Day 15 - Ann Curry

As an NBC news anchor and a correspondent covering many of the world’s most severe humanitarian crises – from Iraq to Rwanda to Sri Lanka – Ann Curry has established herself as an enormously influential journalist. Since March 2006, Curry has devoted much of her attention to another area of the world wracked by conflict: Darfur. Curry traveled to the region three times in 2006 alone, meeting with refugees in Chad and traveling to IDP camps in Darfur. The signature of Curry’s reportage is often considered to be her focus on the human aspects of any story. Curry’s coverage of the Darfur crisis has been no exception, and has included personal interviews with female survivors of sexual violence. Helping amplify Darfuri womens’ voices for a Western audience, Curry reported that rape and sexual violence against Darfuri women can ruin their chances to marry and stigmatize and isolate them within their communities. Of perhaps greatest importance, given that coverage of atrocities in Darfur so often focuses on women as victims alone, Curry’s reporting emphasized that these women are heroes and survivors who, despite having borne and seen unbelievable horrors, continue to sustain their families and provide leadership in their communities.

Curry most recently returned to the region in February 2009, when the ICC arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir was expected to be announced at any moment. Curry had already confronted al-Bashir on camera in a 2007 interview about his role in the genocide, questioning his assertion that Arab militias had burned more than 1,000 villages in the Darfur region without support of the Sudanese government. Ann Curry is one of our 16 Leaders this year for helping demonstrate that no matter how systematically the Sudanese government attempts to silence Darfuri women, they will always find ways to speak.

If you have paid attention to the coverage of Darfur and Sudan for any length of time, you may be wondering: what happened to it recently? If you believed in the adage “no news is good news,” you might assume that the millions of Darfuri civilians stuck in Internally-Displaced Persons (IDP) camps have begun to return home and rebuild their lives, or that Darfuri women no longer suffer from eminent threat of rape and gender-based violence. This could not be further from the truth, and the risk of increased sexual violence may grow as international attention wanes. Please contact Dateline NBC at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and ask the producers to run a special on violence against women in Sudan and to continue to amplify the voices of Darfuri and Southern Sudanese women striving for peace.