Posts Tagged: darfur

politics — No Comments
17
Feb 09

The horns of the genocide dilemma

The discussion about Darfur – and more specifically about the work of the Save Darfur coalition – is interesting to me because it goes right to the heart of why I chose to work for humanitarian organisations – a choice that I wrestle with every day, but that’s another discussion entirely. Following on from my previous post, both Michael and Michelle have written new posts, while David Sullivan at the Enough Project and Steven Bloomfield (the journalist whose interview with John Holmes started this whole discussion) has now also weighed in.

Steven is closest to my line of thinking when he explains that

My problem with describing it as a genocide is that genocides have have simple solutions. You stop the genocidaires… the crisis in Darfur won’t stop if the janjaweed and Bashir’s armed forces are forcibly disarmed or if the Khartoum government is overthrown. It is a nasty, messy war with many players.

We can debate the finer points of his examples of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, but this is fairly near to my thinking. David Sullivan, on the other hand commits the cardinal sin of argument without evidence:

…when Michael suggests that neither the U.S. nor Europe has the leverage to bring peace to Darfur, I wonder how he’s come to such a conclusion. Nobody knows exactly how much leverage the United States, Europe, or any combination of governments may have against Khartoum and the Darfur rebels, because there has been no consistent effort to use that leverage and lead a viable peace process, such as that which helped to resolve Sudan’s North-South civil war.

To sum up: nobody knows how much leverage any external actors have, but the Save Darfur coalition is prepared to expend huge amounts of time, money and effort on trying to get those actors to bring that leverage – if it exists – on to the government and various armed groups of Sudan. This summarizes the problem I have with Michelle and  David’s argument (and by extension with Save Darfur as a project) – the lack of evidence to support their case is obvious to anybody who cares to look. Yet Michelle also has a point – what do those who question the work of Save Darfur propose?

In the possibly apocryphal words of Edmund Burke, all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, and nobody likes standing around doing nothing.  I could propose a purely humanitarian response – save as many lives as possible and forget about intervening in the politics of another country altogether – which would probably please David Rieff but few others. I could make a radical proposal like splitting Sudan into relatively stable pieces, something which is likely to happen sooner or later in any case. I could make an even more radical proposal for state-established corporations to buy as much of Sudan’s natural resources as possible and then hold the government to ransom. Or we could have a laugh and suggest a more robust peacekeeping force.

All of these? None of these? The truth is that we are on the horns of a genocide dilemma – whichever way we turn, we’re likely to get gored by a bull called unintended consequences. Rwanda is what got me into this mess, but preventing the genocide would have left the social pressures that lead to it in place, still boiling away. Yet that doesn’t mean the genocide was a necessary evil, the expulsion from the body politic of toxins – we can’t mutely accept these things without throwing away a piece of our humanity. This calculus is impossible, you see.

The truth is that we need to take action on these things long before they come into view, but we’ve also constructed a political system that is chronically myopic and consistently unprepared. We can see the seeds of future Darfurs right now, if we look hard enough – and they’re all resource wars rather than ideological wars – but we do very little to prevent them from blossoming. The price we pay for a Dayton is a Kosovo; but Kosovo is further on in our ride through the House of Horrors, after our politicians have gotten off the ride. I don’t have the cure, but I suspect that Save Darfur is a placebo.

I’m not surprised that its supporters defend it so vigorously, given how much they’ve invested in its success; they have true faith, which is something that I’ve always – unfortunately – lacked.

politics — No Comments
1
Feb 09

Saving Darfur

Over at Change.org,  Michael and Michelle are getting in to a fairly heavy question: can the Save Darfur campaign in fact save Darfur? Michael argues No, while Michelle argues Yes, and I come in strongly on Michael’s side of the argument. This might surprise people who know that I started my working life working in human rights, coming to it from an interest specifically in genocide prevention.

There are two reasons why don’t I support Save Darfur, with a possible third hiding in the background. The first is that I believe that real social change in a country has never been caused by external actors, and only in few cases has external change . As Michael points, the only people who can save Darfur are in Darfur, in Sudan or (possibly) in the region. One critical problem is that absolutely none of those actors – whether political, militia or civic groups – appear to have a clue how to save Darfur, so it’s hard to know exactly who we’re supporting with our advocacy.

My second reason is that I’m severely disillusioned about the efficacy of mass-mobilisation advocacy in post-industrial societies, particularly following the complete failure of the Iraq anti-war demonstration of February 2003 to have any impact on government policy. The more demonstrations I attended in my life, the more I felt that  the real motives for most demonstrators (not all, mind you) were largely internal motives, questions in an individual’s life that they were working out in the public square.

