Nicholas Kristof Interview (page: 4 / 7) Journalist, Author & Columnist	Print Interview

When did you first become aware of the situation in Darfur? When was that?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nicholas Kristof: At the beginning of 2004, I'd heard a lot about refugees being driven out of their homes in Darfur. They were arriving in Chad, and I didn't really know whether to believe it. A lot of things in the aid world tend to get exaggerated. But I had another story that I wanted to do in Chad anyway, so I thought, well, I'll go there and check it out. And I got to the border of Chad and Sudan, the Darfur area, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I just couldn't believe it. In particular, there were a lot of people who had been driven out of their villages and were hiding, and I was able to find them and talk to them. They were hiding from the Janjaweed militia, the Sudanese-sponsored militia. And in this area, it's very arid, so there's not much water, and there are wells that are quite infrequent. These families, of course, had to get water, and if men went to the wells, then the Janjaweed would shoot them. If women went to the wells, the Janjaweed would rape them. And what these families were doing was they would take their little kids, their nine- and ten-year-old kids, with a couple of donkeys, and send them several miles through the desert to the wells to load up with water, because the Janjaweed in general would leave the kids alone. But watching these families, in utter agony as they would send their little kids across the desert to the wells, wondering if those kids were going to be okay, left an unbelievable impression on me. Partly because my kids were at a similar age, and I was thinking I couldn't imagine sending my kids into that kind of danger. And yet if you didn't, then the whole family would die. That image really haunted me and led me to go again and again.

How soon did it become clear what was happening in the big picture?

Nicholas Kristof: It became pretty clear quite quickly. On my next trip I think was the moment I realized the scale of what was going on.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I arrived at a place hundreds of miles from that first trip on the Chad-Sudan border. It was an oasis, and so there was water. And there were 30,000 people who had been driven out of their homes and were sheltered at this oasis, getting no help from anybody. And they were just sitting under trees, in the shade, sort of one family per tree. And I did what a reporter does, I went from tree to tree. The first tree, I met a man who'd been shot in the neck and in the jaw, and had been carried by his brother for 49 days to get to that oasis. Next tree, right next to that, there were two little kids whose parents and siblings had been killed. They were left alone. Under the next tree there was a family, the men had all been slaughtered in that family, the parents thrown in the village well to poison the water. Under the last tree, a woman who'd been gang-raped by the Janjaweed for a week, and then scarred to stigmatize her forever as a rape victim. And what really got to me was these were four trees right next to each other, and as far as I could see in every direction, there were more trees and more people under them with stories just like that. And it was really at that moment that both the brutality of the atrocities and the scale of the atrocities sank home to me. If you had told me then that Darfur would now be a household word, I would have been astonished. But if you had told me that Darfur would now be a household word, the President would have called it a genocide, and yet we would still essentially be allowing it to continue, I would have been even more astonished and depressed.

Seeing that terribly brutal side of human beings, isn't it devastating to see human beings treated that way?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nicholas Kristof: When you go into Darfur or Eastern Congo or any of these places, you see the very worst of humanity. But side by side with it, you see the very best of humanity. You see these unbelievable aid workers who are risking their lives to save other people. You see local people who are, again, risking their own lives to save other people. There's one woman who deeply impressed me, a woman called Souad, who had -- just shortly before I got there, she'd been out with her younger sister, collecting firewood outside a camp called Goz Amir, and the Janjaweed had come, and she told her sister, "Run back to camp." And then she made a diversion of herself, and ran very ostentatiously in the other direction so the Janjaweed would see her. And they did. Eight of them gang-raped her, beat her up very badly, but she saved her younger sister. You see that kind of courage, and that of the doctors, and you come back from a trip maybe feeling perhaps even modestly reassured about the goodness of humanity, as much as you may be despairing about the depths to which humans can sink.

It must be maddening for you to watch network newscasts, night after night, never mentioning Darfur, or mentioning it for a sentence, in passing.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nicholas Kristof: The thing that is most frustrating is these runaway bride stories. Some white woman runs away from her wedding, and instantly -- coverage all over. Meanwhile, you have hundreds of thousands of people in Darfur dying, and they don't get any attention. It's a difficult story to get. It's hard. It's dangerous. There are a lot of reasons why we in the news business don't do a good job with it. But if I remember right, I think 2004 was the year of the Michael Jackson trial. If I have my numbers right, CBS that year covered Darfur for a total -- in an evening newscast -- of three minutes over the entire year. And also spent 28 minutes covering the Michael Jackson trial. You just wish that if the Michael Jackson trial had had a change of venue to Darfur, you just knew that the networks would have figured out how to cover it, would have been able to get over those impediments. At the end of the day, I think the problem was that we -- the networks -- just didn't think that it was news that a bunch of Africans were being butchered.

Editors say, "People don't want to hear that." It's not that they don't care, but they care more about ratings.

Nicholas Kristof: I think there's something to that, but I think that we can also be a lot more creative in the way we cover these kinds of stories. There's been some very interesting work by social psychologists about what builds a connection.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It's clear, for example, that readers or viewers don't care about a lot of people being killed. But they can be made to care about one person being killed. So I think the challenge for us is not to write about this huge tapestry of death and destruction, but to write about the Anne Frank out there, the finite story. And I think that can be done. And I think that if we, as journalists, think that we perform some kind of special function in society, if we go into journalism feeling that we want to make a difference, if we want to have special privileges, such as a legal privilege to protect our sources, then it's also incumbent upon us to serve that public purpose. I think that as long as we turn the other way from the genocide going on, that it's hard to argue that we're doing our job.

Why hasn't the U.S. done more about Darfur?

Nicholas Kristof: This is actually fitting perfectly into the historical trajectory, that whenever there has been a genocide happening, we have not taken action. This surprise is not that we're not acting, the surprise would be if we actually did do something. We're doing the same thing we did in Rwanda, Cambodia, all the way back to the Armenian genocide.

The Holocaust, too.

Nicholas Kristof: The Holocaust as well, of course. I think the broader challenge is that secretaries of state and national security advisers are pretty good about looking after our national interests. If there is a threat to our national interest, you can count on them to think creatively about the challenge. Where our national values are challenged, whether it be genocide or whether it be any kind of other humanitarian challenge, then the system doesn't work. If there is going to be a response, it has to come from ordinary citizens putting pressure on the government. I think that there is a common thread between genocide, malaria, AIDS, all these other issues, and that the leadership, moral leadership, is going to come from ordinary citizens if it's going to come at all. It can be students. It can be churches, synagogues, all kinds of civic organizations. But they're the ones who provide leadership on each of these issues.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I must say, there are some times when I find it incredibly depressing that there hasn't been more of a response. But the other side of the coin is that you think about hundreds of thousands of students across the country who have participated in some way, or who have worn a green wrist band, or have gone to a march or done something. That is really an extraordinary response of a bunch of kids for a bunch of people of a different skin color, different religion, in a region that they'd never heard of a few years ago. And it has indeed made a difference. There are hundreds of thousands of people who have died in Darfur, but there are hundreds of thousands of people who are alive today who wouldn't be if it hadn't been for that kind of response. And it is worth celebrating, that moral leadership on the part of students, at the same time that we lament the lack of leadership from the White House and Congress and the news media itself.

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