Katrina moved us to act, so why not Darfur?

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Paul Slovic For The Register-Guard

Hurricane Katrina, the most devastating natural disaster in American history, has left thousands dead and hundreds of thousands homeless along the Gulf Coast.

Who among us has not witnessed the terrifying and heartbreaking images of destroyed cities and destroyed lives? The media have done a remarkable job of covering this tragic event from every angle, beginning with newscasters risking life and limb in the midst of the storm, and continuing with almost nonstop coverage of the personal, social, economic and political impacts.

Such vivid reporting has triggered what President Bush has called `a tidal wave of compassion' in this nation and around the world. The aid that flows from this compassion will be sorely needed to help cities to recover and their residents to rebuild their lives.

This tragic event gives us the chance to reflect on great humanitarian crises and our response to them. Consider a disaster in which every village in an entire region is destroyed, hundreds of thousands of people killed, and close to 2 million displaced persons interned in refugee camps, threatened with death from famine and disease.

The disaster I'm referring to is not caused by nature's fury, but by man's.

It is the current crisis in Darfur, Sudan, where gangs of assassins called Janjaweed, supported by the Sudanese government, systematically have been exterminating the population.

Unlike Katrina, which lasted less than a day, the Darfur crisis has gone on for over a year.

Unlike Katrina, where refugees are free to leave their camps and rebuild their lives as opportunity and aid become available, the refugees in Darfur are virtually imprisoned in the camps, unable to venture outside the boundaries without being assaulted.

Unlike Katrina, the destructiveness of which has been graphically portrayed in constant media reports, the ongoing fury in Darfur gets almost no media attention. CBS carried only three minutes of coverage last year, about one minute for every 100,000 deaths. NBC had five minutes.

Not surprisingly, nearly invisible events are treated with apathy by governments and their citizens. President Bush has been virtually silent on Darfur, even after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell visited there in 2004 and informed him of the genocide that was occurring. The president can get away with ignoring this massive humanitarian crisis because the American public is uninformed and apathetic.

Of course, great dissimilarities between Katrina and Darfur can account for and perhaps even justify the vastly different responses.

Katrina hit close to home; Darfur is distant. This distance didn't stop us from vividly portraying last December's tsunami in South Asia and rallying to aid its victims. But tsunamis and hurricanes are acts of nature; they have clear endpoints after which recovery can begin, unhindered by the messy political issues that surround intervening in the government-sanctioned slaughter in another country.

Intervention also can be dangerous; recall the loss of 18 American soldiers in Somalia in 1993. But this political and military danger has not deterred us in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I am not necessarily arguing for U.S. military intervention in Darfur. What does seem inexcusable is the failure of the media and our government to bring the atrocities there to our attention with the same vividness and intensity accorded to extreme natural disasters.

Genocide in Darfur is real. But due to its invisibility, no serious consideration is given to supporting the efforts by NATO, the United Nations or the African Union to address this massive humanitarian crisis.

In the absence of similarly detailed coverage of Darfur (or any coverage, for that matter), perhaps we can use the imagery of Katrina and its victims as a proxy. All the heart-wrenching emotions we have seen among Katrina's victims must surely be present among the victims of the Janjaweed. All the despair and squalor among those we have seen spending the night in the Superdome or the Astrodome must surely be present in the refugee camps of Darfur.

Early relief efforts after Katrina, heroic as they were, were characterized by President Bush as `unacceptable.' What should one say about the humanitarian efforts in Darfur?

Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general in command of the halfhearted U.N. effort to prevent the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans in 1994, asks: `Are we all human, or are some more human than others? If we believe that all humans are human, then how are we going to prove it? It can only be proven through our actions.'

As we act to aid the victims of Katrina, should we not act, as well, to aid the victims of Darfur?

Paul Slovic is a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and president of Decision Research, a nonprofit institute that specializes in the study of risk and decision making.