Brains Like a Shoe

This is the second part of my review of Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (link to Part I). 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.

Mamdani’s Case

With the publication of Saviors and Survivors in the spring of 2009, Mamdani has reentered the fray, this time selecting Save Darfur as his primary target. Denouncing the coalition for its ignorance of the historical and political realities in Darfur and Sudan, he writes that his book “is an argument against those who substitute moral certainty for knowledge, and who feel virtuous even when acting on the basis of total ignorance.” His more damning charges contend that Save Darfur intentionally portrayed the conflict simplistically as ‘Arab’ versus ‘African’ to appeal to Americans’ post-9/11 fear and antipathy of ‘savage’ Arab jihadists. He writes, “When Save Darfur advocates described the nature of evil in Darfur, it is unfailingly in the language of race.” This narrative, Mamdani argues, also serves as the basis for Save Darfur’s erroneous claim of genocide, which for American activists opens the door to humanitarian intervention directed by major international powers against weak states.

Mamdani does not stop with this sovereignty-based argument against new doctrines, like the UN’s Responsibility to Protect, which are espoused by liberal interventionists and hawkish neo-conservatives alike. He also insinuates that the coalition is driven by an expressly anti-Arab intent:

The Save Darfur lobby in the US has turned the tragedy of the people in Darfur into a knife with which to slice Africa by demonizing one group of Africans, African Arabs. For undergirding the claim that a genocide has occurred in Darfur is another, born of colonial historiography, that Arabs in Sudan—and elsewhere in the African continent—are settlers who came in from the outside and whose rights must be subordinate to those of indigenous natives.

Much of the middle third of the book, therefore, details the historical relations between tribes in Darfur to demonstrate that Arabs were no less indigenous to the region than Africans. After setting this record straight, Mamdani also describes how the recent ecological crisis of the Sahel and the proxy wars in Chad between Qaddafi and Reagan serve as important backdrops for the current conflict in Darfur.

Having spent the first 230 pages of his book undermining Save Darfur and then restoring the historical context of Darfur, Mamdani finally presents his version of events from 1987 until the present. Relying primarily on secondary sources, much of Mamdani’s story, which describes the root causes of tribal tensions in the region, has been told repeatedly by scholars like Alex de Waal and Julie Flint. What’s partly new is Mamdani’s submission that one tribe, the Fur, “first claimed ‘genocide’ and attempts at ‘a total holocaust’ in 1989” at a reconciliation conference that ended two years of skirmishes. He highlights this portrayal of victimization to show how both Arab and African tribes increasingly “saw themselves as victims” and adopted “exclusionist rhetoric that inevitably opened them to outside influences that further racialized and inflamed the discourse.” This analysis most resembles When Victims Become Killers (2001)—Mamdani’s controversial work on the Rwandan genocide—as it judiciously examines the breakdown in relations between groups and traditional methods of conflict resolution. Mamdani also correctly highlights the history of double-marginalization of Darfuri Arab tribes, from which the government recruited the janjaweed, and explains their mobilization. While Save Darfur as an organization has for years intentionally avoided framing the conflict as ‘Arab’ versus ‘African,’ the advocacy movement should consider integrating further historical details in its narrative of the Darfur conflict, especially as the message of Darfuris in the diaspora and of certain rebel leaders in exile grows increasingly ideological and the fate of Darfuri Arab tribes remains severely neglected.

And Yet, Is Mamdani Wrong?

Anger blinds analysis, and many parts of Saviors and Survivors read like an angry harangue against the Darfur advocacy movement, the history of British imperialism, and American foreign policy in Sudan and all of Africa—often done in a tone that equates all three. Somewhere in the midst of these excoriations Mamdani also takes time to account briefly for the mass killings and displacements that have occurred in Darfur over the last six years, although in this telling of the Darfur conflict, the Sudanese government avoids the long-arm of Mamdani’s wrath. He writes, for example, “[T]he conflict in Darfur began as a civil war in which the government was originally not involved.” This sentence is especially interesting since it seems to contradict Mamdani’s own writing from 2004 in which he states, “the security cabal in Khartoum . . . responded [to the first Darfuri rebel attacks in what became the civil war] by arming and unleashing several militia, known as the Janjawid. The result is a spiral of state-sponsored violence and indiscriminate spread of weaponry.” While opposing external intervention as a solution, back then Mamdani does hint at the International Criminal Court as an avenue for investigating crimes committed in Darfur.

