Brains Like a Shoe

This is the first part of my review of Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror. The review was published in the latest issue of The SAIS Review of International Affairs. To download the PDF copy with full footnotes, click here.

Darfur. In 2002, the word meant nothing to most Americans, and little more to the country’s journalists, academics, and foreign policy makers. A scant seven years later, though, Darfur represents for many “a place where evil lived.” What happened in the intervening years is an interesting story of grassroots mobilization, in which hundreds of thousands of people learned cogent details about the crimes of Darfur, which they repeated to their friends and families and elected representatives. They explained first and foremost that the Sudanese government and its proxy militia, known as the janjaweed, were responsible for a large-scale campaign of death and destruction in western Sudan. Their stories highlighted the innocent civilians directly targeted by the government’s counterinsurgency operation against rebel movements in Darfur, and invariably listed the grim details of the hundreds of thousands dead, the millions internally displaced, and the facts surrounding the world’s largest emergency humanitarian operation. Urging a response from the United States government, many also highlighted how these ruthless attacks on specific ethnic groups and their villages constituted the twenty-first century’s first genocide.

Where did these Americans, and later many more around the world, acquire their information? At the beginning, the established human rights organizations—Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and International Crisis Group (ICG)—provided some of the only detailed reporting and advocacy on the emergency that erupted in Darfur in the spring of 2003. These organizations have continued to publish regular reports on the situation, just as humanitarian organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières and CARE continue to issue urgent appeals to support critical relief operations on the ground. In the summer of 2004, though, leaders from many human rights groups, a few humanitarian organizations, Sudanese in the diaspora, and other concerned organizations came together at a meeting coordinated by the Committee on Conscience at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. to discuss the situation in Darfur and how to build a more effective advocacy campaign in the United States. Out of this meeting, the Save Darfur Coalition was born—its purpose to help coordinate ongoing advocacy efforts and build a more effective campaign to raise awareness about the violence in Darfur, with the goal of urging the American government to respond.

While a number of groups signed the coalition’s unity statement that summer and over the course of the next year, Save Darfur as an organization grew slowly. Until mid-2005, the coalition’s staff consisted of a single coordinator with a limited human rights background, a handful of interns, and strategic assistance from a firm specializing in non-profit consulting. An advisory group for the coalition consisted of some individuals with knowledge of Sudanese politics and conflicts in this region of Africa, but the small staff itself lacked such experience. In that first year, though, Darfur as an issue began to emerge as a hot-button item, especially among American college students and those following international human rights crises. The Save Darfur Coalition’s efforts to engage grassroots activists contributed to this growing awareness, and overtime the coalition’s popularity and resources grew and beget greater popularity and resources. The moment of ‘take-off’ for Save Darfur probably occurred in April 2006 when its small staff, with the support of its member organizations, held a rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. that attracted an estimated 50,000 people—as well as noteworthies like then-Senator Barack Obama and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Six days after the rally, which garnered international headlines, one Darfuri rebel movement and the Sudanese government signed the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA), thanks in large measure to the heavy pressure that was directly applied by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick. Equally important is the fact that many believed that the agreement would pave the way for a UN peacekeeping force to take over the beleaguered peacekeeping operations of the African Union.

In the days after the signing, some staff within Save Darfur, as well as a number of activists, questioned whether an important step toward ending the crisis had finally been achieved. It became increasingly clear, though, in May of 2006 that the two other contending Darfuri rebel groups would not sign the agreement and that the Sudanese government would continue to object to a transfer of peacekeeping operations from the AU to UN. Save Darfur and the advocacy community subsequently took their lead from a report put out by ICG in June 2006 that stated, “If the DPA is not to leave Darfur more fragmented and conflict-prone than before, the international community must rapidly take practical measures to shore up its security provisions, improve prospects for the displaced to return home, bring in the holdouts and rapidly deploy a robust UN peacekeeping force with Chapter VII authority.”

So rather than shutter its doors, Save Darfur pressed forward with its calls for a UN mission, unhindered access for humanitarian workers to reach those in need, and further regional and international diplomacy to craft a peace deal that could work. A surge of new online activists and their generous donations buoyed this stage of the campaign. For the next two years, the coalition grew rapidly and focused on establishing international partnerships, running a multi-million dollar advertising campaign in the United States and abroad, and supporting larger-scale events in U.S. cities and around the world. Even Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir took notice of these multi-dimensional efforts, and in January 2007, actually invited Governor Bill Richardson as a citizen-envoy to meet with him to negotiate ways to improve the security and humanitarian conditions in Darfur. Save Darfur helped Richardson prepare for the trip, and the Sudanese government even welcomed the participation of Save Darfur’s International Director, Ambassador Larry Rossin (a former American diplomat and UN peacekeeping official in Haiti and Kosovo), as part of the official delegation.

However, Richardson’s trip ultimately failed to achieve any lasting political success, and in its aftermath a few months later, the Save Darfur Coalition received one of its first major rebukes, delivered in the form of an essay published in the London Review of Books, and written by a well-known professor of government at Columbia University, Mahmood Mamdani. Mamdani’s article drew parallels between the conflicts in Iraq and Darfur, questioning why only one of these conflicts was labeled a genocide, and attacked Darfur activists for depoliticizing the region’s violence and supporting an external military intervention in Sudan. The force of Mamdani’s critique raised some eyebrows in academic and leftist circles, but largely fell silent in the mainstream media and human rights community. The president of Save Darfur wrote a letter to the editor that defended the coalition’s own advocacy and stated that the coalition’s “support of a multilateral protection force for the civilians of Darfur” should not be confused with an intervention to “overthrow . . . Sudan’s government.” In the aftermath of Mamdani’s article, an adviser to Save Darfur, who was a co-founder of Women for Women International and former negotiator for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, also met privately with Mamdani to try to resolve any misunderstandings—seeing substantial ground for general agreement with Mamdani on the necessary political solutions to resolve the Darfur issue, and also agreeing with him on the need to promote further Sudanese, African, and Arab voices in the global advocacy campaign (Mamdani later alleged that this off-the-record meeting and series of email exchanges with Amjad Atallah, who only later became a senior director at Save Darfur, counted as a serious attempt to engage with Save Darfur after writing the first piece on Darfur cited above. Except for a request to Mr. Atallah for information about Save Darfur’s structure and finances, Mamdani made no other contact with the coalition or directed any other inquiries to it). With the exception, though, of two subsequent encounters between Mamdani and Save Darfur staff at conferences—one Save Darfur-funded conference at Columbia in which Mamdani spoke on a panel and another Save Darfur-funded conference in Kampala, Uganda—the debate lay largely dormant.

The second part of the review to be posted tomorrow will summarizes and responds to Mamdani’s chief arguments against the Save Darfur Coalition.

Copyright © 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in SAIS Review, Volume 29, Issue 2, Summer-Fall, 2009 (pages 133-144).