Save Darfur - False Advertising?

A Darfuri woman in yet another perfectly staged photo shoot

Last week, the British Advertising Standards Authority upheld a claim brought by the European Sudanese Public Affairs Council (ESPAC) and against the Save Darfur Coalition, ruling that the Coalition's advertisements claims that 400,000 innocent people were slaughtered in Darfur was based on mere speculation and, thus, constituted false advertising.

The ESPAC’s evidence pointed out that of the various estimates of the numbers of deaths in Darfur, the US General Accountability Office had judged a study by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), which is affiliated with the World Health Organisation, and not the study by the Coalition for International Justice, to be ‘the most objective and methodologically sound’. The CRED’s report, published in May 2005, estimated that 120,000 deaths were attributable to the conflict over a 17-month period, from September 2003 to January 2005. And these 120,000 deaths were not all amongst ‘innocent men, women and children’: they included deaths of combatants as well as violent deaths of civilians and deaths from malnutrition.

The ESPAC also put forward evidence to show that mortality rates have decreased in Darfur since 2005. It cited a report in the World Health Organisation’s Weekly Morbidity and Mortality Bulletin from 2006 which said that the number of excess deaths in Darfur had fallen below emergency levels. It also presented comments made by Jan Pronk, a UN Sudan Special Representative, who said that mortality and malnutrition rates had decreased dramatically after 2005, largely as a result of aid received and the setting up of refugee camps (5). This would mean that the Save Darfur Coalition’s adverts were shocking for two reasons: first, they were allegedly based on ‘deficient’ data; second, they were aimed at raising awareness about the ‘SLAUGHTER’ of an alleged 400,000 people at a time when the number of deaths in Darfur had fallen below emergency levels.

Should we be surprised that another attempt to justify the invasion of an oil rich Muslim country is based upon bullshit?