The Starving of Sudan

After a long, long time, I'm posting for the first time in Term 2. This time I will be writing about the controversial photo above, taken by Kevin Carter, known as the Starving of Sudan.

I'm sure that if this is your first time looking at the photo, you would have been shocked by several elements present in the photo. Firstly, the girl in the photo is from Sudan, a country who was extremely impoverished and torn by civil war at that time. People were starving, and though aid packages were being sent there to help the citizens of Sudan, children who were separated from their parents could not get food because of all the stronger adults snatching for the food supplies. So sights like this were very common there, but people outside of Sudan did not totally grasp the severity of the situation there because Sudan was pretty much closed off from the outside world. Then, two reporters were sent to Sudan to take photos of the situation there. One of them, Kevin Carter, came across a girl who was crawling towards an aid station for food, while an eagle was eying her hungrily from a distance. Kevin Carter thought this to be a wonderful photo opportunity, and after a while, captured the photo, chased off the eagle and drove off, leaving the girl to fend for herself. This is the background of the story of this photo. A bit shocking, isn't it? But this is just the first half.

Now, the first question that comes to our mind is that what happened to Kevin Carter? He brought the photo back, and the photo won the Pulitzer Prize. The photo was published in the New York Times, and that photo shocked the whole world. Before long, people who started to ask where and what happened to the girl. But Kevin Carter did not know, as he left the girl alone after taking the photo, thus drawing heavy criticism from people. Why did he not rescue the girl when the girl was just there, when he could have took her on his car and sent her to an aid station, thus saving her life? Does he have no regard for human life? Does he think that the photo, the prize money was more important? While it was true that he needed money then, but he had already gotten the photo, so why did he not save the girl? So why did he leave the girl for dead? After a while of severe criticism, he committed suicide, leaving a note saying, "I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners...I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky."

So this is the background story of this incident. Now I'm going to discuss on the moral issues of this case.

Kevin Carter was lacking money then. He was desperate for money. When someone gets desperate, he is capable of almost anything. But this does not explain the situation at hand. He already had the photo, and he could have both saved the girl and got the reward at the same time. So why didn't he? According to him, he was not sure what made him do that, and he also did not explain the situation very carefully, so maybe what happened at that place was different from what all of us was different. Now that both of the people who were involved in the incident are dead, we can never know what had happened. Maybe the girl was already beyond saving? Or maybe it was just that he had already seen too much of this type of situations and that he had already closed off his heart, and thinks that no matter how many he saves, there will always be more. But if this was really the case, he should have known that life is precious, and that saving one life is good enough. So, I will end off with this conclusion, that what he did was not justified and against what we call human nature., but once humans have been exposed to the cruelty's of the world, we will understand that what we call human nature, is actually the total opposite of what we humans usually behave like. To all those people who have criticised him, are you sure you are any different? Do you agree?