Kristof’s Morality of Attention
Friday, May 18, 2007
By Nicholas Desai
There are, among others, two Nicholas Kristofs, the reporter and the evangelist. Both spoke loudly at Dartmouth on April 24. The reporter likes to toss out deadpan anecdotes that are searing and silencing. Krisof’s nasal voice would seem not to lend itself to oratory, but he lets the material do the work.
Once while talking to a Cameroonian doctor about maternal mortality, he learned that in the adjacent room, a woman was dying from childbirth. She lacked the hundred dollars the doctor required, so, in light of her obstructed labor, the village midwife had sat on her stomach to force out the baby. Her uterus then ruptured; a caesarian section failed, and the poison from the rupture at that time was slowly overcoming her.
He first encountered the death and misery of the Darfur genocide at an oasis near the border with Chad. Under one tree was a man who had been shot in his leg and jaw and left for dead. Kristof heard about a village whose well had been poisoned (a death sentence for such villages) and whose every man had been murdered. Stories of gang-rape abounded, and by the fourth tree he was sure that he had stumbled upon a horror that was not isolated but widespread.
A student was gang-raped and taken to a hospital run by French nurses. Yet if this crime is not witnessed by four adult, male, Muslim witnesses, the Sudanese authorities consider the act to be female lechery and not male rape. Therefore the police arrested her, chained her to a cot, and denied her medicine that could stop HIV.
The janjaweed militias who do the raping and killing wear government uniforms. Sudan’s interior minister has formally addressed them, and prisons are a major source of recruits. At checkpoints, the government waves the janjaweed through. However, at one checkpoint, Kristof’s interpreter was held for “investigation”; Kristof realized that they would likely shoot his interpreter in the head. He and his photographer stayed put and were thrown into interrogation hut, on whose walls hung pictures of a man being impaled by interrogators. (Recalling this, Kristof, who laughs at odd moments, laughs.) The commander finally let all three go.
Fifty janjaweed took over a compound and kept some sisters as slaves (domestic and sexual). One day, their father summoned the courage to ask the janjaweed to go; they beheaded the man in front of his daughters. An aid worker asked the sisters what she could do to help them. “We don’t want anything you can provide,” they replied, “We just want to die.”
One young woman lived at camp surrounded by janjaweed. Men tended not to leave the camp because they would then be murdered; women, however, would “only” be raped, and so felt obliged to venture out for food. One day, janjaweed overtook an eleven-year-old girl and her older sister. The girl managed to escape, but only because her sister told her to run back to camp while she created a distraction. The sister was gang-raped by eight men and had to be carried home on a stretcher.
Kristof met a man with an extremely burnt back. The janjaweed of Sudan had rode into his Darfuri village, burst into his hut, and lit the man’s back on fire. His wife saved his life by throwing herself on his back and smothering the flame with her body. Kristof had pictures of the aftermath.
In other instance, the janjaweed bayoneted a man’s eyes out. In his slideshow, Kristof showed photographs, and there were visible gasps from the audience. The man’s child, recalled Kristof, sat at his feet. He looked at the man with the usual love, but something new had appeared: horror and repulsion at his own father.
Once, Kristof’s car became stuck in sand until some young Sudanese men helped him push it out—they were janjaweed, as it turned out. This brings some uncomfortable thoughts to mind. Kristof thinks most of these men kill, rape, and pillage only after making a calculated decision about payment. He cites the fact that the janjaweed seem not to be very efficient at genocide. “They’re not really doing the nastiest stuff,” says Kristof. They are not ideologues, he says, but they have seen that by slaughtering thousands, they can frighten other people. Many riders simply fire their guns into the air, but within many groups, there are pathological sadists.
Hearing such stories is hard, though, it needs emphasizing, it is nothing compared to living them. Still, the mostly gray-haired and Caucasian crowd is visibly moved. The overwhelming question, though, is “To what?” Here Kristof the Evangelist enters. It seems that he would like to end the Darfur genocide in some way, but, barring that, it is valuable just to pay attention. Morality inheres in attention, even.
