For more than five years, the Save Darfur coalition has used a slick and star-studded multimillion dollar ad campaign to paint a horrific vision of 400,000 dead in a black vs. Arab war of extermination in Sudan. No historic or political causes are offered for this scenario; it's a case of 'genocide' involving good vs. evil and demanding our attention and action. But the big lies underpinning the Save Darfur campaign are coming undone. Reporters, scholars and even US envoys are returning from the region affirming that if there ever was a genocide in Darfur, and there may not have been, there isn’t one now. The British government has even ruled that Save Darfur cannot, in that country, use the figure of 400,000 dead which it throws around in all its US advertisements, 'cause it just ain’t true.

A hundred years ago, in the 'Souls of Black Folk', W.E.B. DuBois observed that '… the country’s appetite for facts on the Negro question has been spoiled by sweets'. If he was around today, DuBois would be able to say the same for America’s appetite for facts on Darfur, the rest of Africa, Iraq, and most of the world. Facts are messy things. Facts come with historical contexts and uncertain consequences. Eternal truths, like good vs. evil are sweet like candy, simple and comforting.

Since its founding in 2004, the Save Darfur coalition has spent tens of millions of dollars on a state-of-the-art advertising campaign to paint us a picture that is exactly that. Sweet and simple, easy-to-understand, and most of all, we get to be the good guys. Darfur is, to use Samantha Power’s phrase, 'a problem from hell', a piece of pure, unambiguous evil in which the global power of the US can be put to use constructively, because stopping a genocide calls for action, not for politics. Stopping genocide, we are told, is above politics. The lesson of genocide is that great powers must act; people of conscience and goodwill must intervene.

There are several problems with this, both as a general proposition, and specifically as it applies to Darfur. In the first place genocide is defined as the attempt to wipe out a nation or a people. There is so little evidence that mass killings on the scale necessary to be called genocide have occurred in Darfur that back in 2007 Save Darfur’s UK operation was prohibited from using the figure of 400,000 dead that routinely appears in its advertisements in the US. Britain has a government truth-in-advertising agency called the Advertisement Standards Authority. They looked at Save Darfur’s massive death toll. They took into account a 2006 US General Accounting Office (GAO) report in which the GAO assembled a number of death and casualty estimates, high and low for Darfur, and summoned a panel of experts to determine which were accurate.

The GAO study found the low estimates of 50,000 to 70,000 dead from a variety of causes – including disease and starvation due to desertification on all sides of the conflict – to be more accurate than the high estimates of 200,000 to 400,000 by direct armed violence on one side alone claimed by Save Darfur. The GAO report maintained that the peak death toll occurred in 2004 and early 2005 and had been trending downward since. This was compelling enough evidence for Britain to ban the inflammatory claims that Save Darfur still makes with impunity in the US, which have no truth in advertising laws.

Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani has travelled extensively for many weeks in Sudan and Darfur as part of the African Union’s Dialog for Darfur project, interviewing officials, activists and ordinary people on all sides of the conflict. In a talk at Howard University on 20 March 2009 he reported that only days before the general in charge of the African Union’s peacekeeping forces in Darfur had pegged the death toll for the entire year in and around the refugee camps at a mere 1,500. While the deaths of 50,000 to 70,000 people several years ago on multiple sides of an armed conflict are a grievous matter – not to be minimised or brushed aside – they don’t count as the ongoing genocide of helpless civilians.

Around the same time that several members of the US Congress got themselves arrested at the Sudanese embassy in Washington, DC, Afshin Rattansi – a reporter and broadcaster for Al Jazeera, CNN, The Guardian, Bloomberg News and other outlets – toured Sudan, speaking to Africans as well as the representatives of Western women's organizations in the country who attested that they were able to travel and speak freely and had seen 'no evidence' of genocide.

Even USAF (United States Air Force) General Scott Gration, travelling in the region as a special envoy, returned to Washington last week saying that the situation in Darfur was at worst 'the remnants of genocide', clearly implying that the worst violence had been over for some time. Gration’s remarks may have exposed a divide in the administration, since UN Ambassador Susan Rice stoutly maintained only two days before that genocide was 'ongoing' in Darfur. Clearly, the genocide story is becoming less and less tenable.

But Save Darfur is all about advertising, and in the US, advertisers are under no obligation to tell the truth. Save Darfur is in fact not a mass movement but an advertising campaign, headed by the CEO of a public relations company that boasts such clients as Dupont, the company responsible for murdering tens of thousands when one of its chemical plants exploded at Bhopal, India, sending a cloud of poison gas rolling downhill into a city.

As Black Agenda Report revealed in a 2007 story, Saviors and Survivors explains, have more to do with culture and status than with 'race' in Western terms.

The stark and horrific picture painted by the Save Darfur coalition in fact prolongs the civil conflict in that unhappy country, encouraging one faction or another to avoid negotiations for a settlement in the hope that Western intervention will put them on top. The 'responsibility to protect' doctrine espoused by Ambassador Rice ensures that regardless of the facts, Save Darfur will have the ear of policymakers for some time to come as they look to sweeten the public excuses to intervene in other countries, and to spoil America’s appetites for unpleasant truths in which it is not always the good guy.

* Bruce A. Dixon is Black Agenda Report's (BAR) managing editor. He can be contacted at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.
* This article was originally published at [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.