A few days ago, on the fifth Global Day for Darfur British prime minister Gordon Brown said “the eyes of the world are rightly focused on the millions of men, women and children in the region who continue to start each day with the fear of violence, abduction, rape or death.” Brown offered to host a peace summit “as soon as practicable”. Apart from tactful criticism of the limited success which peacekeepers have had so far, Brown refrained from stating the obvious, namely that having survived for so long the intermittent public outrage at its horrific crimes, the government of Sudan will not find peace talks ‘practicable’ anytime soon.
The protests which have followed the journey of the Olympic torch towards Beijing have been very effective in keeping the plight of Tibet in the headlines. But, as too many people in other parts of the world know to their cost, no amount of media attention is useful unless it produces sustained political action. With Iraq’s internal conflicts receiving only sporadic attention from the mainstream press, and with Afghanistan’s deterioration receiving even less, one of the paradoxes of our information age is that many developing nations are as isolated from the immediate notice of the wider world as they were at the end of the Cold War.