The gulf separating the West and many African leaders on fundamental issues like human rights was on display just last week. The African Union announced that it would refuse to cooperate with the International Criminal Court in its attempt to prosecute the Sudanese president, Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, for crimes against humanity, over the mass killings in Darfur.

Whatever you think of the ICC's pursuit of Al-Bashir (some human rights observers thought it an unwise move), is enthusiasm for the International Criminal Court really a good test for whether a country is really similar to "the West"? If so, then the United States of America, with our history of determined opposition to the court,  would not seem to meet the test for membership in "the West" either.

Today (4/3/09) the paper sort of apologizes, in an editor's note (only in the print edition, so far):

The Books of the Times review on Monday was about Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror, by Mahmood Mamdani, a professor of government at Columbia University. The review was written by Howard W. French, a former reporter for the New York Times who is now an associate professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism and does not know the author. But had editors known of Mr. Mamdani's affiliation with Columbia at the time the review was assigned, the review would not have been assigned to a member of the Columbia faculty.

That has the sound of a rule that is bound to be applied selectively; it's hard to imagine that book reviewers do not occasionally have professional or (more importantly) social connections with the authors they are reviewing. In this case the two don't appear to know each other at all, which might lead one to conclude that a positive review of a politically controversial book was the real problem.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof issued a call in his column today for pundit accountability.

After making a problematic argument about knowledge and experience being overrated, Kristof correctly pointed out that in the media, “the marketplace of ideas for now doesn’t clear out bad pundits and bad ideas partly because there’s no accountability," and he concluded his article with a call for action: “Hold us accountable!”

Does this mean Kristof will now acknowledge the error of his prediction last month that the president of Sudan would not kick out aid groups in Darfur if the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest?

As Julie Hollar recently noted on the FAIR Blog, Kristof had encouraged the ICC warrant, writing (2/26/09) that fears of such retaliation were "overblown."

But Sudanese president Bashir has indeed followed through on his threat, lashing out in exactly the way many other experts--including Julie Flint and Alex de Waal (Guardian, 7/13/08)-- had predicted. Yet as Hollar noted on the FAIR Blog, Kristof didn’t “acknowledge his error and continue[d] to dispense advice” in his subsequent (3/4/09) column on Darfur.

Nor did he acknowledge the error in his latest (3/8/09) Darfur column.

Perhaps it's time to heed Kristof's call to action.

(Kristof's email address is, by the way, nkristof@nytimes.com, and the email for letters to the Times editor is letters@nytimes.com. Kristof also has a blog where concerned readers can post comments.)

Does Baker or his Times editors realize that they don't speak Swahili in Sudan? It's like reporting that Obama appointed a French-speaking envoy to Germany, and meaning it in a flattering way. Sure, they don't speak French in Germany, but they're both in Europe, right?

Baker also writes:

The latest crisis began March 4, when the International Criminal Court in the Hague charged Mr. Bashir with seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity stemming from the slaughter of 300,000 people in Darfur, the first such indictment of a sitting head of state by the tribunal.

But Baker is conflating violent and non-violent deaths. The ICC prosecutor only accuses Bashir of causing 35,000 violent deaths; the rest (there's no exact count, but most estimates put them at over 200,000) have died of war-related causes like disease and hunger. And most of the victims died in the first few years of the war; humanitarian aid succeeded in dramatically reducing death rates in Darfur to the point that they were "far below the emergency thresholds."

Deaths are deaths, but it's important to make that distinction between violent and non-violent deaths, particularly in the context of a piece that gives a lot of ink to Obama critics who long for the days when Clinton called for a no-fly zone over Darfur and Susan Rice pushed for urgent military planning to "stop the dying." The piece closes with the executive director of the Enough Project asking whether Obama would "force" Bashir to let humanitarian aid groups back in or simply "accept talking about the situation and seeing if that's enough."

When you understand that the dying had been dramatically reduced using diplomacy and humanitarian aid, and when you understand that the attempt at "forcing" via an ICC indictment led to the explusion of much of that humanitarian aid, you might reevaluate the idea that "talking" is less desirable than "forcing."