Muhammad
Idrees Ahmad The
Electronic Intifada 8 June 2009
In Errol Morris’s 2004 film The Fog of War, former US Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara recalls General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the
fire-bombings of Japan during World War II, saying that “if we’d lost the
war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” LeMay was merely
articulating an unacknowledged truism of international relations: power
bestows, among other things, the right to label. So it is that mass slaughter perpetrated
by the big powers, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, is normalized through
labels such as “counterinsurgency,” “pacification” and “war on terror,” while
similar acts carried out by states out of favor result in the severest of
charges. It is this politics of naming that is the subject of Mahmood Mamdani’s
explosive new book, Saviors and
Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror.
Like the Middle East, parts of Africa have
been engulfed in conflict for much of the post-colonial period. While the media
coverage in both cases is perfunctory, in the case of Africa it is also
sporadic. To the extent that there is coverage, the emphasis is on the dramatic
or the grotesque. When the subject is not war, it is usually famine, disease or
poverty — or sometimes all three — and invariably the coverage lacks context.
The wars are between “tribes” led by “warlords” that take place in “failed
states” ruled by “corrupt dictators.” Driven by primal motives, they rarely
involve discernible issues. The gallery of rogues gives way only to a tableau
of victims, inevitably in need of White saviors. A headline like “Can Bono save
Africa?” is as illustrative of Western attitudes towards the continent as the
comments of Richard Littlejohn, Britain’s highest-paid columnist, who wrote at
the peak of the Rwandan genocide, “Does anyone really give a monkey’s about
what happens in Rwanda? If the Mbongo tribe wants to wipe out the Mbingo tribe
then as far as I am concerned that is entirely a matter for them.”
Darfur is the conspicuous exception to this
trend, though Rwanda did enter Western vocabulary after the 1994 genocide.
This, Mamdani argues, is primarily due to the efforts of one organization — the
Save Darfur Coalition (SDC) — whose advocacy has been central to turning this
into the biggest mass movement in the United States since the anti-Vietnam
mobilization, bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. While the mobilization
did have the salutary effect of raising awareness about an issue otherwise
unknown to the majority of US citizens, its privileging of acting
over knowing renders this less meaningful. Indeed, the campaign’s shunning of
complexity, its substituting of moral certainty for knowledge, and its
preference for military solutions, precludes the very end that it purports to
strive for. Invoking what it claims are lessons of the Nazi Holocaust and the
Rwanda genocide, it combines slogans such as “never again” with the battle
cries of a new “good war,” “boots on the ground” and “out of Iraq and into
Darfur,” to call for military intervention in Sudan. Mamdani contends thatSDC is
not a peace movement, it is a war movement. If the signature activity of the
anti-Vietnam war movement was the teach-in, for the SDC it is the
advertising campaign; the expert has been replaced by the celebrity.
The SDC was established in July
2004 through the combined efforts of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
and the American Jewish World Service. It has since been joined by a broad
spectrum of political and religious organizations, a gaggle of celebrities and
prominent intellectuals. It has spawned student chapters all across the country
that range from the high school to university levels. Led by an advertising
executive, it is the only organization capable of bringing together such unlikely
partners as the Reverend Al Sharpton and author Elie Wiesel, actor George
Clooney and former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton.
However, the apparent diversity of its affiliates obscures the fact that its
agenda is driven mostly by Zionists and the Christian Right. However, Mamdani
pays scant attention to the composition of the SDC even though he
devotes a whole chapter to its politics and methods. As The Jerusalem Post reported
ahead of the SDC’s rally in Washington on 30 April 2006, it is “[l]ittle
known … that the coalition, which has presented itself as ‘an alliance of over
130 diverse faith-based, humanitarian and human rights organizations’ was
actually begun exclusively as an initiative of the American Jewish community.”
It noted that even in 2006 that coalition was “heavily weighted” with a
“diverse collection of local and national Jewish groups.” Many have used Darfur
as a strategic distraction from Israeli crimes against the Palestinians, as Ned
Goldstein has argued in his investigation of the Zionist interests behind the SDC (most
recently at the United Nations Durban II conference against racism).
The salient feature of the propaganda is to paint the conflict as war between
“Arabs” and “Africans” and to label the violence “genocide.”
The genocide debate hinges on two factors:
numbers and identity. For mass violence to qualify as genocide the killing has
to be on a large enough scale, and the intent to eliminate a discrete ethnic or
racial group has to be established. Mamdani argues that in order to sustain its
claim of genocide, the SDC has inflated casualty figures and
racialized the conflict.
