The year 2013 marks the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the crisis in Darfur. People around the world remembered the suffering in the Sudan in different ways; some by writing letters, others by partaking in campaigns such as a ‘100 Day Fast for Darfur.’ Mukesh Kapila, the man who witnessed the genocide unfold before him, wrote a book. In writing his testimony, Mukesh became the whistle blower for Darfur, and the resounding voice in the call to bring resolution to a conflict still on-going today.

With an overwhelming heaviness in his voice, Mukesh explains that “there are about 2.5 million people affected in Darfur. There is still on-going ethnic cleansing, and those who perpetrated the genocide, President Al Bashir and his henchmen, still remain in power.” His book, Against a Tide of Evil, is the product of his frustration with the deadlock the situation has reached, as he explains, “there was something nagging inside me, haunting me… Exposure to the circumstances I experienced made me very angry, and the book in one sense, is a product of that.”

Nobody knows exactly the number of people who died in the genocides, nor do they know the full extent to which officials failed in their duties to protect. Mukesh, in his book, seeks to dispel these dangerous ambiguities, “I was an insider, right at the heart of the story. I was an actor in it. No one was better placed to blow the whistle, and call all those into account who failed in this situation. This is my contribution to get the truth out and get it widely known amongst ordinary people.”

As a veteran of humanitarian crises, including Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone, Mukesh’s journey, which took him to “the heart of the story” began after he qualified to be a clinical doctor and from there moved into international aid work. After over a decade working within international aid for the British government, the dynamics of Mukesh’s work experienced something of a change when the events of 9/11 reverberated around the globe.

“Ethnic cleansing is still going on, and those who perpetrated the genocide still remain in power.”

From then on, Mukesh became heavily involved in “dealing with problematic countries like North Korea, Iraq, and Burma” and came to specialise “in disaster and crisis management relating to natural disasters and war zones.” After witnessing some of the world’s worst atrocities, he was propelled further when he was approached by the UN, who initially appointed him as their special adviser in Afghanistan in 2002, before choosing him for the job of head of the UN in the Sudan in 2003.

Mukesh reveals that he never deliberately looked for scenes of mass destruction, but rather his career and its meanderings brought him to the feet of such crises. The clinical gaze of the medical doctor continued to guide his perception of such events, and was undeniably the life force of his profound ability to continue his work against the tide of evil, as he charts in his book. Mukesh remembers that “in the 1980s and 1990s, the word ‘humanitarian’ hadn’t even been invented. It was all about emergencies and disasters.”



This soon changed in the years following, yet his rational intake of such events remained consistent, “Coming from a medical background, you are clearly used to dealing with the extremes of the human condition. As a doctor you deal with cases on an individual level, which is more intense in my opinion, than dealing with it on a mass level.” During the Darfur crisis, it was these personal stories that deepened his conviction that the world had to take notice of what was going on.

The story of the northern Sudanese woman, Aisha, was one such encounter that brought falters to his normally levelled voice as he recounted, “She had been subjected to mass rape in front of her family. In front of her husband. In front of her sons and the whole community of about 130 other women.” From listening to her account, Mukesh realised that “she symbolised the utter and complete impotence of the ‘powerful’ international system to do anything about it.”

The “curious reluctance” of UN countries to act upon the harrowing information they were being presented with was an all too familiar bitter pill for Mukesh to swallow. During his posting as an aid official during the Rwandan genocides of 1994, he saw that “there wasn’t much of an interest in Rwanda. It wasn’t an Anglophone country. Nobody knew much about it, nobody had been there. There was no embassy there.”

Desperate in his quest to prevent further butchery, Mukesh visited the sites of atrocities himself, in the hope of convincing the world to take notice. “So I found myself travelling to Kampala, literally on the heels of the RPF (the Rwandan Patriotic Front), led by Kagame as he seized control… I was in Koma on the day that the infamous exodus took place, I saw for myself the million people leaving. I remember when I first arrived in Rwanda the blood was still dripping down the walls of the churches. The bodies were still rotting on the streets, and the dogs were beginning to eat them. It was completely indescribable, these scenes of gross inhumanity on an industrial scale.”

For Mukesh, the experience of Rwanda was enough. Preventing the reoccurrence of such “gross inhumanity” became the motivation for his work in Sudan, pushing him to take more radical action. He recounted: “I decided that if the world’s governments would not listen to me, I would speak to the world’s peoples. In March 2004, I decided to speak out publicly and ‘blow the whistle’ on what was happening.”

Mukesh agonised over how to present the information relating to such boundless suffering to a world that had been largely oblivious or apathetic, “I pondered over it carefully before I did this because I knew I only had one chance, it had to be done in such a way that there would be no turning back, and in one instant it would change the world’s perceptions, and the perceptions of the decision makers, who had previously refused to act.”



A far cry from Mukesh’s outwardly benign personality, he executed his liaison with the world’s media in “a very cold, calculated manner. I had heard that Margaret Thatcher listened to BBC Radio 4, so I thought her successors might. That’s why I decided to give them an exclusive on what I had to say.”

Immediately after the interview, the world was in a paroxysm of disbelief and panic, inundating the former Sudan chief with frenzied requests for interviews and further information. He remembers that “all this global media saturation happened before my bosses in New York were even out of bed. By mid-afternoon Nairobi time, it was really old news.”

Mukesh’s gamble had achieved the desired effect however, “never had before had the UN moved so fast in such a short space of time… within a couple of months there were the first peacekeepers on the ground.”

Like the use of the media, Against a Tide of Evil is an instrument of a much bigger campaign. Mukesh sincerely hopes that “by stripping away the excuses and the alibis that people have been offering over time, and by refocusing the attention on Darfur, ten years after it started, that the world will not forget.” In addition to revisiting what happened, with initiatives like Remember Rwanda Day, he stresses the importance for justice and accountability, and “the acknowledgement of wrongdoing.”

After what seems like a lifetime of witnessing the unreserved evil man is capable of committing, Mukesh has but one message for the world, and those policy makers who have the power to affect change: “Today’s battles are not won on the battlefield, but in the hearts and minds of all men, connecting across the globe. Just because there are a few that instigate evil, that doesn’t necessarily mean people will follow them.” M