A conspiracy of silence on Darfur in Beirut

[gottaB]

By Julie Flint, The Daily Star

July 23, 2004 -- It was a fine idea - to issue Amnesty International's latest report on Darfur, "Rape as a Weapon of War," not in London but in the Middle East and Africa. In Africa, because Sudan is part of Africa; in the Middle East, in Amnesty's own words, "because northern Sudan is part of the Arab-Islamic world, and the government and government-supported militias which are committing horrific human rights violations in Darfur have benefited from the support or silence of Middle Eastern countries."

If there was any doubt about that support or silence, it was dispelled at the issue of the report at the Press Syndicate building in Beirut this week. The opportunity to engage in a debate about the monstrous goings-on in Darfur was lost as Khartoum's ambassador in Lebanon was allowed to hijack the presentation of the report and turn it into a platform for Sudan's lies and propaganda.

Ethnic cleansing by government forces in Darfur? An invention of the people who brought you Abu Ghraib and who lied about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction! (Loud applause.) A conspiracy against the Arabs! (Louder applause.) Rape? What nonsense! Not more than two cases, the ambassador declared - apparently unaware that, under the relentless accumulation of facts, his own government had been compelled to set up committees to investigate accusations of rape in Darfur and help victims through criminal cases.

A conspiracy of silence on Darfur in Beirut....

***

A call for action from Muslim WakeUp!, Justice in Darfur Now!

[geek tragedy]

1. "What--no Israeli involvement? Yawn."

Where is al-Jazeera's live coverage?

[Jim Sagle]

2. If it ain't about the joooooooooos, it ain't newwwwwwwwwws.

[gottaB]

3. Arab press review, brief impressions

I read a few Arab news sources published online in English. There has been attention paid to Darfur, but overall I'd say it wasn't a priority and that indeed, imagined genocides or potential calamaties involving Israel are much more frequent topics.

The Daily Star, has published several of Flint's pieces, as well as pieces that express the Government of Sudan's view, and more impartial news stories. In general they seem balanced to me, but rather quiet.

Arab News, the Saudi daily, has carried stories about Darfur in their world news section. I can't recall any front page coverage, or any editorials. It seems like being just a stone's throw from Sudan, they would show more interest.

Dar al Hayat, which if I am not mistaken prides itself on being a pan-Arabic paper, scarcely mentions Darfur in its English pages. The English version represents only a fraction of the Arabic version, yet given their claims to cover international news especially, the silence on Darfur is puzzling. There are exceptions, naturally, like Iskandar's Not a Conspiracy, a critique of Sudanese official paranoia, but in the absence of regular reporting it's hard to contextualize such a viewpoint.

The English version of Al Jazeerah carries about as many stories about Darfur as the New York Times, but I don't recall them having their own reporters there, as the Times does. The CNN of the Arab World? They don't even come close to competing with the BBC's coverage, and as Flint points out, this is an issue for the Arab world. The very real potential of a million deaths ought to provide quite the tempting spectacle for a cable network that never shies from the horrors of war. So I think your jab is on target, that absent a narrative of Arab martyrdom, the story holds little interest for Al Jazeerah, at least in their capacity as cbn of the Arab world. Inasmuch as tales of Arab martyrdom do find their way into Al Jazeerah, whether of rebel attacks against Arabs or the Government of Sudan's reactions to the "bullying" by the US and Europe, Al Jazeerah's relative quietness about actual events and conditions in Sudan creates a potential for extreme bias and stupidity.

Khaleej Times carries stories various points of view. I can't really sense an editorial bias, one way or the other.

The Egyptian weekly Al Ahram has covered Darfur as a news story and in its opinion pages. Their editorial bias is critical of the Sudanese government, though the tone is far from militant. Some recent editions make no mention of Darfur. The paucity of coverage is inexplicable. Sudan is a neighbor in turmoil, and there are about 3 million Sudanese living in Egypt (see The Art of Flight). Today Al Ahram's front page features four stories on Israel/Palestine and two on Iraq. Their regional section contains four stories about Israel/Palestine, one about Lebanon, one about Iran, and three about Iraq.