The mortality figure of 400,000 has become a
staple of SDC propaganda even though it has been repeatedly
discredited. In 2007, the British Advertising Standards Authority chided the SDC (and
the Aegis Trust) for breaching “standards of truthfulness” in its use of the
figure for its UK advertising campaign. The number had already been
challenged when a panel convened by the US Government Accountability
Office in collaboration with the National Academy of Sciences concluded that of
the six estimates they studied, the figures presented by the SDC were
the least reliable. The most reliable estimate was the study carried out by the
World Heath Organization-affiliated Center for Research on the Epidemiology of
Disasters (CRED) that had recorded 131,000 excess deaths at the peak of the
conflict of which only 30 percent were due to violence. The violence had
dropped sharply after January 2005; this, Mamdani avers, was due mainly to the
intervention of African Union peacekeepers. By 2008, the total deaths for the
whole year had dropped to 1,500. These numbers are far lower than what
constitutes an emergency according to the UN, let alone genocide.
The conflict began as a civil war in 1987-89,
driven less by race or ethnic rivalries than by a struggle for land and
resources — it pitted the mostly nomadic landless Arabs against the mostly
sedentary Fur peasants. Compounded by Khartoum’s botched attempt at land reform
during the 1990s, turning it into a party to the civil war, the simmering
conflict erupted into a full-scale insurgency in 2003. This eventually led to
the government’s brutal counterinsurgency campaign where it turned to nomadic
tribes from Darfur and Chad to serve as proxies.
Mamdani identifies three causes as having
contributed to the conflict. First, is the history of colonial rule wherein the
British went about a project of retribalizing Darfur through a system of native
administration that created tribal homelands and introduced a principle of
discrimination that privileged “natives” over “settlers.” This led to the
dispossession of nomadic tribes, especially the camel nomads of the north. The
tribal identities were further solidified through a census that required each
registrant to choose a “race;” a written history that presented Arabs as
“settlers” from the Middle East; and laws that gave preferential treatment to
whoever was deemed a “native.” This narrative also allowed the British
colonizers to present themselves as merely following the precedent of an
earlier Arab colonization.
Drought and desertification was the second
contributing factor. The Sahara’s southern rim expanded by 100 kilometers,
forcing nomadic tribes further south and eventually to encroach on the lands of
the sedentary Fur tribes.
Finally, the civil war in neighboring Chad
where opposition groups armed by Cold War rivals — the US, France and
Israel on one side, and Libya and the Soviet Union on the other — had
frequently taken refuge in Darfur, leading to a proliferation of weapons and
militias. Mamdani explains that the Western powers were involved in the
conflict long before the Sudanese government was; and Omar al-Bashir’s Islamist
regime wasn’t even in power at the time.
The Arab-versus-African narrative obscures
the fact that since at least the British colonial era, Arabs have been Darfur’s
most deprived constituency. “If Darfur was marginal in Sudan,” writes Mamdani,
“the Arabs of Darfur were marginal in Darfur.” Contrary to the British
historiography — whose assumptions have since been reproduced in 20th century
nationalist writings — most Arabs arrived in Sudan as refugees fleeing persecution
in Mamluk Egypt. Moreover, the diffusion of Arab culture was more a consequence
of commerce than of conquest. Mamdani demonstrates that “Arab” is not a racial,
ethnic, or cultural identity. It is an assumed political identity that is more
a reflection of preference and power than of genealogy. For example, former
slaves once freed would become Fur in Darfur, and Arab in Funj, the Sultanate
in riverine Sudan where Arabs dominated. To be an Arab in Darfur therefore
signifies nothing so much as weakness. The conflict in Darfur today is as much
between Arabs (the Abbala camel nomads against the Baggara cattle nomads) as it
is against the relatively privileged Fur and Massalit, and the less privileged
Zaghawa. The SDC however emphasizes the north-south axis of the
conflict that pits Arab against Fur and ignores the south-south axis which pits
Arab against Arab.
The Darfuri rebels likewise defy easy
classification. When the insurgency began in 2003, there were two major groups
— the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) —
they have now split into 26. JEM, which is the largest rebel organization,
has an Islamist orientation and draws its inspiration from Hassan al-Turabi,
the influential Sudanese Islamist and onetime ally of Omar al-Bashir. In
contrast, theSLA is secular-Africanist with ties to the Sudan People’s
Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south (led by the late John Garang). Before the
split between the Islamists in Khartoum, the government had employed Darfuri
Islamists led by future JEM founder Khalil Ibrahim for its
counterinsurgency in the south. (Ibrahim opposed the power-sharing agreement
that ended the war in the south.)
