Peace in Darfur: still a long way off

It is too early to tell – but the “framework agreement” recently signed between the Government of Sudan and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), the most effective armed rebel movement in Darfur, offers some hope for peace in Darfur. The commitment to an immediate ceasefire and reaching a final accord by March 15 advances the dialogue further than at any point since May 2006 – when President Omar al-Bashir’s government signed the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) with what was then considered the strongest of the movements. The problems with that agreement are the same as those threatening the current talks: the fragmentation of the movements and questions about the sincerity of the Sudanese government.

Read the rest here.

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.

About an hour later, I returned to reception to ask about the “protocol” and restrictions in place due to the arrival of the special guest from Khartoum.  The staff assured me that the security had overreacted in the first few hours and gave me a stamped pass that would allow me to go and come as I please. Thus far, I have not faced any further issues – other than that inescapable locked-down feeling of any setting where men with guns sit and stand around every entrance and exit, looking all-too-bored for any by-stander’s comfort.

Ironically enough, I did not have to leave the hotel to watch Bashir’s political rally. My window afforded a partial view of the stadium.  I could not make out the words of his speech, but at times I could hear the crowd break out with a chant of “Salaam, Oyay” (Peace, Yes!).

Maggie Ficke of the ENOUGH Project was inside the stadium and reported on the climate.

Papers the next day quoted Bashir as making an economic case for unity. He argued that Sudan’s economy could expand by a higher percent if all efforts are exerted to end political tensions:

“that have encouraged nothing than regional wars and displacement of inhabitants…To experience real growth and success in the war against poverty, we must get our act together on two fronts…[O]ur politics must promote political stability and public confidence in the future of our country.”

Bashir, dressed down in a short sleeve shirt, treated the crowd to some interesting campaign rhetoric, such as “We will cut off every hand attempting to disrupt peace.” He also promised to celebrate with the people of the South after the referendum, whether they chose unity or secession.

In my conversations though in Juba thus far, it’s clear that Bashir’s last stab to make unity attractive will fall mostly on deaf ears. People are gearing up for the elections to contest leadership within the Government of South Sudan, but with a keen eye on the referendum. As for those in Darfur, very few trust these most recent promises from Bashir and his National Congress Party (NCP) – and, thus, confidence in a durable political resolution emerging from the Doha negotiations remains low.

With my flight out of Juba soon to depart, I hope to have more time to write about the many interesting conversations that we have had in Sudan over the last four weeks.  For now, I can say that having visited Khartoum, the three capitals of Darfur and Juba, one cannot help but be struck by the depth of complexity to the immediate crises and issues at hand.  Peace, prosperity and development for all Sudanese – the slogans of Bashir’s campaign – can be realized over time, but first a profound and dramatic shift in the mentality of those in power and those who dominate politics through fear and violence must occur.

On Darfur, Alex de Waal takes on the chatter among some Darfuris about self-determination. He discusses the various arguments in support of self-determination in the context of current Sudanese politics. And this week in the medical journal The Lancet researchers concluded that about 300,000 people died over the past six years in Darfur, but that disease, rather than violence, killed at least 80 percent of them. This is probably the most reliable mortality study to date. I am sure people like Mahmood Mamdani will make as much hay as they can with this study to argue that the conflict in Darfur has been exaggerated by activists. He and others will no doubt in the process conveniently ignore the fact that roughly 3 million Darfuris fled the violence and still remain in displaced camps.

On the United Arab Emirates, The New York Times ran a more analytical than normal piece on the now crumbling image of the Emirates as an Arab model of modernity: “Then the crash came and revealed how paper-thin that image was, political and financial analyst. That realization, not just in Dubai but also in Abu Dhabi, the oil-rich capital of the United Arab Emirates, has cast a harsh light on an opaque, top-down decision-making process, not just in business but in matters of crime and punishment as well, political and financial analysts said.”

And here are some quick recommendations of other interesting pieces:

• Marc Lynch on the controversial politics of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most influential satellite mufti: “Hate him or love him, the man has a keen sense of Arab opinion — whether he’s following or leading it — and has a proven track record of driving the debate.”

• US Policy in Gaza Remains Unchanged: My friend Amjad Atallah at the New America Foundation in the article argues that the United States is seen as completely complicit in the humanitarian crisis: “The idea that the U.S. is impotent… is something that no Palestinian in Gaza who we met believed.”