Well, I could speculate some more about the meaning of the silence, but I must also say that many media outlets in Europe and in the greater anglophone world have been remiss on this story since the very grave warnings were issued last spring. Only recently, since the children have been stricken en masse, have they been willing to send in the cameras and broadcast the story. They too have their narratives of innocence and martyrdom more sacred than their allegiances to truth or professionalism, which, properly understood, should organically both originate in and nourish a commitment to social justice.

ugh. There is some recognition in me that the desire to see horrible things done to other people may be orders of magnitude stronger than the will to help those in need. "Reality TV," which resembles none of the realities I know in real life, seems to capture this spirit of I don't know--not sadism exactly, but the making a spectacle of cruelty, and taking pleasure in the spectacle, if not the cruelty, a pleasure which is either sadistic or masochistic, in that effeciency of ambivalence that typifies the modern spectacular--. I see that same ethos in media coverage of this "humanitarian crisis," the greusome masqeurade of hiding violence behind the effects of global malnutrition, at the same time presenting viewers with a rapid sequence of grotesque images, which, compressed temporally, iconify a way to die, become objects of silent contemplation the way still photographs do. Or screams.

[reorg]

4. "lies and propaganda"

after reading this impassionate attack against the

"... gaggle of well-upholstered ladies in the front row of the audience, all past the age of traveling to war zones and who apparently represented Lebanese non-governmental organizations, or NGOs. Forget the "N," these were GO ladies. They clapped, they cheered, they smiled. They just loved the ambassador. What they didn't do was ask questions or show any interest in what was happening in Darfur. They knew, you see: It's an American plot, a pure invention by the occupiers of Iraq.

But where was America in all this? The report was Amnesty International's and Abu Ghraib is a continent away from Darfur. ..."


I found myself compelled to look for some more articles by this presumably slim and able-bodied "veteran reporter" and human rights activist (of the GO HRW, see below).


Daily Star, 30-Sep-03

"... Arab commentators have had no shame in urging their Iraqi brothers, exhausted by three major wars and more than a decade of sanctions, to start a new war “of liberation” against their liberators. Western commentators critical of the war have luxuriated in the failures of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) ­ failures that condemn Iraqis to protracted hardship. ..., in the words of a British Arabist, “even the most optimistic and moderate Iraqis fear the very real prospect of civil war.”
Not those I know. ...

In mid-summer, I spent over a month in Iraq. What I found there did not correspond to what was being reported ­ most crucially, that the liberators were widely perceived as occupiers. That simply wasn’t true. In Baghdad, where US forces had permitted widespread looting (although not as much as reported) and where security and services were virtually nonexistent, attitudes toward the Americans were mixed. ...

Today, the line being peddled is that there is growing popular support for a war of resistance against the CPA and Iraqis working with it. It is said that Iraq is a security-free zone threatened with “Lebanonization.” Bad news sells; good news doesn’t. ...

It is worth stating the obvious, so momentous is it: For the first time in almost half a century, Iraq has no executions, no political prisoners, no torture and no limits on freedom of expression. ..."

http://www.worldsecuritynetwork.com/showArticle3.cfm?article_id=8664


This really does sound impartial, doesn't it? Even though one might get the idea that the lady's perceptions were not borne out by reality.

She also has some experience with old ladies. In another piece she relates this:


"Inside story
Riefenstahl, the Nuba and me

It began with a phone-call out of the blue - Leni Riefenstahl asking for help to get back to Sudan and the Nuba tribe she loved. Julie Flint recalls her three-year relationship with the notorious German film-maker

Thursday September 11, 2003
The Guardian

It must have been the closing days of the last millennium, or the opening days of this one. I was at home in London with a friend, the Nuba rebel leader Yousif Kuwa, when the telephone rang and a sharp, rather croaky voice said: "Hello, my dear. I am Leni." "Leni Riefenstahl?" I said. And the voice said: "Yes." I turned to Kuwa and whispered: "It's Leni Riefenstahl!" ...

I knew who Leni Riefenstahl was, of course - Hitler's favourite film-maker, a protege of the Third Reich who had first visited, and fallen in love with, the Nuba in the 1960s and had published two remarkable books about them. ..."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,2763,1039697,00.html


Well, Ms. Riefenstahl had of course fallen in love with Hitler, too, before she fell in love with the Nuba. And never really understood why anybody would criticize her for making those widely received Nazi propaganda films (little wonder she was Hitler's "favourite film-maker"), for which she never felt the need to repent or even apologize. Yet this apparently was neither a concern for Ms. Flint. She rattles on and on about the Nubas and what Riefenstahl (guess who's on the phone, Riefenstahl!) would tell her in this croaky voice.


