Thursday, September 10, 2009
About those deaths in Darfur...
...they were greatly exaggerated. As I have written on more than one occasion, the media have routinely reported the highest possible figures for Darfur, with virtually no evidence behind them, while simultaneously reporting the lowest possible figures for the far more well-established death toll in Iraq:
A group of former Sudanese activists says some of the figures of those reported dead and displaced in the conflict in Sudan's western Darfur region were exaggerated.
The former Darfur rebel activists told Al Jazeera that they increased tolls and gave false evidence during investigations conducted by delegates from foreign organisations into the conflict.
"We used to exaggerate the numbers of murders and rapes," Salah al Din Mansour, a former translator with World NGOs in Darfur, said.
"If the figure was 10, for example, we asked people to say two or three hundred."
"In case of an attack on a certain village, from the Janjawid, we used to ask them to mention the government forces with their Land Cruiser cars, in order to involve the government in the tribal clashes."
The group said they had decided to admit to their fabrications in an attempt to put an end to the crisis.