What worries me a little about the sort of advocacy that Save Darfur coalition is involved with is that it is no-cost to the participants. If nothing happens as the result of their advocacy, that can be incorporated into the narrative, but it won’t affect them personally in the least (again, this doesn’t apply to all – there are Darfuri/Sudanese involved). On the other hand, they will invest sufficiently in the process that it might blind them to its flaws – a common problem in any endeavour. The question in the end is simple – what impact does it have? All the activities that Michelle cites – Sudan divestment, Ask the Candidates, Team Darfur – what’s been the outcome of those activities, exactly? Michelle says

Darfur gets significant attention now because of thousands of advocates kicking up the dust, shouting to sky, grabbing everyone who will listen (and even some who won’t) and saying, “This must end NOW.”

What must end now, exactly? Does anybody still believe that there is a genocide happening in Darfur (if there ever was, which most people actually working on the ground never believed, as far as I know)? What does “ending” it mean, exactly – what does a post-genocide Darfur look like? “Significant attention” is nice, but it doesn’t really mean jack to the people of Darfur, or to the government of Sudan or various armed groups who are simply not that interested in what the US has to say. The onus is on the Save Darfur coalition to show that its efforts lead to significant and lasting change in Darfur/Sudan (or, more weakly, in US policy towards Darfur/Sudan) – but I don’t see them doing that, or even trying to do that. All that remains are slogans and platforms and a sense that doing something is better than doing nothing.

Preventing and ending genocide are truly worthwhile goals, but in the case of Save Darfur, I’m not convinced a) that genocide is happening, or that it ever was, and b) that an external actor such as Save Darfur can have significant impact. I can definitely change my mind on both of these issues, but I need to see better arguments than Michelle gives us.

politics — 2 Comments
19
Jul 08

From Exposure To Closure

Chris Blattman disagrees with me on the ICC indictment of Omar al-Bashir, which I think is a defensible position (and one which I would probably have held myself previously). However he links to Alex de Waal’s post All Quiet in Sudan? and suggests that Alex’ arguments may show that the ICC indictments are backfiring. I think this demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what the ICC indictments are intended to achieve.

Although Luis Moreno-Ocampo may well be a loose cannon, as Chris believes, the ICC indictments have one aim and one only: to bring Omar al-Bashir to trial for his role in the conflict in Darfur. While we need to take account of the political realities, the only way that they can backfire is if they put Omar al-Bashir out of reach of criminal proceedings – or possibly if they lead to more crimes against humanity in Sudan. There’s nothing in Alex’ analysis to suggest that this is the case or that it’s likely to be the case in future.

However the points that Alex makes are all dead on – and expose the real fault lines in the international system, cracks which are nowhere near the ICC itself. For example,

The second strand of the [Sudanese] government strategy has been to seek solidarity from regional organizations including the League of Arab States, the African Union and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. By last weekend, it was clear that the regional organizations all had strong objections to the ICC’s move. Many African states, including Egypt, have been early and strong supporters of the ICC, and their lack of support for this move by the Prosecutor reassured Khartoum. The AU’s new Chairperson, Jean Ping, was particularly outspoken.

It’s often been noted that African leaders have a tendency to turn a blind eye to the excesses of their peers, but at least you can say that they’re consistent. Support for the ICC was always going to evaporate as soon as national governments realised that it wasn’t just going to go after their enemies, so none of this should come as any surprise – nor does it show that the indictments are a mistake. In terms of the remit of the ICC, exposing this is surely the opposite of backfiring – it demonstrates that those regional governments are now aware that they are not out of reach of the law.

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7
Jul 08

My heart’s in Darfur

Wow, it’s a big blogging day, isn’t it? I must be ill or something. Ethan asks

If Darfur is one of the best examples of people in the developed world paying attention to events in a developing nation, and if drawing attention to Darfur has involved an oversimplification of the conflict which may be damaging and misleading, should be be looking at the Darfur movement as an exemplar for how to draw attention to developing world issues, or should we be avoiding it like the plague?

Ethan has already answered the first part of his own question in the post. Darfur is a good example of people paying attention to an constructed narrative that they feel invested in, rather than in the actual situation. This is normal – we all bring something different to the table – but Darfur is interesting because it’s scaled up far larger than anybody (including me) ever expected. Of course the impact of that large scale has been a big nothing for the people of the Darfur, but that doesn’t seem to worry most of the people involved – so all credit to Ethan for asking these questions.

Personally I think we should look at the Darfur movement as an example of how to mobilize people – if that’s what you want. It’s not a good example of how to educate people, which I think is more important than mobilizing them. If people want to mobilize, they’ll mobilize themselves – but they can only do that if they have good information with which to make their decisions. The reason why you’d want to draw attention to developing world issues (or “issues”, as they call them in the developing world) is the one that interests me, as previously noted – not because it’s a bad thing in itself, but because participation without purpose is not a good use of anybody’s time.

In other words, is it possible to get people interested in African stories without oversimplifying them? Is it possible to solve “the caring problem” too well, convincing people to care too much and in the wrong directions? For those of us trying to get more attention to the rest of the world, how do we strike this balance between too much and too little?

Wow, that’s a lot of questions there. Short answers:

a. No.

b. Yes.

c. You should start by asking why you’re trying to get more attention to the rest of the world. Once you know why you’re doing it, you’ll be able to work out the right approach.