Brains Like a Shoe

First posted at Save Darfur’s blog…

My colleagues Jerry Fowler and Mark Lotwis left Sudan last Friday heading back to Washington.  In order to set up a few more meetings in the South, I stayed on in Juba. Little did we know President Omar al-Bashir and his entourage of advisors and security agents would be coming to town—and staying in the same modest hotel as the Save Darfur delegation, in the very wing where Jerry had been sleeping.

Over the weekend, I had heard that Bashir would be traveling to Juba and a few other towns in the South to campaign.  In my mind, I imagined a quick dash by motorcade from the airport to a rally in Juba and then a few darts by plane to some other choice locations in the Greater Equatoria states.

So I was quite surprised when early Monday afternoon, I was confronted by a newly erected roadblock in front of my hotel.  Initially, the mix of police and security officials told me that I could not pass. When I explained that I was staying at the hotel beyond their checkpoint, they quickly scanned my backpack and then gave me strict instructions on how to walk to the next crowd of security personnel suddenly stationed in front of hotel gate.  After another round of negotiations that involved coaxing hotel staff out to verify my claims, I was finally permitted to enter the foyer—where I was promptly urged by a security guard to take my room key and, like a misbehaving child, go straight to my room.

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Check out a piece that I just posted at Huffington Post…

“Bashir’s Pre-Election Victory Lap at the Scene of the Crime”

Can you imagine Slobodan Milosevic running for president in Srebrenica? The world would have been justifiably outraged. Yesterday, however, indicted war criminal Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir visited El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. While not an official campaign appearance, the trip comes three days after Bashir received the formal presidential nomination of his party in the upcoming elections in April. It is long past due for the world – and particularly the United States – to express its grave concern about the sham electoral process that in a few months could effectively legitimize Bashir’s repressive government. Read the rest here.

Rebels in eastern Chad (Photo: Reuters)

First posted at Save Darfur…

Is there an end coming to the Sudan/Chad proxy war? Perhaps, and that may be a good thing in the long run, but in the short run the people of North Darfur are bearing the brunt of changing calculations by the ruling regimes in Khartoum and N’djamena. The African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies (ACJPS) last week issued an urgent warning about attacks on civilians by the Chadian opposition forces operating in North Darfur. These troubling developments may be in response to the much rumored rapprochement between Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and Chadian President Idris Deby.

A Sudanese delegation last week traveled to N’djamena, Chad, to continue bilateral discussions on ending the proxy war between the two countries. These talks­­—which began in October­—allegedly aim to create a “framework for joint patrols on their shared borders” and to normalize diplomatic relations. The United States has welcomed the dialogue as “a key element in advancing the Darfur Peace Process.” This reading is dead-on. Just as important though, the international community and the United States must offer support for the implementation of commitments made by both Chad and Sudan, while at the same time speaking out about any human rights abuses committed by all armed forces in the region.

The Small Arms Survey provides a helpful background to the tensions and hostilities between Sudan and Chad:

Throughout the 1990s Déby was a loyal ally of the regime in Sudan. He consistently refused to supply aid to Sudanese rebels—whether from Darfur or South Sudan—despite requests to do so since the early 1990s. But from 2003 he was unable to stop the two rebel movements in Darfur, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), from using Chad as a rear base, recruiting combatants even among the Chadian Republican Guard (a pillar of his regime) and garnering support among the Chadian Beri, including those close to the government.

…Déby’s inability to prevent those close to him from supporting the Darfur rebels weakened his credibility among power-brokers in Khartoum. In response, starting in 2003, Khartoum incorporated Darfur based Chadian opposition elements into the janjawid…When these groups were not fighting alongside the Sudanese army in Darfur, they launched periodic attacks on Chadian territory.

In 2004 Khartoum started asking the numerous rebel Chadian factions to unite. From 2005, Déby began a rapprochement with Darfur rebel groups (SLA–Minni Minnawi and JEM), in exchange for their commitment to aid in fighting Chadian rebels on Chadian soil. The situation deteriorated rapidly .An attack on the border down of Adré on 18 December 2005 by the Rassemblement pour la démocratie et les libertés (RDL), a Chadian rebel movement made up of Tama led by Captain Mahamat Nour Abdelkarim, marked a turning point. Déby now realised that Sudan was decisively supporting Chadian rebels against him. While the rebels did not manage to take Adré, the raid allowed Mahamat Nour to display his strength and later assume the leadership of the Sudan-supported rebel coalition, the Front Uni pour le Changement (FUC). From this point onwards Déby actively supported the Darfur rebels.

In the last two years, this proxy war has included rebel offensives on both capitals. Two months ago, the UN Panel of Exports Report identified the Sudan/Chad hostilities as a key component of the Darfur ongoing crisis, noting that they serve as a chief “impediment to the political process that also has a negative impact on the settlement of the conflicts between Chad and the Chadian armed opposition groups and between the Sudan and JEM.” In the last month, in fact, Chadian President Idris Deby has both bombed rebel forces and offered to make peace with them.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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Bec Hamilton invited me to react to Ben Wallace-Wells’ essay, “Darfuristan,” in the current issue of Rolling Stone. You can read the full post on her great blog, “The Promise of Engagement.”

Here is the meat of it…

My issue with this essay though, and other less well-researched criticisms of the advocacy movement (see Mahmood Mamdani’s diatribes), is that it captures the fluidity and complexity of international politics and American activism to the gross neglect of important shifts and dynamics in Sudanese politics. The essay goes half-way by discussing the highly politicized nature of the IDP camps in Darfur today. By reading the complete essay though, one would think that Bashir and his National Congress Party (NCP) have successfully rebuffed all international pressures and that they have once again securely protected their monopolization of power and wealth in the country.