And since Ms. Flint of HRW is so outspoken on these massacres in Darfur, and on the ruthless government that condones or incites them, let's remember how coy and timid her organisation kindly asked the US government, with all due respect, taking into account "considerations of international peace and security" that obviously warranted the sanctions, to ease, pretty please, some of the restrictions on the oil-for-food programme in pre-occupation Iraq.

It is true, HRW informed their government that the death rate of children more than doubled, due to the sanctions. But I never heard or read anything from HRW claiming the US government was willfully ("it's worth it", Albright) committing genocide, despite an estimated (by the responsible UN persons) 1 million deaths.

Therefore, and finally, a few timely remarks on Human Rights Watch, from Global Research in Canada:

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Human Rights Watch, the US foreign policy establishment-connected rights watchdog, is an ardent exponent of holding human rights abusers to account. The group argues that the prosecution of violators makes clear to dictators, tyrants and despots, that there's nowhere to hide. This is arrant nonsense. For one thing, leaders of the de facto world government need not worry about hiding, since they have no fear of ever being prosecuted; they control, or at the very least, have an enormous influence over, prosecutions and the bodies that carry them out. And since HRW's key members are drawn from the US foreign policy establishment, it's a pretty safe bet that the organization's view of the world closely resembles that of Washington. Would HRW call for the prosecution of US leaders? Of course not. The mild slap on the wrist the organization gave NATO leaders for the war of aggression on Yugoslavia – which was an egregious assault on both the principles of jus ad bellum and jus in bello – is proof enough. The rights group mildly admonished NATO leaders for ignoring humanitarian law, when, in fact, the US-led coalition committed the greatest crime of all according to the Nuremberg laws – initiating a war of aggression. On top of that, NATO forces deliberately destroyed civilian infrastructure, a flagrant war crime. Vital allies of the US also have no fear either, a point Israeli leaders -- who, in connection with the Palestinians, oversee a human rights horror show and war crimes extravaganza -- can readily attest to. Who really has nowhere to hide are leaders of countries that are not allies, satellites or dependencies of the US. This includes anyone who presides over a closed or largely state-owned economy who refuses to bow to demands to accept what's euphemistically called "democratic" or "economic reforms" – elevating the profit making interests of corporate America above the material and social security requirements of the domestic population. Renitent leaders will eventually be indicted on some charge, whether genuine, exaggerated or trumped up, to justify an inevitable predatory US war to pry open markets and elevate US corporate interests. To be sure, there is nowhere for these leaders to hide, but that hardly has anything to do with human rights abuses or war crimes, and everything to do with the world's de facto government concealing the pursuit of corporate America's interests behind the pursuit of justice. In this, Human Rights Watch is also an instrument of the de facto world government's imperialism.

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/GOW407A.html

[gottaB]

5. Who is Julie Flint?

It doesn't surprise me that EPSAC has compiled a dossier on Flint. You would question her credibility and her agenda? Okay, let's question that. Has her main interest over the years has been providing ideological cover for neoimperialist adventures? Or, rather, as she would claim, has she reported on human rights abuses, passionately, but without a hidden agenda.

And what about her writing about the AIDS crisis? Well, let's toss that out since it's been a while, and we don't have an easy way to fit that into the conspiracy theories of the sort we are entertaining at the moment.

On Iraq, Flint was a longtime critic of Saddam Hussein, and an ardent defender of Kurdish human rights. She also defended the Kurds against human rights abuses by Turkey, but perhaps a few jaunts in Turkish prisons persuaded her to keep her distance from that government (see Kurdish Struggle is Chiefly against Racism). In my mind, Flint's hatred of Saddam Hussein and her Kurdish loyalties led her to take positions that I would not agree with. The article you cited from September 2003 is a case in point. Had it been written in March of 2004, I would say defintitively that she was incapable of accurately reporting the facts. As it stands, I would say that her reporting displays bias but not "lies and propaganda."

Here are some other stories of hers which display an unusual bias, yet I wouldn't assume to be propaganda:

• Ahmed Chalabi: His Own Man
  
  
• America's New Iraqi Order: Promising Democracy While Protecting Abusers
  

As you are well aware, Julie Flint has authored many works critical of human rights abuses by the government of Sudan. Her advocacy goes back many years, prior to the recent conflict in Darfur. So is she biased against Arab governments? Perhaps, but Turkey is not an Arab government, is it? Perhaps she is biased against Mulsim countries, even those ruled by secular governments? But that wouldn't explain her critiques of Israel's abuses of human rights.

