Werner Daum

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Werner Daum is a Fellow at the prestigious Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, and was Germany's ambassador to Sudan from 1996 to 2000.

In Summer 2001, Daum wrote a long article for the Harvard International Review entitled Universalism and the West — An Agenda for Understanding [link] in which he harshly criticised the US government for destroying the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum. The thrust of his argument was that the medication shortage caused by the attack led to an unknown number of deaths in Sudan, which might have been in the tens of thousands.

The American intellectual Noam Chomsky later quoted this estimate in a comparison between this attack and that on the Twin Towers in New York on 11-9-2001, arguing (in a Reductio ad absurdum) that if the US had the right to bomb Afghanistan in retaliation for the latter attack, then the Sudanese would have the right to bomb America for the attack in Khartoum. He was virulently attacked for this by several right-wing commentators, such as Keith Windschuttle [link].

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