Newspaper Editorial on GUD

This Editorial was published in the Guyana Chronicle newspaper on June 29, 2007:

Recognising Darfur
THE letter published in yesterday's issue of the Guyana Chronicle concerning the crisis in Darfur was surprising for several reasons.

The first would be that it was written by a young Guyanese living here, Mr. Clinton Urling. While as a people we tend to be more aware than persons in many other places of the events going on in the larger world, our interest rarely moves being beyond the academic or the speculative.

"No other international issue affects me more than the atrocities that are being committed on the people of Darfur in Sudan", therefore represents a moral or emotional position a bit outside of the normal area of concern for us.

Secondly, Mr. Urling's letter was undersigned, "Guyanese United for Darfur (GUD). That the sentiment expressed in the letter should be representative of a collective voice, not just an individual's, is just as surprising within the local context.

The "Crisis in Darfur" remains one of the more enigmatic phenomena of the present era in international relations. Basically, for the past four years, an Arab militia called the janjaweed has been wreaking havoc on the lives of several tribes in Darfur, a large province in the west of the African nation of Sudan.

It seems that international pressure notwithstanding, the government of Sudan – accused of complicity in the genocide – happens to be the entity dictating the pace of international intervention in what is clearly the worst humanitarian crisis of the present century.

To put things into perspective, while 3,000 lives were estimated to have been lost during the September 11, 2001 attacks on America, 300,000 – or ten times that number – have lost their lives during the four-year long nightmare that has been the crisis in Darfur.

And some two million people have been displaced from their homes – not exactly palaces in the first place – and are now forced to dwell in refugee camps where hunger and disease work to lead them to the fate that the janjaweed intended for them in the first place.

One cannot help contrast Darfur and Iraq: the blitzkrieg involved in bringing a dubiously executed justice to Saddam Hussein, when there was no clear evidence of the crimes which formed the basis for the invasion of Iraq; and the exasperating equivocation in the light of overwhelming evidence of atrocities committed with the full compliance of the government of President Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir.

Mr. Urling, writing for GUD, may be right in asserting that local newspapers can provide greater coverage on the atrocities being committed in Darfur; truth be told, more column inches might have been given to Paris Hilton's recent sojourn in jail than to the humanitarian crisis in Sudan in the past few weeks.

The thing is however, public interest often dictates what the press chooses to publish.

If the newspapers, this one included, are to increase their coverage on Darfur, it may take a few more letters from Mr. Urling and other members of GUD to tilt that balance.