• Human Rights Watch’s Seven Principles for Effective International Engagement in Yemen: “To be effective, international counterterrorism policy in Yemen should take into account the lessons from the response to al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan: military tactics such as airstrikes that cause high civilian casualties, and arbitrary arrests and abusive treatment of suspected militants undermine efforts to reduce local support for al Qaeda. The Yemeni government has engaged in all of these actions against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).”

• UN Dispatch – American Engagement Caucus Formed: Russ Carnahan, a Democrat and Anh “Joseph” Cao, a Republican, launched the “American Engagement Caucus” at an event on Capitol Hill last week. The caucus is dedicated to  enhancing international cooperation and engagement.

This scoop came from Safwat El-Sherif, the Secretary General of Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party and the Chairman of the Egyptian Shura Council. El-Sherif made these comments to a delegation of visiting Sudanese journalists in Cairo. He also stressed that Egypt views Sudan as its “strategic depth” and, as such, the country will spare no efforts to keep Sudan unified, strong, safe and secure.

What does this mean concerning Egypt’s response to a vote for southern secession in 2011? Well, probably not much, since first El-Sherif does not really make foreign policy and second Egypt has been sending mixed signals for months. At times, officials have said they would support southern independence and at other times they have hedged on such support. The debate about what to do in Cairo is likely still ongoing, given its importance to Egyptian national security.

However, El-Sherif’s interesting justification for a unified Sudan was only matched by his description of the wall that Egypt is building on its border with Gaza and his explanation of the current press freedoms in Egypt.

On unity: A generation was brought up on a love for Sudan and the unity of the Nile Valley. Such a generation believes in the unity of the Nile Valley and went out into the streets for it.

• In fact, Sudanese chose independence in 1956. Sudanese leaders have often criticized Egypt’s intrusive  foreign policy that seems to forget often this historical and political reality.

On Palestine: There is no wall of steel, but actions of the armed forces to protect Egypt’s national security…We are free to choose the way we protect our national security.

• In fact, the wall is made of super-strength steel says the BBC and Egypt has been complicit with Israel in the humanitarian blockade of Gaza.

On Freedoms: Egypt is experiencing unprecedented levels of freedom of opinion and expression, and it has allowed freedoms unprecedented in other Arab countries.

• In fact, Egypt has very restrictive press laws. On Friday, authorities arrested 20 prominent bloggers who had traveled to Upper Egypt to show solidarity with victims of recent sectarian violence. They were released the next day.

Cross-posted at Poets and Policymakers…

Maps: A novel by Nurrudin Farah begins with a quote by Charles Dickens: “No children for me. Give me grown-ups.” Farah indeed depicts his main character, Askar, as a precocious child beyond his years and the novel tracks his struggles in identity from birth to near adulthood. Misra accompanies Askar, an ethnic Somali born in the Ogaden (eastern Ethiopia) on most of this developmental journey. She is his Ethiopian adopted mother and soul mate – an identity that engenders conflict given that the novel takes place in the late 1970s.

In the summer of 1977, the power of nationalism propelled Somalia and Ethiopia into the Ogaden War. By this point, Ethiopia had lost control of the Ogaden to an insurgency and there was clear evidence that the Somalis were supporting the rebel movements. This assistance, once the war began, climbed to upwards of 75,000 Somali troops supported by tanks. Somalis overwhelmingly supported this invasion of eastern Ethiopia.

Calculating the worth of their two alliances, the Soviet Union broke off relations with Somalia in the fall of 1977 and upped their arms sales to the Ethiopians. Ultimately the Ethiopians pushed the Somali forces to withdraw completely from the Ogaden. In the end, over 25,000 Somalis died in the war, as well as thousands of Ethiopians. The failed campaign fought in the name of Somali nationalism also brought humiliation to the Siad Barre regime as roughly 700,000 refugees from the Ogaden flooded across the border into Somalia – creating a humanitarian crisis.

In the novel, Askar is sent to Mogadishu from a small village in the Ogaden at the height of the war to stay with a well-educated uncle and aunt. Misra stays behind, only to be accused within a year of betraying the village to the Ethiopian army, elements of which carry out a brutal massacre of many of her fellow villagers. She ultimately flees and finds her way to Mogadishu a decade later. Before her sudden arrival, Askar and his new family are informed of the alleged betrayal. And, thus, Askar is forced to manage his loyalties and love to Somalia with his intense connection to the woman that raised him.