However, according to Sudan scholar Alex de
Waal, both organizations learned “to characterize their plight in the
simplified terms that had proved so effective in winning foreign sympathy for
the south: they were the ‘African’ victims of an ‘Arab’ regime.” The
government’s response to the insurgency was at first a half-hearted attempt at
reconciliation, followed by the arming of a proxy force comprising nomadic
militias, many of them from Chad, who have come to be known as the Janjawid.
The consequences were devastating, with large-scale bloodletting and the
displacement of 2.5 million people.
Khartoum’s use of proxies to quell an
insurgency and the resulting death and displacement parallel US policies
in Iraq, where ethnic-sectarian militias have been deployed against the
mostly-Sunni insurgency. Yet, unlike Iraq, where in excess of a million have
died according to the latest Opinion Research Business poll, and five million
displaced, the violence in Darfur has been labeled a genocide. Darfur has also
spawned domestic mobilization in the US on a scale for which there is
no parallel in the case of Iraq. Mamdani argues that this is due to the fact
that Iraq requires Americans to act as citizens, with all the responsibility
and complicated political choices it entails, whereas Darfur only requires them
to act as humans where they choose to take responsibility out of a
sense of philanthropy. He notes that “In Darfur, Americans can feel themselves
to be what they know they are not in Iraq: powerful saviors.” As the Nigerian
writer Uzodinma Iweala observed, “It seems that these days, wracked by guilt at
the humanitarian crisis it has created in the Middle East, the West has turned
to Africa for redemption.” In adopting the language of good and evil, Mamdani
observes, the SDC has acted as “the great depoliticizer” in
precluding political reconciliation in favor of a moral (read
military) solution.
In Saviors
and Survivors, Mamdani emphasizes regional over international
solutions. Western modes of conflict resolution in Africa resemble nothing so
much as the International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Programs:
“Those who made decisions did not have to live with their consequences, nor pay
for them.” The Western emphasis on the humanitarian crisis in lieu of a
political solution merely prolongs the conflict. By contrast, the AU’s
approach is both humanitarian and political. The African Union’s (AU)
intervention in Darfur had been largely successful in reducing the violence,
yet its operation was undermined by Western powers that failed to deliver the
support they had pledged when the AU brokered the N’DJamena
ceasefire agreement in April 2004. It was also vilified in SDC propaganda.
Mamdani asserts that much of the foot-dragging was to discredit the AU so
that the notion of an African solution for an African problem could be
discredited. The aim was to “blue hat” the AU forces and bring them
under Western command. In a Washington Post op-ed pointedly titled
“Stop Trying To ‘Save’ Africa,” Iweala asked, “How is it that a former
mid-level USdiplomat receives more attention for his cowboy antics in
Sudan than do the numerous African Union countries that have sent food and
troops and spent countless hours trying to negotiate a settlement among all
parties in that crisis?”
The recent International Criminal Court case
has further entrenched the Khartoum government in its defiant stance. Criminal
prosecutions during an ongoing conflict merely exacerbate matters, Mamdani
argues. More so when the adjudicating body has a demonstrable record of bias.
The model for justice must be the post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation
Commission rather than Nuremberg — survivors’ justice rather than victors’
justice. The well-being of surviving multitudes must not be subordinated to the
imperative of punishing individual perpetrators. Mamdani offers a trenchant
critique of what he calls the “New Humanitarian Order,” which has supplanted
traditional colonialism and turned human rights into the new pretext for
intervention. The “international community,” which Mamdani argues is nothing
more than a “post-Cold War nom de guerre for the Western powers,” has
created “a bifurcated system whereby state sovereignty obtains in large parts
of the world but is suspended in more and more countries in Africa and the
Middle East,” reducing citizens to wards in “an open-ended international rescue operation.”
The Obama Administration already appears to
be making a break with its predecessor’s approach and has ordered a review of
its Sudan policy. Scott Gration, the new envoy, has already visited Khartoum
and Darfur, as has John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. In the case of the Bush Administration, the SDC was able
to mobilize Congress against the State Department that was seeking a political
resolution modeled on the power-sharing agreement that ended the longstanding
conflict in the south. It remains to be seen how much the Obama Administration
is able to resist the formidable lobbying power of theSDC. While Mamdani
maintains that the aim of the SDC is to induce the US government
to intervene militarily in Sudan, it appears that the real interest of its core
organizations is to perpetuate the conflict so as to continue using the image
of the Arab as the perpetrator to distract from the regional reality of the
Arab as the victim.
