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.

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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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