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Helsinki Edition
October 1998
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Famine has a name
The international organisation Médecins Sans Frontières has been trying for years to help people. At the moment they are supporting the people in South-Sudan. There has been a famine there for about six months now and there are villages where 120 people die a day. And the media react as if it was just another famine.
The organisation tries to draw attention to the things they do through the normal channels. They issue statements, send out newsletters and try to get media coverage to raise money and to get governments to act.
Where South-Sudan is concerned, the Belgian media only published the figures. No matter how high the death-toll was, the impact was really disappointing.
Médecins Sans Frontières needed something more to get the public to care. This was yet another famine and people have already seen so many. So they decided to personalise this disaster.
Next to the ordinary obituaries in the papers they put an obituary for a little boy named Myan Deng, who had died recently. Something like this had never been done before so it got a lot of media coverage. The press office of Médecins Sans Frontières said: "By putting a name on the victim, we will probably get a bigger response than just telling people how many deaths there were. By naming Myan Deng, you can get the idea you knew the boy. But putting this obituary in the paper also lets us admit our impotence in certain matters. Médecins sans Frontières is there to save human lives. We don't succeed all the time." |
