A few days ago South-Central Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government desperately asked its neighbours to send troops to help prevent the capital, Mogadishu, from falling to Al-Shabab forces. The SOS came after a series of attacks killing the minister of security and head of police. The brief hope the appointment of a new government last January offered is quickly vanishing in the same violence that has haunted the country for the past 18 years.
But why is Somalia, whose political turmoil is accompanied by one of the worst humanitarian crisis in recent history, is still largely absent from international media? Why Darfur continues to capture the attention of ordinary people, foreign offices and Hollywood celebrities, despite a dramatic drop of violence in the region, and the raising killings in Somalia pass largely unnoticed? One obvious answer lies in the reluctance of big powers to engage with yet another crisis in the Islamic world. Another, more subtle, reason has to be found in the way the humanitarian and political mayhem in Somalia have been framed so far.
In the past years, together with a team of international and local researchers, I have been conducting research on the perception of the conflict in Darfur among Darfuris as well as in the international media. The results can be found here (http://www.stanhopecentre.org/2007/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=146&Itemid=1)/ . This research has helped provide insight on how the narratives constructed around the conflict have dramatically affected the willingness and capacity of the international community to respond to the crisis. I will use these findings, coupled with the sharp insights of Mahmood Mamdani’s recent work on the Darfur crisis and the role of the Save Darfur Coalition, to understand if and how the emergency in Somalia can be framed in a way that has the power to attract the attention it needs.
Since 2005 the Save Darfur Coalition, a group of faith based organizations and NGOs, has advocated a greater involvement of the US and other governments in the conflict in the Western region of Sudan. The coalition has been very successful in gaining international attention. It has, however, come at the expense of a counter-productive framing the conflict and its actors. This narrative has created victims and villains, forgetting that in too many cases the victims are in the villains’ camp. It has given the opportunity for inexperienced and self-righteous individuals to behave like heroes, just because they were siding with those that were said to be the “good guys”. At the same time, this strategy has been exceptionally capable in putting Darfur on the global map. For Somalia, the challenge that presents itself is: are there ways to construct a narrative of a conflict, as to attract greater attention towards it, without creating a simple story of villains, victims and heroes?
Three aspects of the international media’s coverage of the Darfur crisis suggest possible insights for Somalia.
First. Numbers. In the case of the reporting on the conflict in Darfur, a striking feature was the persistence and consistence of the number of casualties. In our research we analyzed the local and international press and in almost every article about Darfur on the BBC or CNN, even those about recent events, there was a background note with the number of casualties. This is a way to hammer a common and recursive narrative into the head of the reader.
The number of casualties did change over time, but it did it through a sharp and dramatic increase and not incrementally. Until 2007 the official figure commonly cited by the news was 200,000. Staring from 2008 this figure suddenly jumped to 300,000 despite that there were no major clashes in Darfur. Following Mamdani’s argument, the reason of this increase has to be found in the ‘politics of attention’ rather than in the real dynamics of the conflict. So-called ‘experts’ such as those gravitating around the Save Darfur coalition consistently fed the news media with easy numbers and put pressure on international bodies to use their figures.
In contrast, a brief examination of reports on Somalia (sampling around 200 pieces between May 2008 and May 2009 on google news) I could not find any consistence and clarity among the reported numbers of casualties and displacements. There obviously was coverage of the number of deaths during singular events, and in many cases they were high and striking, 119, 45, 34, but there was hardly ever the background note we could encounter in Darfur. To an occasional reader what was going on in Somalia could be easily interpreted as just a dramatic event in a chaotic region of the world. And thus, nothing to act upon.
A lesson is, simple numbers, repeated with consistence and persistence, are a way to alert readers that the whole story goes beyond the single episodes. This story has to be repeated over and over again, always the same, to reach its tipping point. In the era where blogs constantly increase while foreign correspondents disappear, having the ‘right’ numbers circulating in the blogosphere may make the difference.
A second, and much more problematic, aspect of constructing a narrative depends on how the actors in the conflict are framed. The Save Darfur Coalition decided to play the racism card framing the war as one between Arab Muslims and African Muslims. It created a polarization that was easy to interpret, especially by American audiences that already used to the “war on terror” rhetoric where the Arabs are seen as the enemy. Mamdani, as well as Alex DeWaal, illustrated how this division was more fabricated than real. Just as large, consistently repeated numbers are important for garnering attention, this dichotomy has also allowed the conflict to be framed as a “genocide”. This word has been successful in creating a sense of urgency.
I am not arguing for the use of this or similarly powerful words, especially when they camouflage reality for the benefit of a partisan campaign. At the same time, however, I think it is vital to be aware of the mechanisms that are used to construct specific narratives. And it is legitimate to ask if it is possible to produce some that do not fall under the paradox of criminalizing people as to be able to help them.
This task is much more daunting than using simple and recurrent numbers. But there are cases when framing an issue with different words without dramatizing it too heavily has still produced a remarkable change. An example is offered by the campaign against Female Genital Mutilation. For a long time this practice was known only in medical circles as female circumcision or infibulation. Circumcision evoked the image of ancestral practices that could not be judged in the name of an apparently legitimate cultural relativism. But in 1974 a new campaign begun to re-name the practice “mutilation”, creating a new image in the mind of the people the campaign was targeting. An image strong enough to justify the right to intervene and stop FGM, independently from the latitude where the mutilation was taking place.
Somalia does not yet have a powerful narrative. But if it did, what should it look like? If possible, the narrative would come from those affected by the conflict and would not be built over the heads of those who have been the its victims, but through their personal stories. A narrative that, if possible, has the courage of moving beyond black and white. The US president Barack Obama has demonstrated a commitment to a more nuanced foreign policy. Somalia could greatly benefit from it in the future. Any narrative should take into consideration the effects that it will produce in the future, if it succeeds. In Darfur today it is still difficult to assist the Arab nomads, because for many humanitarian organizations they still are regarded as the aggressors or ‘bad guys’.
A final point concerns the narratives that are not constructed, but emerge through the sufferance displayed by images. What is also known as the CNN effect and had in the Somali crisis of the early 1990s one of the most notable examples. It was images of dying children that in 1992 shocked Western public opinion and convinced the US and the UN to intervene in Somalia to stop the famine and the war that caused it. It was images of an American soldier dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 to force president Clinton to withdraw the American contingent from the country. These events exemplify the power of images and world wide coverage, with little context and understanding, to reach audiences’ attention as well as their hearts and pockets. As the example of Somalia illustrates, however, this power is difficult to control, makes foreign policy less thoughtful than what it already is, and condemn local populations to rely to a worrying extent on foreign perceptions.
Any future UN intervention will certainly be made in these shadows but an early recognition of the importance of appropriately framing the conflict and engaging with the local and international media will have far-reaching and long-lasting implications.
Iginio Gagliardone, Centre for Global Communications Studies.