“CBS Evening News carried only three minutes of coverage of Darfur for the entire year of 2004, and dropped that down to two minutes in 2005, but in the last year jumped to 20 minutes or so,” he says, emphasizing that this is progress. He especially commends Ann Curry of NBC for her work. “It does feel as if Darfur as a story is getting a little bit more traction; the reality is that in the news media we’ve always done a pretty lousy job of covering genocide.” What infuriates Kristof—though the man is always cool, and strangely, his smile stretches as his words grow angrier—is the commemoration of past mass murder even as the contemporary versions continue unperturbed. Yet this inaction is typical of genocide throughout history, he says. “We regularly hold memorial services lamenting the lack of response to Rwanda or commemorating the Holocaust, but we don’t do anything about Darfur. I just find [that] appalling. France passed a law recently making it illegal to deny the Armenian genocide of 1915. If you want to honor genocide victims, don’t do it about people who died in 1915. Do something to prevent there from being fewer victims today in Darfur! France has completely blown it in that respect.”
What, one student asks, about paying attention to Iraq? Is it not “convenient” to use Darfur as an “excuse” to ignore Mesopotamia? He stiffens at this. “In Darfur, you have atrocities happening to people you’ve never met, halfway around the globe, whom traditionally everyone has ignored—I think it’s a little harsh to call that convenient.” He acknowledges, however, such disasters as Malaria, also a mass killer. Kristof says that nothing has shaken him more than hearing of Darfuri children tossed onto bonfires. There really is something different about genocide, he insists, and the columnist consciously uses this term. “‘Genocide’ makes people guilty in a way that ‘ethnic cleansing’ does not; that’s why I’ve used it. When I use the g-word, I can sense readers feeling kind of guilty in a way that is not true if you just describe bad things happening. There is a real sense of moral responsibility to react to genocide; people don’t feel nearly the same responsibility to stop bad things from happening.”
How to stop bad things and genocide? “The feeling is that if [Americans] empathize,” he says, “they’ll have to send troops.” Kristof, though, is opposed to sending troops, “even if we had them.” He believes it would be the last straw diplomatically and would destroy America’s international reputation. A no-fly zone, he suggests, could be maintained out of a French airport in Chad; if a Sudanese plane were to destroy a village, it could be then destroyed. Bush could hold a summit in Europe, he suggests.
Kristof speaks with more energy about homegrown awareness-raising activism than about no-fly-zones. As if pre-empting a question, he goes after the notion that this behavior is ineffectual:
I think that’s wrong. There are hundreds of thousands of people who are alive today in Darfur and in Chad because students at Dartmouth and every other campus do put up green lawn signs and wear armbands, and it’s very hard to figure out the exact linkage, but if it weren’t for the activism that has taken place there would be an awful lot more dead Darfuris.
It would seem, though, that the elusiveness of the linkage has been on his mind—why else bring it up? And the nebulousness of his repeated statements about it—“Every little bit of pressure adds one matchstick to the scale there”; “The more it’s kind of in the airwaves, the more it causes Sudan to be more careful”— seems to belie his stated certainty about the armband effect. Kristof flatters his audience; he says that “people like you” will end the genocide.
On matters of activism, Kristof the Evangelist will always step on Kristof the Reporter’s toes. A student asks him about his opposition to anti-sweatshop campus movements. “I feel a little bit guilty about doing that,” he answers, smiling nervously, “I think campus activism is great. I think that any campus movement that tries to improve the lot of people in the developing world is great.” Yet he knows that this particular one is wrong-headed.
I asked him about two recent and important books about world poverty, The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs and The White Man’s Burden by William Easterly. The first offers a more predictable regimen, with special emphasis on boosting foreign aid. The second spends a great deal of time explaining the shortcomings of that approach. Which did he prefer, I wondered. “I’m maybe the only person in the world who thinks [Sachs and Easterly are] both really great people. I think that Easterly wrote a very provocative, very interesting book,” he says at first. A pause. “What I felt really uncomfortable about in that book was its attacks on Jeffrey Sachs. I think that Jeff Sachs with his activism and his sound bites and his evangelism has ultimately saved an awful lot of people in developing countries, and I celebrate that rather than condemn it.” Again, the linkage is obscure, and, surely, getting the question of poverty right is more important than one man’s reputation, his many sound bites notwithstanding?
He registered after his lecture a mild concern about the voyeurism of genocide awareness. A young woman asked him specifically about Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag. Though he admitted to worrying about “genocide porn” and “violently titillating images,” he avers that these do not kill people as does genocide. He is determined, therefore, to display the most wrenching photos he can find.
To tell the truth, Nicholas Kristof came off as a bit odd. His advocacy for the morality of mere attention is so outshone by the indelible facts he puts on display that there was something incongruous about his presentation—like a cheerfulness trying to break through miles of cloud.
“The genocide could be worse!” he laughed at one point.
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