Ad campaign’s Darfur deaths claim not factual – UK regulator
August 15, 2007 (LONDON) — Britain’s advertising regulator has criticized a humanitarian organization for claiming 400,000 people have died in Darfur, saying the claim was unsubstantiated.
The statistic, included by the Save Darfur Coalition in a November 2006 ad campaign, should have been presented as an opinion, not a fact, Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority ruled last week. Although the ASA said the mortality figure was within the realm of possibility, it said there was no reliable information to back it up.
“As unfortunate as that may be when you’re dealing with atrocities, from an advertising point of view, you can’t state something as fact if it’s not,” ASA spokesman Matt Wilson said.
The Washington, D.C.-based Save Darfur Coalition said it accepted the ASA’s judgment, but added that it still believed that the violence in the Western Sudanese region had claimed about 400,000 lives.
“History tells us that the scale of genocides are rarely accurately understood contemporarily,” the coalition said in a statement, which also accused the Sudanese government of refusing to allow independent observers access to Darfur.
Because the ad campaign is no longer running, no disciplinary action will be taken, the ASA said.
“It’s an initial slap on the wrist,” Wilson said. “They should be careful about any future ads that they place.”
The ASA’s review of the ad was prompted by a complaint from the European Sudanese Public Affairs Council, whose director David Hoile accused the coalition of distorting the facts.
“The sort of imageries and claims that were coming out of Washington, D.C. were very dangerous,” he said. “We were concerned that there would be a rerun of the sort of allegations that brought the U.S. and the UK into the Iraq debacle.”
Hoile said his organization, which is devoted to countering what he described as anti-Sudanese propaganda, receives funding from one French and three British companies with interests in Sudan. He declined to identify them, citing public animosity toward corporations investing in the country.
The Save Darfur Coalition, an alliance of more than 180 faith-based, advocacy and humanitarian organizations, receives most of its funding from individual private donations, spokesman Allyn Brooks-LaSure said.
The number of people killed in Darfur, which has seen nearly four years of fighting between African rebel forces and the Khartoum government, is the subject of fierce debate. Some studies have put the death toll as high as 400,000 or more, while Sudan’s government claimed last year that only 9,000 had died.
The last official, independent mortality survey for Darfur, published in March 2005 by the World Health Organization, estimated that 200,000 had died since fighting began in the region in 2003. The figures have not been thoroughly updated since, although fighting in the region has continued.
(AP)