Brains Like a Shoe

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

Stripping Agency of Victims

On his mission to teach Save Darfur a lesson, Mamdani himself ignores critical elements of the violence in Darfur, and in the process, strips the victims and perpetrators of their political agency. (Similar charges have been leveled at Mamdani’s treatment of the Rwandan genocide in When Victims Become Killers.) Mamdani is right to highlight the historical and political realities that led to the most recent outbreak of fighting in Darfur at the beginning of this decade. Save Darfur and others in the movement have been guilty at times of simplifying the nature of the conflict in order to attract and retain supporters. Indeed, Save Darfur shares this fault with advocacy organizations working on a whole host of other domestic and international issues, all of which vie for the same media space. Mamdani is right to point out the problematic consequences of such simplification. But Mamdani is wrong to use such instances to reason away the catastrophic violence and its impact on Darfuri society. Unable to delink his frustration with uninformed American liberal (or neo-conservative) interventionism from his analysis of facts on the ground, his book attacks the victims of violence for distrusting a brutal regime in Khartoum and seeking external assistance from the international community. To that end, he demeans Darfuris living in IDP and refugee camps as “consumers” who have abdicated their responsibility as “citizens” and committed all their hopes for salvation to humanitarian intervention.

Is this the same callous advice Mamdani would give to displaced civilians in Sri Lanka caught between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan military, or to innocent Palestinians in Gaza caught between the violence of Hamas and Israel? To be sure, it is true that there exists genuine concern about the dependency psychology that may well be growing within a number of war-affected Darfuri communities. But these facts notwithstanding, Mamdani shows no willingness to explicate the political limitations of the 4.7 million Darfuris still affected by the violence of the last six years. Reading Mamdani, the Darfur and Sudan of the last twenty years appear like an oasis of freedom of expression, association, and political mobilization. Nothing could be further from the truth, as noted by Alex de Waal in his critique of Saviors and Survivors. Having endured an oppressive military regime since 1989 and then a campaign of ethnic cleansing, it is not surprising that Darfuris have struggled to unify under various rebel movements or to put forward a civil society alternative today. The last serious peace talks between the Darfur rebels and the Sudanese government revealed a glaring gap in the capacity of Darfuri groups to even state their collective demands clearly and to negotiate effectively. Since the failed Darfur Peace Agreement of 2006, the vicious cycle of rebel fragmentation has only made the voices of the average Darfuri even more difficult to discern. One must remember that facing similar human capacity challenges and the divide-and-conquer tactics of Khartoum, the rebels in South Sudan remained internally divided for years before unifying around the leadership and vision of John Garang.

Having so easily dismissed the concerns of three million displaced Darfuris by labeling them “consumers” as opposed to responsible “citizens,” it is natural that Mamdani can find no moral or political role for an advocacy organization like Save Darfur that works to amplify these concerns. To be fair, the advocacy movement must acknowledge that is has been slow to recognize its influence over the decision-making of Darfuri rebels who assume that the advocacy movement will remain quiet about their negotiating intransigence and human rights abuses in Darfur and neighboring Chad. With that said, though, some of the most useful efforts of the more mature Save Darfur Coalition have sought to provide platforms to Darfuris to tell their own stories and to provide time and space for Darfuris in the diaspora and civil society to articulate their concerns in future negotiations with the Sudanese government. The coalition funds and supports, for example, various efforts to engage these leaders in the peace process, given that both the Sudanese government and the personal ambitions and ideologies of Darfuri rebel leaders have stripped average Darfuri citizens of these opportunities. Not only does Mamdani fail to engage this part of Save Darfur’s work, he fails to acknowledge the importance of empowering victims in Darfur who are pitted in an asymmetrical set of negotiations about their futures with the politically astute Sudanese government.

In fact, based on Mamdani’s writings, it is an open question as to whether he has greater animus for the policies of the Bush administration or the grassroots mobilizing tools of the Save Darfur Coalition, which he regards as the “humanitarian face of the War on Terror.” Such outlandish claims demonstrate the shallowness of Mamdani’s research of Save Darfur. All of his quotes detailing the supposed race-based tactics and neo-imperial objectives of Save Darfur come from activists, journalists, or celebrities who are not formally linked to the organization. The book lacks reference to even a single interview with any members of the Save Darfur Coalition or its close partners. As the above narrative of the coalition’s emergence eludes, such interviews would have revealed a more interesting history of an organization that ultimately recognized its policy deficiencies and attempted to fill them with highly knowledgeable and experienced Sudanese and American policy makers and human rights defenders.

