By Tim Robertson
In 1985, Paul Salopek, part-time fisherman, part-time farmhand, was riding his motorcycle through New Mexico when it broke down near Roswell. To pay for the repairs, he took a temporary job as a police reporter for a local newspaper.
Since then, Salopek has earned two Pulitzer Prizes, the highest honor given to American journalists, for his coverage of such disparate topics as the Human Genome Diversity Project, an effort to catalog and analyze the genes of every population of the world, and a series of conflicts across the globe.
To quote his employer, the Chicago Tribune, “He has covered wars across Africa, Central America, the Balkans and the Middle East. He has worked among Pygmies and Zulus, Texans and Alaskans, suburban homeowners and Marxist tribesmen.”
Salopek is presently incarcerated in a Sudanese prison awaiting trial on espionage charges.
Since 2003, according to the CIA, more than 200,000 people have been killed and nearly 2 million displaced from the Darfur region in western Sudan. The Sudanese government and its domestic allies have been killing, pillaging, burning and raping those considered disloyal throughout the region for the last three years.
When Salopek crossed into Sudan in an attempt to catalog and expose these atrocities that continue today, he was arrested and charged with disseminating “false” information, espionage and crossing into the country without a visa. His arrest, combined with the ejection of peacekeepers and aid workers, sent a clear signal that the Sudanese government wants no one to see what is about to happen.
Separately, the State Department claims the government is planning another offensive through northern Darfur.
Every elementary school student should know a free press is essential to combating tyranny and preserving freedom.
In 2001, President Bush famously scribbled in the margins of a memo outlining the Rwandan genocide a note, “Not On My Watch,” asserting that genocide would not be tolerated under the Bush Administration. With these insidious details, it would seem our only action as a responsible superpower is to intercede, sparing the lives of thousands of innocents.
The President must act upon his bravado and remove the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from a symbolic bargaining table and see how the President Omar al-Bashir’s resolve to kill innocents holds when faced with the most powerful military the world has ever seen.
Every war begins with a story to make it more digestible. The story has been WMDs, evil dictators, the spread of communism and the spread of Naziism, among others. Maybe the story of two hundred people dying per day in a region halfway around the world, four times as many that died in the tragic plane crash last week that monopolized headlines, can’t be that kind of spark.
But perhaps the story of one man who has at least temporarily lost his own freedom can be the inspiration. Salopek sought to expose information that would lead to the freedom and safety of a group of people he never knew, the most responsible use of the very free press he and the rest of the world have had stripped away in Darfur. It’s time we get it back.
Tim Robertson is a graduate student in Political Science. E-mail him at opinion@louisvillecardinal.com.
