On Monday afternoon, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof drove with his parents down from the family farm in Yamhill County, Ore. to come and speak at the University. Participating in a panel discussion, he addressed the moral complexities of covering the genocide currently taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan, and afterward both he and his father spoke briefly with the Emerald about their lives.
A vast, arid region in the western part of the central African nation of Sudan, Darfur has spent the last four years clamped in the jaws of genocide. Janjaweed militiamen sponsored by the Sudanese government raid villages and refugee camps in Darfur and its surrounding areas, systematically murdering men and boys and systematically raping women and girls. In this area alone, several hundred thousand people have died.
It seems like a clear-cut moral case: Genocide is bad, bringing genocide to light is good. But Kristof said it’s not that simple.
In covering the genocide in Sudan, he found himself “knee-deep” in moral dilemmas.
Sudan doesn’t generally give visas and entrance permits to journalists, so it requires a certain level of deception to get into and remain in the country. Once, he got a visa to fly in with then U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and then stay for only a couple days. He “conveniently” missed his flight out and remained in Sudan for a week. Another time he just drove in from neighboring Chad without a visa at all.
The question he’s wrestling with in these instances, he said, is “at what point does the story become so important that you’re willing to bend the rules?”
Refugee camps are also difficult to enter, requiring a multitude of plastic passes that those with access wear around their necks on lanyards. Knowing that the guards were not literate in English, Kristof attached his library card to a lanyard, flashed it, and was waived through.
These are the lighter of the moral dilemmas.
In Sudan, cars are few, and giving a ride to someone wounded on the roadside could mean the difference between life and death – for both parties.
The questions here, Kristof said, include bias, the taking of sides, how engaged journalists should get in conflicts and whether he’s putting himself in danger. He said that when he sees children or other obvious non-combatants he’ll give them a ride, but if they’re potentially a soldier or member of the Janjaweed militia, he’ll keep driving.
He also said he struggles with naming rape victims. In addition to the intimate and lasting damages from rape, Sudanese culture stigmatizes rape victims and writing their names in the New York Times may put them in danger from government reprisal. In the case of Sudan, however, the government organizes people by using their home villages; most names of people he interviews in the camps are the equivalent of Smith or Johnson and the camps are hugely populated. These factors make it difficult to attack an individual for being a source and Kristof said he never prints the home villages of the victims. But he said he still worries about trying to bring attention to the genocide by telling these women’s stories without making their lives worse.
“It’s something you wrestle with,” he said.
Throughout his coverage he’s also wrestled with how to write about the graphic violence that defines the genocide. In the beginning, he said, he tried to be restricted and tactful, to avoid writing “genocide porn”.
But after four years of confronting the public’s “incredible ability to tune things out,” he’s decided to “go both barrels”.
People are used to graphic images and if readers are shocked when they open their morning paper “it’s Darfur that’s ruining their breakfast,” he said, not Nicholas Kristof. “I think that’s the only way to get people to react more.”
This tactic risks turning people off but it can also be effective way to “force a certain amount of empathy on readers.”
Fostering empathy among readers is the most effective way he’s found to convey the genocide, and he does this by showing some of the best of humanity alongside the worst, he said.
Kristof’s focus on Darfur has led some to label him a crusader, a label he resents. He’s a journalist, he said, not someone trying to sell something, and not someone less than objective. He declines invitations to speak at demonstrations because it “feels a bit over the line.”
“It’s a very delicate balance,” he said.
The Kristof Men
Nicholas Kristof is the only child of Ladis Kristof, a Romanian-born ethnic Armenian who emigrated to Oregon in 1952. He gave his age as “almost 90.” In an interview given in his still-thick Romanian accent, Ladis said that while he was a young man in Europe, he studied forestry in Poland and was interred in a Soviet labor camp. After his flight to the United States, Ladis studied first at Reed College in Portland and then earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago.
Ladis’ career took him across the United States before he finally acquired a tenured faculty position in Canada. Teaching there, a former professor contacted him with news of a position available at Portland State University. Ladis took the job, bought a farm in Yamhill County, Ore., and has lived there ever since. He is now a professor emeritus at PSU and still teaches a class there, he said.
They moved to Yamhill when Nicholas was in fifth or sixth grade, Ladis said.
When asked to describe his son as a young boy, Ladis said “he was very bright,” and that he was involved in Future Farmers of America.
Ladis tried to convince his son to attend his own alma mater, Reed College, but Nicholas “wanted to go only to Harvard,” because “Harvard has the paper.”
Upon getting his license at 16, Kristof began writing articles for the local McMinnville, Ore. newspaper. As an undergraduate, he continued writing for the Harvard University’s school newspaper, “The Harvard Crimson.” During his undergraduate career, his father, with a slight twinge of pride, said he had articles published in the Wall Street Journal. Studying at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, he would travel on Christmas break and make money writing for news services.
While the young Kristof was studying Arabic in Cairo, Ladis said, the New York Times hired him and sent him to Taiwan for a year to learn Chinese. While in China, Nicholas and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Tiannanmen Square protests.
The Emerald spoke with this lifelong journalist on a short walk between Gerlinger Hall and the Excelsior Inn restaurant, where he was to dine before his large public lecture Monday evening.
“I identify with Oregon and with Yamhill County especially,” Kristof said. “If I could write for the New York Times while living in Yamhill…”
Every summer, Kristof said, he and his wife send their three children back to live on the farm. He said that coming from a small town was useful in his reporting because it gives him a sense of what rural and evangelical Americans are thinking. This is especially useful given the clout of evangelical Christians.
“There’s not a lot of evangelical Christians in the Upper West Side,” he said.
In conversation as in life, Kristof moves fluidly between the mundane and the horrifying.
In the camps, Kristof said he’s looking for the most compelling story, and when he stops under one tree and finds a family who is facing starvation and whose father has been killed, he quickly and politely moves along.
“Under the next tree there’s a six-year-old kid who’s been shot in the stomach,” Kristof said.
He spoke about the disconnect between working in the field in Third World countries and raising his three children in suburban Scarsdale, N.Y.
In Sudan, he sometimes feels “trapped” in a “hellish environment,” of refugee camps and brutality, and when he gets home he always goes for a run past rows of nice suburban homes.
Covering geno
cide, “You really do see the worst of humanity, but you also see the best,” he said, whether it’s women who’ve been gang-raped and have the courage to tell their stories or a kid who carried his wounded brother on his back for 49 days to get medical assistance in a refugee camp.
In Darfur “you’re talking to people who could be killed that day,” but on the flight out, “you’ll be sipping red wine on Lufthansa.”
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