Mia farrow and the perils of the Darfur diet

In the past, individuals who were committed to a political goal would often say they were willing to "die for the cause". Today's celebrity campaigners are only willing to "diet for the cause".

After the Atkins Diet, the Zone Diet, the Cabbage Soup Diet and the Purple Diet – where the aspiring weight-shedder eats only foods that are purple in colour – there is a new fad fast on the block: the Darfur Diet. This involves sticking strictly to  liquids-only for between three and 12 days, and in the process achieving both a state of ketosis (when the body starts to burn its own fat for fuel) and a state of moral smugness (when the face contorts into a permanent look of self-congratulation).

The actress turned campaigner Mia Farrow started her Darfur Diet – or "hunger strike", as she grandly called it – on 27 April. Her plan was to consume only liquids for 21 days as an "expression of outrage" at Khartoum's expulsion of Western aid agencies and its continued repression of people in Darfur. However, after starting to feel weak, Farrow cut the hunger strike down to 16 days. Then on Friday, Day 12, she called if off entirely on her doctor's advice.  She had, she told Larry King in a televised interview a few days earlier, achieved "ketosis or something like that" – which is the same fat-shedding, bad breath-inducing state of bodily dysfunction that every celebrity adherent to the Atkins Diet aims for.

This is not a hunger strike: it is a detox under the guise of helping poor Africans

So next time Oprah or any of the other well-known followers of Atkins want to shed a few pounds prior to an awards ceremony or a jaunt to the Bahamas, they might consider "dieting for Darfur". As Farrow said on Saturday: "I lost 13lbs." The people of Darfur – should not be unduly worried that a well-off actress has stopped starving herself in her plush New York flat, where according to her blog she "watched Schindler's List all the way through" and listened to Bach and Mahler. They can take comfort from the fact that Richard Branson, one of the richest men on Earth, is taking over from Farrow – for three days.

Branson's three-day "hunger strike" started over the weekend. On the first evening he said he was craving a "decent meal" and was feeling so disorientated that he "had a couple games of chess with somebody who doesn't normally beat me, and he beat me both times". Is there no sacrifice celebrities aren't willing to make in order to Save Darfur?

Farrow and Branson have taken celebrity self-promotion to a new low. This is not a hunger strike: it is a detox done under the cynical guise of helping poor Africans. It is yet another example of celebrities using an important issue to bring attention primarily to themselves and their pure moral values. In the process, Farrow and co have helped to warp public understanding and debate about Darfur.

Celebrity activists like Farrow, George Clooney, Matt Damon and others continually present the conflict there in super-simplistic, almost colonialist terms, as a cut-and-dried case of barbarous Africans in Khartoum seeking to wipe out pathetic Africans in Darfur. Farrow says "evil" is stalking Darfur. Clooney went so far as to say: "It's not a political issue. There is only right and wrong."

In truth, the conflict is complex and complicated. One expert points out that where, in 2006, there were two main rebel groups in Darfur opposed to Khartoum, they have since split into more than 30 groups, "in a development wearily familiar to Monty Python fans". And these rebel groups are not stuffed with innocent nice guys.
Mahmood Mamdani, Professor of Government at Columbia University in New York, has stingingly attacked celebrities like Farrow for their "reduction of a complex political conflict to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims".

Indeed, Farrow's reliance on fact-lite hyperbole over facts was brilliantly illustrated the day after she ended her "hunger strike". She had been protesting against the deaths of Darfurians as a result of Khartoum's recent expulsion of foreign aid agencies, yet a UN official said there was "no hard evidence" that more people had died as a result of the "disrupted aid effort".

And yet Farrow has such a childish, reductionist view of Darfur that, last year, she met with the CEO of Blackwater – the mercenary outfit that caused so much mayhem in Iraq – to ask him if would send some military men to "protect people" in Darfur. Is she serious? The Darfur Diet might be good for Western celebs, helping them to lose weight AND look caring, but such cheap stunt-mongering could prove disastrous for people in Sudan. Farrow is hungering for Darfur, and thirsting for war. ·