Despite Darfur, Africa aid funds falling short
By William Maclean
NAIROBI, Sept 13 (Reuters) – Darfur is rare among Africa’s conflicts in generating both sustained media coverage beyond the continent and a diplomatic controversy involving Washington.
Televised images of gaunt Sudanese in the troubled west of Africa’s biggest country have stirred worldwide compassion while a war of words rages between Washington, which says genocide has occurred, and Sudan’s Islamist rulers, who say it has not.
But despite the emergency’s high international profile, rich donor nations have yet to respond with sufficient funds for the relief teams trying to save lives there, U.N. experts say.
And they say that failure is repeated in ailing efforts to support relief work in Africa’s many other desperate places.
The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said at mid-year the average response to combined appeals by aid agencies for 2004 for the world’s top crises, the bulk of which are in Africa, was running at just 23.6 percent.
As of Aug. 25, Sudan efforts remained underfunded, with $434 million out of an appeal for $722 million still unmet.
“The ‘CNN effect’ has not influenced funding trends to date in 2004,” an OCHA report said, referring generally to the ability of media to raise awareness of a given crisis.
COMPASSION FATIGUE
“Media prominence appears to make no consistent difference to donor response. For example, the current headline crisis, Darfur, remains significantly underfunded.”
Relief experts cite several potential reasons.
Some cite a high volume of funds pledged for Iraq, a resurgence of Western “compassion fatigue”, and heavy coverage of both Iraq and the U.S presidential election that divert media resources from the many inaccessible emergencies in Africa.
But there are no easy answers, and one remedy sure to fail would be an attempt by media houses simply to cover every crisis, argues a senior World Food Programme (WFP) official.
“I don’t believe that to show hungry people in 12 different places in the world would be very healthy,” Jean-Jacques Graisse, WFP’s senior deputy executive director, told Reuters.
“Quite to the contrary: It might have a negative impact, with people believing that nothing can be done and that the situation is so bad all over the world that there is no point in trying to assist any longer. That is a potential danger.
“It’s not the media that has to change but, I would imagine, the reaction of donor governments, who may no longer be as willing to be as generous as they have been in the past.”
The United Nations estimates 1.2 million people have fled their homes in Darfur and up to 50,000 people have died from direct violence, starvation or illness,
But Darfur is by no means Africa’s biggest crisis.
The United Nations estimates 3.3 million people, a third of them children, in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s east are beyond the reach of relief groups and prey to armed groups spawned by years of war and ethnic massacres in the Great Lakes.
In Uganda, 1.6 million are displaced after 18 years of war between the cult-like Lords Resistance Army and the government.
In southern Sudan a separate war over the past 21 years has uprooted 4 million people and killed 2 million.
Aid agencies estimate 19 million people are short of food in central and eastern Africa, less than 5 million in southern Africa and up to 2 million in West Africa, a region struggling to emerge from a series of devastating wars.
The U.N. emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, has worked vigorously to highlight crises in Africa and beyond, ratcheting up the rhetoric to try to erode rich world apathy.
In late 2003 Egeland called northern Uganda the world’s “biggest forgotten and neglected humanitarian emergency”.
SILENT EMERGENCIES
In April 2004 Egeland said Darfur was “one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises”, and in June he declared access for aid groups in eastern Congo as “even worse” than in Darfur.
Some even fret that Darfur may be becoming too prominent.
“The crises in Uganda, Somalia, the DR Congo and southern Sudan itself have almost been forgotten,” says Dennis McNamara, Egeland’s special adviser on internal displacement.
The key to winning aid may be the perception among rich nations that they have national interests at stake.
“Silent emergencies are those in which media coverage is sparse, in which the national interests of the large donors of humanitarian aid are not engaged, and (lack of) … a support system of influential and interested foreign aid organisations,” wrote Larry Thompson of Refugees International in a 2002 paper.
Commentators have also long worried that trivialisation of mainstream Western media saps coverage of serious issues.
“The number of documentaries on foreign subjects is declining. So it’s a kind of fiction to say that television has created this world of instantaneous global communication,” Canadian author Michael Ignatieff said in a 1998 radio talk.
“Television in a curious way has changed much less than we thought … The partiality of the European and American gaze, the imperial gaze, is still as partial as ever.”