UNESCO Chair Slams Media Silence

UNESCO Chair in Comparative Human Rights Amii Omara-Otunnu ’80 accused the media of selectively covering certain humanitarian crises while turning a blind eye to others, especially the on-going civil war in Uganda, at a film screening and discussion event Wednesday night.

The event was co-sponsored by Harvard African Students Association (HASA) and uNight, an organization dedicated to raising awareness about the humanitarian catastrophe taking place in northern Uganda.

Since the initial 1986 rebellion, Uganda has seen constant conflict between the government and the rebel forces which reorganized as the Lord’s Resistance Army. The conflict has left hundreds of thousands dead and 1.2 million displaced.

UNight co-founder Daniella L. Boston ’05 began her presentation on the situation in Uganda by screening a short documentary that captured the horrific conditions of concentration camps in Norther Uganda. The film provided alarming statistics on the lack of access to water and basic health care. “Unlike the situation in Darfur, the Ugandan crisis has gone on for twenty years,” Boston said.

“Nine percent of the population is trapped in these camps, where 95 percent of the residents live in abject poverty, where thousands die every month of disease and malnutrition, where the children are forced to walk miles and miles every night to escape abduction by the armies.”

After Boston’s presentation, keynote speaker Omara-Otunni took the podium and began his address by summarizing the history of conflict on the African continent, spanning from the European “Scramble for Africa” to the conflicts of today.

This history illustrates that the conflict in Uganda is “an exception in terms of magnitude and duration, but certainly not in nature,” Omara-Otunni said.

“Why do we hear so much about some conflicts, like, Darfur, and nothing about others?” Omara-Otunni questioned. “4 million people have died in the war in the Congo, but no one has raised a finger about it.”

Omara-Otunni contended that the international community’s silence condones abuse by the Ugandan government.

“Our ignorance serves the interests of some people in power, people that may benefit from the thousands of deaths every month,” he said.

Omara-Otunni ended his talk by urging students not to rely on media reports but to go “satisfy intellectual fascination with the truth” by doing their own research.

HASA president Elisabeth Y. Ndour ’08, said that “having speakers like Omara-Otunnu keeps the memory alive for HASA members, reminding us that our purpose is not just to be a social organization, but also a politically active group.”