Askar’s fascination with maps provides a way for him and the author to explore the character’s identity through the ravages of Ogaden War, as well as the colonial past that set the boundaries and the ever-present national aspirations of the Somali people. The basic question asked repeatedly by Misra and Askar is: who are my people? And what are my responsibilities to them, especially in the face of multiple loyalties? The novel reveals that the answers for people with complex relationships are never as clear as the boundaries fought over by the belligerents.

These painful questions likely endure for the people of the Ogaden as a low-level insurgency continues against the Ethiopian government, which now blames the Eritrean government of providing support to the rebels. In addition, immediate irredentist claims on the Ogaden by some members of the Islamic Courts Union that took power in Mogadishu in 2006 helped provoke Ethiopia to invade Somalia later that year. The Ethiopians quickly removed the Islamists from power – but in the process ushered in three chaotic years of displacement and bloodshed in Somalia.

Like Dickens, Farah undoubtedly would also prefer grown-ups rather than children to demonstrate the horrors of his age. Yet in choosing children, he faces the cruel realities directly. In Somalia today, in fact, the United Nations reports about half of Somalia’s population of seven million is in a state of humanitarian emergency. And, half of those are children. An official stated last month:“There is no child in central south Somalia who knows what it is to live in peace. And to now try to recover from that as communities and society, of course, will take at least a generation.”

Farah also in the midst of the darkness though offers hope through the story of Askar as well as many of his other characters. For those who may hear Somalia and just shake their heads to forget or to despair of the situation, here is a great excerpt from an interview in 2007 in which he explains his motivations and intentions of his fiction:

NURUDDIN FARAH: …I have tried my best to keep my country alive by writing about it, and the reason is because nothing good comes out of a country until the artists of that country turn to writing about it in a truthful way.

JEFFREY BROWN: You mean, this is the role of an artist, the role of a writer.

NURUDDIN FARAH: This is the role of the artist, the role of the artist who also is, well, shall we say, probably courageous, probably mad, probably terribly ambitious writer, who wants to say, “This is what Somalia is like, and this is what I’m going to write.”

It is possible that the way I see Somalia is not the way that some other Somalis or some other foreigners who do not know Somalia may see it that way. But I have continually seen Somalia as a country full of hope, and yet that are being held back from, you know, accomplishing that hope, that dream.

To end, such words remind me of those arguing for constructive disengagement from Somalia by the international community. The idea is to free Somalis as much as possible from the distortions and obstacles inherent in foreign interference. It would only be then, they argue, that Somalis could face other challenges like that of clan politics and local and national governance openly and honestly. Unfortunately, for many reasons (some good and some bad), the international community remains stuck in the failed status quo of Somalia which supposedly keeps the country from falling further into the abyss, but also prevents Somalis from fully seizing control of their futures.

Variations of this predicament exist in Afghanistan and Sudan. Looking forward to another post, Niloufer and I hope to write more on the topic soon.

“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.

So any concrete signs that Khartoum and N’djamena are beginning a period of rapprochement are significant. Given numerous broken previous agreements though, this dialogue must be viewed with much skepticism. The United States and the international community can and should support this dialogue and the implementation of any new agreements in a few ways.

First, it should speak out about any human rights abuses being committed by Chadian opposition forces in Darfur or Darfuri rebel movements in Chad. The recent reports of attacks in Darfur by the Chadian opposition most likely are due to these forces responding to a possible deal between Khartoum and N’djamena. In its report on these incidents, the African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies (ACJPS) called on the government of Sudan and relevant UN representatives to initiate a full and thorough investigation. As it’s doubtful that the Sudanese government will heed such advice, the United States must be out front on this issue.

Second, the United States should also take up the recommendation of the UN Panel of Experts and push “the [United Nations] Security Council [to] explore possible ways to provide assistance to the…cross-border monitoring activities, including by expanding the mandate of UNAMID, providing it with the necessary resources and taking account of issues of command and control.”

Ultimately, an end to the Sudan/Chad proxy war could serve as a positive step forward in achieving peace and stability in Darfur and eastern Chad. In the short term, however, the agreement could be a catalyst for more violence against civilians as different armed groups adjust to the changing strategic realities. During this period, human rights monitors must be vigilant and any perpetrators of violence should be held accountable. Any deal by Khartoum and N’djamena will remain only ink on paper unless an agreement is immediately followed by monitoring and implementation supported by the international community.

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).

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).

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).