Let me tell you a story.
By the spring of 2005, the world was well aware of the grave crimes being carried out in Darfur against the Black population at the hands of Arab Janjaweed militias, with arms, coordination, and air support provided by the Sudanese government.
Determining the death toll proved to be impossible given the limited access to the region. The attempts to generate an estimate are outlined in Darfur and the Crime of Genocide and detail the authors’ efforts to create a model based on combining several sets of flawed survey data to reach a projected death toll between 300,000 and 400,000.
The media had begun to form a consensus around this 300,000 figure, with the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe all publishing pieces pegging the number of deaths in this ballpark.
The term ‘genocide’ was circulating, despite Kofi Annan’s reticence. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Darfur was compelled to make a quick decision to find evidence of crimes against humanity and potentially individual acts of genocide, but could not find evidence of a top-down conspiracy to commit genocide ….more
