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Sudan: Who Controls the Narrative?
Sudan: Who Controls the Narrative?
As the conflict continues along the North-South border in Sudan, bloggers are challenging the media's portrayals of both sides. Some go so far as to call actions taken in the region genocide, however many refute that claim.-
On The Stream we interviewed Sudanese blogger Amir Ahmad and human rights defender Osman Hummaida.
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Ed. note: Items in this story have been changed since the original posting.
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From Sudanese blogger Moez Ali:
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Most articles being written about Sudan these days highlight the conflict as being more or less oil related. Every single article that tries to address the issue in Abyei paints a one-dimensional picture of the conflict. The phrase “oil-rich region of Abyei” is more common in literature about Sudan these days than a plausible solution.
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Before the South voted for independence in a January 2011 referendum, American actor George Clooney traveled to South Sudan with human rights group The Enough Project.
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Clooney and others warned that a genocide might occur if violence erupted between the North and South.
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More recently, on June 22 The Enough Project called on Americans to dial the White House using the number 1-800-GENOCIDE.
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The condemnation expressed by U.S. government officials over the recent violence in Sudan must translate into meaningful action toward those most culpable, to force them to rethink their calculations. Call the White House at 1-800-GENOCIDE and urge Obama to impose consequences against the government of President Bashir.
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In a recent opinion piece for the Washington Post, American academic Eric Reeves went further to claim that the North is waging a genocidal counterinsurgency in the South Kordofan region of Sudan.
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By early 2004, it was clear that the ideologically Arabist and Islamist regime in Khartoum was waging a genocidal counterinsurgency war throughout the western region of Darfur.
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Today, another episode of genocidal counterinsurgency is beginning in another part of Sudan. Absent a vigorous international response, there will almost certainly be a reprise of ethnically targeted human destruction in the middle of the country, specifically within the Nuba Mountains region of South Kordofan, which has a rich mixture of African inhabitants.
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Reeves clarified his stance an another piece published three days later.
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To be sure, the allegation of genocide is a strong and for some a controversial one, and I do not claim to have full knowledge of everything that has happened or will happen in South Kordofan.
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He then called for American intervention in the region if the violence continues.
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The United States and its allies—or the U.S. alone, if necessary—should state that, if Khartoum does not halt its campaign of ethnic destruction in South Kordofan, the aircraft responsible for bombing civilian and humanitarian targets will be destroyed, until the regime yields.
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Some Sudanese bloggers have taken issue with portrayals of the conflict in Western media. Blogger Moez Ali:
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The problem with such reporting is that the real stories get lost in the middle. Western reporters have failed miserably in addressing the real issues behind the conflict in Sudan.
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What’s more deplorable than all this is the overuse of the word “genocide.” Thanks to the over publicized Nickolas Kristof, Darfur and all other conflict regions in Sudan are now synonymous with genocide, ethnic cleansing and human rights violations.
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I’m not denying the deaths and violence, but using the genocide label so freely distorts the picture and is very counterproductive to those who are trying to voice their concerns.
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Ali criticises the failure of many reports and commentaries to mention fighters aligned to the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), the former southern rebel group.
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So the point here is that when you label a conflict like that in the Nuba Mountains as genocide, you automatically remove the will, courage and audacity of those who took up arms from the equation. They become helpless civilians rather than freedom fighters (or whatever you want to call them).
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There’s a huge responsibility on the reporter to tell the story how it is. It is actually extremely condescending to have a western reporter classify the conflict in the country as genocide when it’s not, because of the sympathy and pity that are associated with the term.
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There has to be immediate, unbiased coverage of the hostilities in the South and West of the country. Calls for the genocide police and classifying rebellions as genocidal attempts by the government is doing injustice to those on the ground fighting for their rights.
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In an opinion piece for Al Jazeera English, Zimbabwean blogger Tendai Marima criticises the narrative of 'goodies vs baddies' that has emerged in many media accounts.
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The battle for Abyei strikes at the heart of Sudan's contemporary conflict, as the disputed colonial borders and ethnic tension between the nomadic Misseriya and pastoralist Ngok Dinka was one of the root causes of Sudan's civil war in the 1980s. An emotional issue, Abyei has been exploited for political gain by both north and south in the past, and al-Bashir's latest brutal insurgency is no different.
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She points specifically to accusations of violence committed by the Southern SPLA against a rival ethnic group.
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Last Thursday, a confidential UN report obtained by AP claimed that dozens of civilians belonging to a rival ethnic group had been killed by the SPLA in a village near the Nile River, though some locals say the figure could be as high as 254.
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If Satellite Sentinel and Enough Project's satellite pictures were described as hard evidence of Khartoum's "war crimes" in Abyei, doesn't the SPLA's firing on unarmed members of rival ethnic groups also warrant serious attention?
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The news of "ethnic cleansing" in Abyei headlined last Sunday's Africa section of many international news sites and yet the documented atrocities by the SPLA have a lousy three mentions on a news web-search.
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When selective reporting due to lack of interest leads to the portrayal of the internationally supported SPLA as perpetual victims, seldom aggressors; a straw-clutching conspiracy theorist could almost be forgiven for thinking there is something deeper at work here.
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Ed. note: We have removed reference to a letter originally posted to Nicolas Kristof's blog at the New York Times regarding allegations of ethnic cleansing. The original letter, with its introduction, can be read here.
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What do you think? Is the media accurately portraying the violence in Sudan? Tell The Stream via Twitter or Facebook.
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