The Darfur diversion: “Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror”

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.

Mahmood Mamdani's 'Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, politics, and the War on Terror'

a review by Mandisi Majavu, LibCom (There is more writing by Mandisi Majavu here and two interviews with Ernest Wamba dia Wamba here.) 

In 2002, Mamdani wrote an essay entitled 'Making sense of political violence in Africa', in which he argued that to distinguish between cultural and political identities is to differentiate between self-identification and state-identification. He further pointed out that to historicise political identity through linking it to political power, is to acknowledge that all political identities are historically transitory and all require a form of the state to be reproduced. Furthermore, "when the raw material of political identity is drawn from the domain of culture, as in ethnic or religious identity, it is the link between identity and power that allows us to understand how cultural identities are translated into political identities and thus to distinguish between them" (p. 7).