur tragedy through the lens of activist, pro-interventionist groups such as Save Darfur or institutions such as the U.S. Holocaust Museum, which label the crisis a genocide.
It was shocking because it doesn't fit with the simplistic, mostly-without-nuance view of the conflict in Darfur that such groups have been putting out for the last few years.
Why have these groups -- which, after all, are far more familiar with realities on the ground than all but a few specialists and Sudanese emigres living in the United States -- offered an incomplete picture of what's happening? Because they know that in order to get people to care, they have to oversimplify. Even naming an organization Save Darfur is an oversimplification, in that it implies that there is an innocent victim (the Darfuris) and a group from whom they need to be saved (the Islamist government of Sudan and its murderous janjaweed militia).
From a practical standpoint, such oversimplification often seems not just unavoidable but essential. After all, to a regrettable extent, activism is a zero-sum game. When all is said and done, a group that is passionately committed to the plight of Darfur is competing for donations with groups that are equally passionately committed to curing Lou Gehrig's disease or stopping global warming or combating homelessness. For each group, their own cause is preeminent. But, alas, there are only a finite number of contributions to go around.
To communicate a more complicated message may be more accurate but it is inevitably less compelling, and according to the conventional wisdom, campaigns need to be compelling if they are to have a hope of success.
In the case of Darfur, there is in fact considerable controversy about whether the government of Sudan and the janjaweed have committed genocide. Save Darfur, the Holocaust Museum and the U.S. Congress say they have; the European Union and many of the most important relief groups working on the ground in western Sudan say they have not. There is also a heated debate among statisticians, demographers and activists about how many people have been killed or displaced. Understandably, those who are campaigning for an international intervention to rescue the Darfuris tend to accept the higher figures; indeed, for many it is the brute number of dead that drew them to activism in the first place.