In Mamdani’s new view of Sudanese politics on display in Saviors and Survivors, victims seem to have a greater responsibility than their perpetrators to uphold the sovereignty of their states. Mamdani argues, for example, that “the key debate in Sudan on Darfur is between those who see internal reform as the best way out of the crisis and those who call for an externally driven humanitarian intervention.” This dichotomous presentation fails to consider sufficiently the disastrous escalation in 2003 of an ongoing—but relatively contained—conflict: the Sudanese government’s calculated campaign of terror in Darfur. The 2004 Mamdani recognized this fact by writing that even though “the janjawiid were not a single organization under a unified command . . . [w]e must hold the patron responsible for the actions of the proxy. Those who start and feed fires should be held responsible for doing so; but let us not forget that it may be easier to start a fire than to put it out.” Yet the 2009 Mamdani treats the counterinsurgency campaign of President Bashir as a fait accompli and something not to be lingered upon at great length. Mamdani suggests, instead, that what is most needed now to end the conflict is the emergence of “an internal force” representative of Darfuri society and “capable of effective leadership” to sign a peace agreement with a conciliatory counterpart in Khartoum. As Khartoum continues to make considerable mischief in Darfur, this prescription for conflict resolution sounds remarkably similar to the message of hardliners in the Israeli and Palestinian conflict: the past does not matter for negotiations, our controversial policies in the present will not affect the viability of negotiations, and the future is wholly dependent on a currently unwilling peace partner.

Ironically then, Mamdani’s apologetics for the Khartoum regime are most striking when juxtaposed with his condemnation of the recent employment of collective punishment by the Israeli government. In Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2005), Mamdani writes:

The practice of collective punishment involves the denial of both individual responsibility and individual agency . . . In the annals of the modern state, the practice of collective punishment is identified with colonialism and racism. It has involved abrogating notions of individual responsibility central to the rule of law in favor of collective responsibility for all political acts . . . Security triumphs rights.

Having provided such a useful description, it is hard to believe that Mamdani avoids labeling the Sudanese government’s policies in Darfur as a form of collective punishment in Saviors and Survivors. Surely the widespread targeting of civilians—rather than rebels—between 2003 and 2005 qualifies as such. Surely the years of obstruction and the recent expulsion of humanitarian aid to the victims reminds us of Gaza. And surely the refusal to prosecute government officials or paramilitary leaders for crimes committed reminds us of America’s dirty wars in Central America or of certain decisions made by U.S. officials with regard to Iraq.

Yet, instead of condemnation, Mamdani gives the reader only history and “context” for the Sudanese government’s actions. References to reports from Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International on Darfur do not appear within the pages of Saviors and Survivors. Instead of engaging these accounts in any way, Mamdani primarily focuses on Save Darfur’s labeling of the conflict as “genocide” and the coalition’s past misuse of mortality figures. In doing so, though, Mamdani—wittingly or not—promotes the Sudanese government’s central narrative that Darfur was and is chiefly a tribal conflict that spiraled out of control thanks to foreign interference and exaggeration. So ready to draw parallels between Save Darfur and the Bush administration’s media tactics in the “war on terror,” Mamdani never acknowledges that Khartoum has been operating its own spin-room.

At every stage, Bashir and his inner circle have effectively framed international concern regarding the crisis as the product of a duplicitous western campaign to destabilize the country. In a detailed analysis of Bashir’s speeches in regional summits and forums, Sarah Washburne shows how the Sudanese president “constructs a perception of the malicious ‘other,’ which serves to demarcate the boundaries of control over internal predicaments. When discussing why the government is not culpable in terms of internal security, Bashir places the blame on conspiracy, a dangerous media, or colonialism.” While Mamdani’s notes and bibliography include dozens of references to western news articles, activists’ statements, and advocacy organizations, he includes exactly zero direct quotes from Bashir and exactly zero articles about Darfur from the local, largely state-controlled Sudanese media. Lacking this layer of analysis, Mamdani foolishly claims in an online conversation about Saviors and Survivors that “the Sudan government’s weakness lay in that it lacked its own version of soft power.” The rampant conspiracy theories about Darfur, especially in the Sudanese and Arabic press, belie such a weakness.22

In the end, dealing a blow to the new propagators of imperialism—the so-called “human rights fundamentalists”—is the true concern of Saviors and Survivors. While Mamdani attempts to paint Darfur as yet another scene of battle between western imperialists and their resisters, many advocates in Africa and the Arab world have not fallen into this same intellectual trap set by President Bashir. Polls conducted in six Muslim countries in 2007, for example, revealed genuine concern about the ongoing crisis in Darfur; another set of polls in 2009 supported these findings and even suggested surprising levels of popular Arab and African support for the ICC’s case against Bashir. In Africa, the Darfur Consortium—which Mamdani mentions in only one line—consists of over fifty civil society organizations working around the continent to pressure African governments to promote a just, peaceful, and sustainable end to the ongoing political and humanitarian crisis in Darfur. Their sister group, the Arab Coalition for Darfur, was founded in 2008 by over thirty Arab organizations. They have also shown the courage to expose the underbelly of Bashir’s anti-western narrative for what it is and to compare the gross human rights abuses in Sudan to other violations by autocratic governments and occupying powers in the region.

The third part of the review to be posted tomorrow will discusses how Mamdani’s critique of Save Darfur and narrative of the conflict actually strips the Darfuri victims and perpetrators in Sudan of their collective agency.

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