While never the war-mongering caricature that Mamdani paints, this more mature organization has added increasing layers of nuance and depth to its policy recommendations. Whereas Mamdani contends that the coalition irresponsibly demands “military intervention rather than political reconciliation, punishment rather than peace,” the coalition never advocated for an Iraq-style intervention (Despite Mamdani’s charges, Save Darfur never used the slogan: “Out of Iraq, into Darfur.”) Calls for a no-fly zone and a Chapter 7 mandate for a UN peacekeeping force have been the most hawkish appeals of Save Darfur, and the coalition has even stopped advocating for a no-fly zone after listening to the concerns of humanitarian groups on the ground and heeding the advice of other experts. The coalition’s policy prescriptions have instead consistently called for a fully resourced UN-led peacekeeping force and internationally supported peace process. Other policies like the coalition’s support for the International Criminal Court’s proceedings against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, while controversial to some, nevertheless reveal a comprehensive understanding of the current conflict in Darfur and politics across Sudan. Notwithstanding a difference of opinion on the ICC matter, great overlap and little difference actually exists between the coalition and Mamdani’s own policy recommendations for the Obama administration on how to resolve the crisis in Darfur and hold together
Sudan’s fraying parts.[1]

On the other hand, some actors, writers, and activists who advocate on behalf of Darfur’s victims continue to distort the realities of Darfur, thereby giving continuing credence to Mamdani’s accusations. At a time when violent deaths and hunger in Darfur have reached their lowest levels since the beginning of the conflict, some individuals have chosen hyperbolic messaging over a realistic accounting of the still dangerous and unpredictable conditions in Darfur today. For Save Darfur, it could have benefited more from Mamdani’s critique before the summer of 2006, when the coalition first began to fully appreciate that the American government alone could not “save” Darfur or, for that matter, Sudan. At that time, the coalition decided to establish an international component to its advocacy that focused on forming working partnerships with leadings NGOs in Africa, the Arab world, and Europe. These partners, often with the financial support of Save Darfur, crafted tailored messages about the conflict in Darfur that would particularly resonate with people in their countries and move their governments to support peacekeeping, peacemaking, and political reform in Sudan. Yet, nothing about this important element of the coalition’s advocacy is part of Mamdani’s depiction of Save Darfur.

Detailing the coalition’s close partnerships with Arab and African civil society organizations would have forced Mamdani to alter many of his more slanderous conclusions about the objectives and strategies of the coalition. After reviewing Save Darfur’s efforts in other countries, perhaps Mamdani would have realized that the coalition’s advertising in American media markets was not designed to racialize Arab perpetrators, make Americans feel good once again about their powers abroad, or engender a constituency to support unilateral intervention in Sudan—but only to wake up Americans to a human rights crisis of the first order happening once again below the radar of most American policy makers. The coalition’s 30-second advertisement with the Arab American Institute that aired throughout the Arab world in early 2007 strikes at the heart of Mamdani’s almost conspiratorial claims about the coalition’s motivations. Rather than marginalizing the issue of Iraq or stereotyping Arabs, the appeal from Darfuris in their native Arabic ends with a note of shared suffering: “Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, DARFUR. We must pray for all of them together.” This ability to amplify and translate the very real pain of Darfuris for a diverse array of audiences may ultimately explain why so many people have responded to Save Darfur’s campaigns around the world.

The Politics of Idealism and Pragmatism

In Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Mamdani warns us that “the danger of bringing good and evil into politics cannot be underestimated.” This warning also seems to underpin U.S. President Barack Obama’s preferred foreign policy strategy of diplomatic engagement. His new Special Envoy for Sudan, Major General Scott J. Gration, has spent his first seven months on the job aggressively negotiating with Khartoum to “unclench its fist” and take important steps towards resolving the conflict in Darfur and salvaging the peace agreement that brought an end to the decades of civil war between the north and south. Gration also demonstrates no great concern about the debate over genocide and believes that a resolution in Darfur is directly associated with the issues of reform, justice, protection, peace, and democracy for all Sudanese.

Saviors and Survivors, then, may already be outdated, as it ultimately seeks to demonstrate the manifold consequences of the Bush administration’s Manichean “war on terror” by taking us to Darfur. Mamdani’s book cannot accomplish this feat, though, without dismissing the voices of victims and downplaying what at one point Mamdani calls “Bashir’s own little war on terror.” There is no question that in some instances Save Darfur overreached in its advocacy—but its intentions have always been similar to those who advocate for unheard victims in places like Iraq and Palestine (both causes that seem very close to Mamdani’s heart). To Save Darfur’s credit, the coalition has constantly been evolving and seeking to redress its deficiencies and errors. Its real test will be how it responds to the decisions of an administration that purports to understand the complexities of the issues in Sudan and desires to craft a comprehensive strategy to deal with them.

Advocating for American leadership and a responsible set of policies that will create opportunities for Sudanese to reach their own durable political solutions is certainly more challenging than raising an urgent alarm about mass atrocities and genocide. Showing few recent signs of internal reform, the Sudanese government now seems interested in playing up the relative stability in Darfur to draw attention away from its failure to fully implement the Comprehensive Peace Agreement with the South, and its unwillingness to pursue further democratization and political liberalization in the North. To avoid future bloodshed and the possible violent disintegration of Sudan, Save Darfur and others should continue to be a political and human rights watchdog for the Obama administration as it attempts to facilitate an inclusive Darfur peace process, encourage free and fair elections in Sudan in 2010, and deal with the seismic consequences of a referendum for southern secession in 2011.

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