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Friday 5 December 2008

The Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur

Less mighty than the sword

Caroline Moorehead on Daoud Hari's memoir of Darfur

And then, one day, guiding Paul Salopek of the National Geographic, he was caught.The chances were all that he would now be executed. Again, he survived. Luck and the intervention of those foreign reporters whose stories he had helped to bring about got him out to the US, to join other young Sudanese — the so called Lost Boys — transported to safety and new lives. Now Hari watches and waits for the day when he might be able to go home. He left behind him a land filled with refugee camps of desperate, displaced, hungry, sick Darfurians, living in torn plastic tents, their frail structures held up by sticks and flapping in the wind.

But along with his story Daoud Hari has a message. There have been interminable debates about whether or not the killings in Darfur constitute a genocide. (Hari himself argues that they are indeed a genocide, but of a ‘complicated’ nature). Whether they do so or not, the crimes that have been, and continue to be, committed are crimes against humanity. There are steps, he argues, that the West can — must — take to stop the massacres. The full complement of UN peacekeepers must be allowed into Darfur; China, purchaser of most of Sudan’s oil, must use its leverage to ensure that peace is made and kept; the well over two million displaced Darfurians must be allowed to go home. These are indeed crucial moves. But they are not new. The UN, the EU, newspaper and television reporters from every continent have been saying the same for several years. Geopolitical concerns dictate otherwise. Daoud Hari’s vivid, touching, impassioned account is both extremely readable and very persuasive, but his bleak conclusion says it all. ‘For’, he writes, ‘it has no meaning to take risks for news stories unless the people who read them will act.’ The stories are written. People do not act.

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