LONDON (AlertNet) - On March 19th, Mukesh Kapila, the UN coordinator for Sudan, told Radio 4's Today programme that more than a million people had been affected by ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region of western Sudan, creating 'the world's greatest humanitarian crisis'.

Dramatically, he blamed the government of Sudan directly for the atrocities - the first senior official to do so - and compared Darfur to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, which had gone largely unreported until hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost.

It was a calculated gamble by Kapila. Weeks earlier, the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide had reopened the scars that humanitarians, politicians and journalists incurred through their failure to act faster. One question that kept coming up was: could it happen again? Frustrated by the dominance of Iraq in the media, Kapila and his media advisor, a former Daily Mail journalist, had concluded they were going to have to say something new.

If there's one item of media coverage that put Darfur and the Sudan on the map, then this was it. Within hours, the message that Darfur was the new Rwanda had spread around the world. And this time, the wave of coverage persisted as politicians responded. Darfur, a previously unknown region of Sudan, was becoming a household name.

That Darfur merited a place on the mainstream agenda is beyond dispute.

Why it took so long to get there, why other crises never make it, and whether any of this matters to the victims of humanitarian crises are questions growing numbers of policy-makers, humanitarians and journalists are asking.

It's hard to say just when the Darfur crisis started. Amnesty International had been noting problems during 2002. But the human rights group had been unable to visit Sudan for 13 years. When it was finally granted access in January last year it immediately raised the alarm. But the group's public call to the Sudanese government, to set up an independent inquiry into attacks on Darfur villages, received little attention.

Warnings by UNHCR - the UN agency for refugees - had suffered the same lack of impact. The agency had been warning of the seriousness of the situation since September last year. By December 2003, spokesman Kris Janowski was telling journalists that the number of refugees fleeing Darfur for Chad had reached 75,000 and used the term 'ethnic cleansing' to describe the allegations of the refugees.

However, UNHCR hadn't been able to verify the accounts of refugees independently.

And, while both Amnesty and UNHCR were working with journalists to increase coverage, the problems in getting access were prohibitive.

Ron Redmond, head of communications at UNHCR says: 'The inaccessibility of Darfur and Chad made them extremely difficult to cover for the media - they may as well have been the moon for many reporters and editors'.

It's not just the distance, or the inhospitable environment, but practicalities like getting a visa. Without home government support for their applications, it?s near impossible for most journalists to get a visa for many countries in crisis. And if there's no geo-political interest then governments have little incentive to help.

Unravelling the reasons why some humanitarian crises get into the headlines and others don't, can be a fruitless pursuit. It often seems as much to do with whether there is much other foreign news around as with anything more substantial. Earlier this year, Reuters Foundation teamed up with the Columbia School of Journalism to study the complexities of crisis coverage.

The study, sponsored by the Fritz Institute, surveyed more than 500 journalists around the world and interviewed 50 communications staff within relief charities.

Journalists admitted that they shied away from reporting complex emergencies because, finding them hard to understand, they couldn't imagine how readers would cope and found it difficult to persuade their news editors to finance travel to the scene.

They said that an emergency stood the best chance of coverage if: it had a high death toll; involved a population from a similar background to the target audience; had created suffering among children; could provide compelling visuals or eyewitness accounts; and had foreign policy implications for the journalist?s country.

This latter factor seems crucial.

Sudan had been in the news on and off throughout 2003 as talks to settle a long-standing tension between north and south Sudan over autonomy and oil rights edged towards a settlement.

Western diplomats and politicians, trying to keep the talks alive, may have been tempted to turn a blind eye to Darfur. Editors may have felt they?d had enough of Sudan. The Rwanda anniversary and Kapila?s outspokenness appear to have changed all that.

Within weeks UK development secretary Hilary Benn was in Sudan and, with the backing of religious conservatives, so was US secretary of state Colin Powell.

Such high profile visits fuel media coverage. But just how much difference does the media role make to the victims? In humanitarian circles the 'CNN effect' is used as shorthand for the viewpoint that, without television, news coverage of a crisis is unlikely to generate an adequate response from donors. Two Danish charities - Dan Church Aid and the Danish Refugee Council - examined the effect in a study in 2002. They found that media coverage of floods in Mozambique in late 1999 had led to greater assistance than floods in the Indian state of Orissa the same year, even though the number of people affected was greater in the Indian case.

Striking images from Mozambique, dramatic flyovers by the helicopters of the South African air force and the pictures of Rosita, the baby girl born to a mother while she took precarious refuge in a tree high above the water, all served to raise the profile of Mozambique.

The Danish researchers examined the impact of media attention, donor security interests and a third factor - 'stakeholder commitment' - by which they meant specialist humanitarian agencies and donors which exist purely to facilitate aid flows to poor countries. And they found that the three factors were broadly of equal importance, with the media appearing to play a crucial role in influencing decision-makers only when there were no vital security interests at stake. This perhaps explains the classic counter-example to the 'CNN effect' is North Korea, which continues to receive large-scale aid despite a dearth of media access or coverage. The anniversary of Rwanda's genocide helped Darfur to make the cut.

The reality is that, as a result, it has probably crowded out other equally serious crises. Last week, when Jan Egeland, the United Nations' emergency relief coordinator, launched the UN's appeal for $1.7billion aid next year, he stressed the needs of the less publicised emergencies around the world. Among them, northern Uganda, where an 18-year-old insurgency under the leadership of self-proclaimed mystic Joseph Kony, featuring mass abductions, child militia and the displacement of more people than in Darfur, has created the world?s worst 'forgotten' emergency.

But what chance is there that northern Uganda will become the new Darfur? 'It's too far away and it's too complicated, but that was true of Darfur,' Mukesh Kapila told me. 'The real problem is that there?s no political story. At least with Sudan there was this nasty government and worries about Islamic extremism - a political context. In northern Uganda what can you say other than there's a madman?? !

This article was first published in the Press Gazette on November 18, 2004