Posts Tagged: Sudan

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16
Apr 09

Water, water everywhere

Or not, if you live in Mexico City:

Mexico City officials have shut down a main pipeline providing fresh water to millions of residents because reserves have fallen to record low levels. The closure, due to last 36 hours, will affect five million people, or a quarter of the city’s population… This is the third time the capital has faced such a drastic form of water rationing this year, the BBC’s Stephen Gibbs in Mexico City reports.

Back in the 1990s, the prospect of water wars was all very exciting for students and professionals in violent conflict. The political economy of war was coming into the mainstream, with very little disagreement that diamonds and similar resources were key drivers in either generating or sustaining conflict. There was an assumption that the same could be said for any type of natural resource – including water, the “blue gold” of the twenty-first century,  and thus the idea of water wars was born.

Nature magazine has pay-walled Wendy Barnaby’s original story Do nations go to war over water? but Jack Shafer covers it in Dispelling the water-war myth. Barnaby writes:

Countries do not go to war over water, they solve their water shortages through trade and international agreements.

and Shafer adds:

Water scarcity in the region results in “conflict and tension,” Barnaby adds, but the Israeli and the Palestinian officials have successfully used a committee (controlled by the Israelis) to peacefully resolve problems. In other places where competition for water should theoretically escalate into violence, Barnaby finds similar resolution…

Jared Diamond opens Collapse with a chapter in which where he describes the various environmental pressures at play in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, including the “apparently intractable” problem of managing the water supply. He quickly identifies the key weakness in Barnaby and Shafer’s optimism about negotiated solutions to these problems.

Until 2003, many of those potential conflicts in the Bitterroot Valley were amicably adjudicated for several decades by Vern Woolsey, the 82-year-old water commissioner whom everyone respected, but my Bitterroot friends are terrified at the potential for conflict now that Vern has finally stepped down.

Successful conflict resolution requires trust, particularly in individuals and institutions tasked with mediating the conflict, and without that trust conflict is nearly inevitable. Unfortunately trust is an even more scarce and fragile commodity than water, and one it starts to break down it’s hard to restore it. In his book Diamond marshalls an impressive historical range of examples of exactly what happens when key resources – such as water – start to become scarce, degraded or disappear entirely.

Barnaby seems to have focused her attention on “wars” in the twentieth-century sense of countries throwing armies at each other, which as we all know is a wholly inaccurate description of wars in general. In that limited sense, she’s correct to point out that nobody has yet gone to war explicitly in the name of water – but then nobody has yet gone to war explicitly in the name of oil, and I don’t think anybody doubts that oil has been a key driver in (cough cough) some recent conflicts.

Barnaby couldn’t find enough material to write a book about water wars, but perhaps she should have looked more closely at national and communal tensions where water supply may be a key driver in an admittedly complex set of environmental problems.  She could start with, oh, I don’t know, Darfur?1

  1. Although note that the UN’s position on the role of climate in the conflict is felt by some to be overstated, I tend to agree with Thomas Homer-Dixon’s views on climate and conflict. [↩]
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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.

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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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14
Jul 08

One step forward, one step back

Last week: Britain and the US have condemned Russia and China for vetoing a draft UN Security Council resolution to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe’s leaders.

Particularly amusing was UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband saying the veto “would appear incomprehensible to the people of Zimbabwe” – surely they’re used to nobody charge to the rescue by now? The doomsayers railed against the inability of the United Nations to address human rights at all – a charge which has some legitimacy when you look at the charade that the Human Rights Council threatens to become, but has less credibility when you remember that the United Nations has usually been the vehicle for those rights in the first place; and it was the UN that approved the Responsibility to Protect, of which this would have been a fine outing.1 The UN (unfortunately) is large, it contains multitudes; the truth is that the Security Council will never be able to address these issues without reforms that the permanent members will never agree to – the removal of the institution of permanent membership itself and the end of their veto.2

This week: The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) prosecutor charged Sudan’s president on Monday with masterminding a campaign of genocide in Darfur, killing 35,000 people and using rape as a weapon of war.

For discussion about Darfur, I can’t recommend Alex de Waal et al.’s Making Sense of Darfur blog highly enough and, sure enough, they’ve provided in-depth analysis of what this means. If you wish to understand the situation in Darfur, you will not find better on the web; and their coverage of the ICC decision is as usual excellent, although unfortunately it’s a temporary feature. The main point here is that – regardless of whether you agree with the decision or not (and tragically the blogosphere doesn’t have much more to offer in terms of commentary than those two) -  the ICC has taken a major step in advancing the status of human rights on the global stage by indicting a sitting head of state in an ongoing conflict,3 which is also an excellent counter-balance to the continuing bad news from Zimbabwe. It also shows that the future of human rights lies not with the old order – the Security Council, one of the oldest institutions available – but with more recent international institutions such as the ICC.

For what it’s worth, I come down strongly for sanctions against Zimbabwe, combined with more vigorous diplomatic pressure – not on Zimbabwe itself, which remains oblivious, but on Zimbabwe’s enablers, particularly South Africa. It is long past time for African governments to stop defending each others actions at the expense of the well-being of their peoples, and long past time for others to stop tolerating it. I come down weakly in favour of the Bashir indictment, because the threats that Sudan may descend into “mayhem” as a result ring slightly hollow when you look at the actual state of Sudan and wonder if “mayhem” would possibly be an improvement4 and I think the potential benefits outweigh the imagined disadvantages.

The reason that I support the indictment is mainly for the service it does in advancing the debate on human rights globally. While it may in itself be quite toothless, it changes the terms of that debate – and that may indeed be the strategic reasoning behind it. It’s only through these discussions that we advance the cause of human rights, which is after all a series of discussions between different groups about power and responsibility – even if part of the backdrop to those discussions is the deteriorating situation in Zimbabwe.

  1. The irony meter goes off the charts when you realise that Mugabe himself was at that meeting. [↩]
  2. On the other hand, there’s a case to be made that those two factors are what prevents the Security Council from descending into utter irrelevance. [↩]
  3. Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor previously, both in circumstances slightly but critically different. [↩]
  4. Joke. [↩]