Antonovs are in almost daily action. Millions are still crowded into the aid camps where malnutrition and disease run riot. There are continuing skirmishes between rebels and government. Expelled aid agencies are having to cave to Khartoum’s demands in order to return to Darfur. And President Bashir continues to gallivant around the Arab and African worlds in defiance of an International Criminal Court warrant for his arrest.

Writing in the New York Review of Books, Kristof says he is worried that President Obama shows few signs of having the will to tackle Darfur…

To some extent, that’s a reflection on the Save Darfur movement and on scribblers like myself who took up the Darfuri cause. We have failed to foster the political will to bring about change. For all our efforts, the situation on the ground may soon become worse. A "Darfur fatigue" has set in, and the movement has lost its steam. And of course the movement was always compromised by its own shortcomings, from infighting to naiveté to the ubiquitous penchant of advocacy groups for exaggeration.

He’s right and wrong in pretty much equal measures. Naivete and exaggeration have been the downfall of the Darfur movement. And Kristof more than anyone has been guilty of this – continally taling about light-skinned Janjaweed, for example. At the same time though the Save Darfur movement has done an incredible job of keeping Darfur on the political agenda. The issue was featured in US Presidential debates and Obama has appointed a Sudan envoy.

The advocacy movement has even achieved its two main goals – UN peacekeepers and an ICC arrest warrant. 

The advocates have been incredibly successful. The problem is that they have been pushing for the wrong solutions. If the likes of Kristof are having second thoughts then this can only be good for achieving peace in Darfur.

This issue is one of the main themes of my book, Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War, due to be published by Reportage Press in November.

The parents of Roxana Saberi, the freelance journalist sentenced to eights years for espionage in Tehran, have visited their daughter in the Iranian capital for the first time since the verdict was dished out at the weekend. The 31 year old was originally arrested for buying a bottle of wine. Her subsequent one day trial puts yet more strain on a crucial few months for US-Iran relations, but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has pressed for an early appeal trial. There’s a Facebook group and website, a Twitter account and a petition to sign, but as Nicholas Kristof points out,

At the end of the day, a Web campaign may not get her freed any time soon. But it may improve her treatment and reduce the likelihood of abusive treatment in prison. And word may reach her, which may lift her spirits just a bit to know that she’s not forgotten. link

I’ve put together a dipity timeline of the case of Saberi which I’ll keep updated with items from the Frontline Newswire, that feeds into the right hand column on the Frontline Club news page, as and when the story develops.

Reporter is a film about the work of New York Times foreign correspondent Nicholas Kristof. The film, produced by Ben Affleck, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival last week,

“As journalism of all kinds becomes more desperate to make money, then there is a tendency to focus more on celebrity,” Kristof said in a telephone interview from his home in the New York City area. “I just don’t know what’s going to happen to journalism, what our business model is going to be. I tend to think that one way or another, news and information will still have value.” link

You can catch a short interview with Affleck and Kristof with the LA Times above. The (somewhat dramatic and breathlessly wordy) trailer for the documentary is below. Anyone seen it in full? Any good? By the way if you haven’t seen the trailer to the Frontline Club’s own journalist documentary film, head over to Blood Trail now.