The Foreign Service Journal, December 2004

includes $112.9 million in food assis- tance, $50.2 million in non-food assis- tance, $36.4 million for refugees in Chad, $5 million for refugee pro- grams in Darfur, and $6.8 million for the African Union monitoring mis- sion (which we initiated through base camp set-up and logistics support by a private U.S. contractor). An addition- al $20.5 million in Fiscal Year 2004 funds is in the pipeline for initial sup- port of this expanded mission. Yet all of this did not stop the killing and abuse. It has been argued that the admin- istration was legitimately concerned that direct action by the U.S. would unwind other interests — global, regional and (most of all) domestic. For example, State Department offi- cials made it clear they did not want to lessen Sudan’s cooperation on counterterrorism, unwind the tenta- tive agreement between Khartoum and southern Sudanese rebels, stir up opposition within the Arab world, or upset our larger agenda at the U.N., particularly with the Russians and the Chinese. They argued that the Defense Department would oppose any additional troop commitments, even relatively small ones. It is also true that Sudan is in a region of Africa that few Americans know about, and, it seems, fewer care very much about (even without fac- toring in “donor fatigue”). Nor did it help that the U.S. media — with a few honorable exceptions — have consistently played down the crisis and its humanitarian costs. Even at the height of the genocide, Darfur rarely made the headlines or the opening story on network news, and days often went by without any men- tion in mainstream media at all, even as thousands and thousands of women and children died. When the crisis was covered, especially on TV, it was presented episodically — almost like some unstoppable natural disas- ter — and with little real analysis. 16 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 4 S P E A K I N G O U T