But as those who follow Sudanese politics closely know, Khartoum is not the same Khartoum today. The regime has its back against the wall and is fighting for survival in a self-destructive way unseen in its twenty years of dominance. Such an analysis is at the heart of the International Crisis Group recent paper entitled, “Sudan: Preventing an Implosion.”

Consistent international condemnation and isolation of the Bashir regime’s egregious actions in Darfur, South Sudan, and even in Khartoum and other areas of North Sudan, have opened the door for Sudanese actors committed to human rights and a more democratic and liberal form of governance to speak out and challenge the regime. The recent demonstrations of the Juba forces and the emergence of grassroots groups like Girifna are the two most obvious examples.  Reported cracks within the NCP regarding the future of the party and the state also reveal that all may not be well within the ruling cabal. The elections scheduled for April 2010 could put to the test all of these changing dynamics, especially if the opposition and civil society continue to work together to demand greater freedoms and civil rights. The international community and activists should not take sides in these elections, but they should continue to demand greater political space to allow Sudanese politics to take place without resorting to violence and repression.

Check out my new article at Foreign Policy on Sudan’s continuing drive to secure debt relief and how the United States and international community should use debt relief as both an incentive and pressure for peace:

Time to Take Away Sudan’s Credit Card

Sudanese officials are heading to Washington in search of a bailout. But the Obama administration should condition its support on an improvement in the country’s dismal human rights record.

Omar al-Bashir’s brutal Sudanese regime certainly has nerve. On Dec. 14, as Bashir’s National Congress Party (NCP) thugs violently suppressed the second peaceful demonstration by opposition groups in seven days, the Sudanese minister of finance met with the U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan Scott Gration and urged the United States to lift sanctions on Khartoum and cancel Sudan’s foreign debt — in other words, bailing out the government that brought you such atrocities as Darfur and the decades-long civil war with South Sudan that now ominously threatens to reignite.

While no Western country is rushing to hand out money to Bashir, the international community has disagreed over how to persuade Sudan to end its genocidal ways, and the United States is still the only country to impose sanctions. One unlooked-for upside of the global financial crisis may be that it offers new economic leverage with Khartoum. Following the crash, Sudan now holds roughly $36 billion in external sovereign debt that it is struggling to repay. This debt gives the rest of the world a new opportunity to finally affect the course of Sudanese political reform and even end the conflicts in Darfur and South Sudan, if Western countries are willing to act boldly (Read the rest here).

Sudanese women registering to vote

First posted at Save Darfur…

A new report by the Carter Center on Sudan’s elections expresses grave concerns about recent security crackdowns. The report should serve as an urgent wake-up call for the international community that the necessary conditions for free and fair elections currently do not exist in Sudan. Instead, the lack of political freedoms and the gross registration violations, especially in Darfur, shed clear light on the ruling National Congress Party’s intentions for these elections: a fraudulent process designed to legitimize its undemocratic, repressive and genocidal rule.

Jerry Fowler, Save Darfur’s president, stated in a press release today:

The Carter Center’s report came as no surprise. Sudanese civil society and opposition leaders for the last two weeks have been speaking out loudly about the gross human rights and elections violations of a repressive regime. By and large, the international community has remained quiet while these activists and opposition leaders have been threatened, harassed, and beaten throughout Sudan. The situation, as the Carter Center report acknowledges, is even more severe in Darfur. The heavy military and intelligence presence at the registration sites and the lack of even the basic freedoms make it impossible for the people of Darfur to participate in a credible elections process.

Given the alarming nature of the Carter Center’s report, Save Darfur has urged the U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan, General Scott Gration, to work with his international counterparts and demand answers from the Sudanese government on the following issues:

Lack of Basic Freedoms. Several recent incidents – such as the crackdown on protesters in Khartoum and the beating and detentions of journalists – have clearly demonstrated the lack of political rights and freedoms in Sudan necessary for free and fair elections.

The Carter Center reported:

• [T]he Center…expressed serious concerns about incidents that undermine political rights and fundamental freedoms in Sudan, including: arrests, detention and harassment of civil society and political party members for constitutional and peaceful activity in Khartoum and other cities by security services, and attacks on the National Congress Party (NCP) premises in Wau and Rumbek.

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Protesters yesterday in Khartoum, courtesy of Girifna

First posted at Save Darfur…

It was déjà vu yesterday in Khartoum, when on the second Monday in a row the police and security agencies loyal to Omar al-Bashir’s National Congress Party (NCP) forcibly shut down a peaceful demonstration organized by the Juba group (those political parties that signed the Juba Declaration in September) . The student group Girifna has a gallery of photos from the scuttled demonstration. This time NCP officials tried vigorously to split the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) from the network of political parties calling for reforms to the national security laws, peace in Darfur, and free and fair elections in April 2010.

On Sunday, the SPLM and NCP announced a breakthrough in their negotiations over the 2011 referendum, the status of the Abyei area, and the popular consultations promised to the people of the Blue Nile and South Kordofan. So on Monday NCP officials said that the SPLM had also agreed to suspend the protests warning that any move to the contrary would nullify the recent breakthrough. SPLM leaders though denied these reports, with Yasir Arman, the deputy secretary general of the SPLM, stating: “any attempts to drive a wedge between the SPLM and the Juba forces will not succeed.”

Instead, some SPLM officials participated in the demonstration and afterwards they and other participants strongly condemned the use of tear gas to disperse the gathered crowds. In addition, Pagan Amum, the secretary general of the SPLM, accused (in Arabic) the NCP of paying people to suppress the demonstration.

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