Demagogue

Eric Reeves has released his latest Darfur Mortality Update

The international news cycle continues to be dominated by attention to the apparently inexorable rise in tsunami casualties toward a figure of 200,000 throughout Southeast Asia. And yet at the same time, evidence strongly suggests that total mortality in the Darfur region of western Sudan now exceeds 400,000 human beings since the outbreak of sustained conflict in February 2003. In other words, human destruction is more than twice that of the recent tsunami---and has now surpassed the half-way mark for the most commonly cited total for deaths in Rwanda during the genocide of 1994.

In an interview with Macleans, Romeo Dallaire has this to say

When you see the massive public support for tsunami victims, does it make you wonder where it was during the Rwandan genocide?

Dallaire: The first gut reaction is exactly that. I felt it even in a more nasty fashion with 9/11, where there were only 3,000 dead. I take great heart in the human participation in such an outpouring -- there's the sense that people do count. However, where I have difficulty is that governmental structures, and the media, react more to a natural disaster than a man-made disaster like in the Sudan, where there are as many, if not more, people suffering and dying. A natural disaster calls out the best in everybody, but one created by humans seems to keep people aloof.

An article in The Age made a similar point yesterday

Aid agencies are calling on Australians to remember Sudan, where more than 3 million people are at risk of starvation. Its plight has been overshadowed in the past three weeks by the tsunami disaster

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More than a million people have fled their homes and 50,000 have been killed but, since Boxing Day, Darfur has almost slipped off the world's radar.

Donations to Oxfam Community Aid Abroad's Sudan appeal are said to have slowed significantly and the agency warns that a massive crisis is looming.

And while we are at it, I made a similar point two weeks ago.