• Israel's Torture Jails Exposed
  
  
• Vanished Victims of Israelis Return to Accuse Sharon
  
  
• The Sharon Files
  
  
• The "Honolulu" Obeid and Dirani leave
  
  

In sum, Flint's advocacy does not reflect an objective point of view, but neither do her biases promote the foreign policy agenda of any one state entity. She is consistently critical of government abuses of human rights.

I welcome your (and ESPAC's) raising of the issue of Flint's credibility, as it helps to think clearly about one's sources of information. I don't believe that her work constitutes "lies and propaganda." If you want to convince me of that, you will have to make a stronger case.

[reorg]

6. Who the hell is EPSAC, or ESPAC?

They put out a dossier on Ms. Flint? Where can I find it? Thanks.

BTW, I'm not out to convince you on anything. Just thought I would share some bits and pieces adding to the picture. It is your source, Ms. Flint, who spoke of "lies and propaganda", I quoted her, make of it what you will.

[gottaB]

7. RE: ESPAC -- "google is your friend"

Are you claiming that you aren't suggesting that Flint is engaging in propaganda? Would you claim that you haven't previously characterized criticisms of the government of Sudan, including reports issued by Human Rights Watch, as "propaganda"?

Shall we revert to the position of viewing Jan Egeland as the only credible voice on the crisis?

Darfur Death Toll Could Be 50,000: UN

"For Darfur it is not lack of access which is our main problem, it is lack of security," Mr. Egeland said.

"It's still a security and protection crisis of unprecedented proportions."

hmmm

[reorg]

8. Flint is engaging in propaganda?

I don't know. The way I would put it: I'm not inclined to trust her judgement. Which is not to say that I suspect her to lie about what she heard from refugees.

Have I previously characterized various news reports on the conflict as propaganda? Sure. Is that wrong?

Thanks for the latest news from Mr. Egelund. You neglected to mention, though, that (according to your source):


"Mr Egeland said that helicopters are needed, but his program is short on cash."


Maybe some people should get the message out to the big donors to come through with more than 1 or 2 percent of the already pledged aid, what do you think?


ed. for typo

[gottaB]

9. What do I think?

On the issue of donors, I have already given my opinion:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=103&topic_id=62633#62829

To recap, it's been a gos talking point to repeat the criticism about lack of funds in response to US and UK pressure. To whom should that criticism about lack of funds primarily be directed? To the US? The UK? Hardly.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/fromthefield/108792864954.htm

So, by all means, let's get the message out. Share this link, and links to Oxfam's efforts (Oxfam: Sudan), and any other relief agencies who are helping save lives in Darfur.

p.s., A handly list is here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=106x8499

[reorg]

10. criticism about lack of funds

- to whom should that criticism be directed?

Good question. The donor agencies have a habit of making pledges but then realize there are problems with the cash flow, delaying or even impeding reimbursement of the funds. It is a complete mystery to me how this is possible, but it happens with regular projects, too. Perhaps a loud hue and cry directly with the agencies (USAID, presumably, in the US, and BMZ in Germany) might help.

I seem to recall that some high officials also were conditioning the reimbursement on security measures and/or committments of the GOS, don't have the sources for that right now, though.

FWIW
>>... the United Nations and its partners presented un-met requirements to the donor nations of some $236 million, for the period 1 June to 31 December 2004. In response, pledges for this year amounted to approximately $57 million. Additionally, the United States pledged $188 million, to be disbursed from 4 June until the end of 2005 with at least $44 million of this pledge to be disbursed in the next four months. Donors and humanitarian agencies took the opportunity presented by the conference to ask the GoS to ensure the protection and security of its citizens, and to actively implement the provisions of the Humanitarian Ceasefire Agreement signed on 8 April 2004. Participants also called on all parties to the conflict to provide full and unfettered access to humanitarian organizations. ...

A group of 16 humanitarian workers, on a three-day interagency assessment mission to Mellit, approximately 30 km North of El Fasher, were detained by the SLA earlier this week and subsequently released on 6 June. Consequently, the movement of UN staff in the Darfur region was restricted to the major towns as a precautionary measure. The restriction has been lifted in South Darfur following a general security assessment of the region, but the restriction still holds in West and North Darfur pending an assessment. Increasing security concerns throughout the week have impeded rapid humanitarian assistance imperative for averting an acceleration of the humanitarian crisis expected during the upcoming rainy season.<<

http://www.unsudanig.org/Emergencies/Darfur/roundups/data/30-May-06-June.doc