Darfur - an opportunity and a test

Cold, Lonely and Tired

I'm not feeling that way, at least not now, thank God, but I read that phrase in a book and it reminded me of times in the past when I did feel that way. It wasn't fun, to say the least. It was very difficult and confusing. I mean, the words aren't really there to describe my dark phases but I also know, deep in my heart, that what seemed dark to me is really just a cloud cover to someone else. I haven't hit the bottom of human despair and hopefully never will. Maybe I don't possess that depth to my character and emotions. Maybe I'm just too superficial. Either way, I'm glad to dodge that bullet, if indeed I have dodged it.

I try to help other people in my own feeble way. My heart goes out to people in suffering. I really admire that NBA Cleveland Cavaliers player Ira Newble for his effort to get signatures on an open letter to the government of China regarding its investments and business dealings in Sudan -- where hundreds of thousands have been killed and millions have become refugees in Darfur Province. I want to help. And I'm happy that he wants to help. Sports and politics are uneasy bedfellows but there is plenty of precedent for it; example: Jackie Robinson. Olympics and South Africa. Olympics and Black Power. That kid Newble is less self-absorbed, I assume, than the average athlete.

So today I seek more information about Darfur and have turned up several nuggets for consideration. The most interesting nugget so far has been the counter to the genocide portrayal. I'm not well-informed at this moment, but I am trying to become informed and to that end, I'm reading up on both sides of the story.

One fact about the Darfur situation is Darfur, a region in western Sudan, is in a continuing armed conflict, mostly between the Janjaweed (comprised of Arab-identifying Sudanese) and the non-Arab Sudanese.

My heart is moved and I can only imagine the plight of people who are living through this civil conflict. I don't have any particular link to be able to help right now, but I hope to find some way soon.

I also don't feel that we should go in militarily and deny the sovereignty of Darfur the way we did in Iraq. I especially don't want to see African leaders just steamrollered, since I'm African-American. However, is this a reason for non-intervention?

Who cares whether the Sudan government has a written plan to genocide Africans or not? They are sponsoring the killing of between 200,000 and 500,000 and still continuing. Let's condemn these killings with maximum intensity. Let's point the finger at the perpetrators and pursue the cease and desist of it immediately.

Clearly there are several points of view to be considered: Western, Arab and African sources need to be considered.


In the meantime, here's the info I've been reading:

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/05/30/asia/AS-GEN-China-US-Sudan.php
US briefs China on move to sanction Sudan for its role in Darfur
The Associated PressPublished: May 30, 2007

"BEIJING: The U.S. briefed China on Wednesday about the administration's plans to introduce a new U.N. Security Council resolution sanctioning Sudan's government for failing to do enough to halt the bloodshed in Darfur."

"The U.S., which has condemned the crisis in Darfur as genocide, has long pushed for a tougher stance against Sudan's government, while China has consistently opposed attempts to pressure Khartoum, saying the issue should be resolved through diplomatic negotiations.

"Hill refused to talk about the gap in their positions, and gave few additional details about his conversation with Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei. He said [that] he expressed support for China's decision to send engineers to Darfur to support a small force of U.N. peacekeepers that Sudan has agreed to."

http://www.darfurinfo.org/

From http://www.darfurgenocide.org/index.php

"The ongoing Darfur Genocide is no accident, no local tribal conflict. The genocide is the brutal plan of three men in the Sudanese national Government -- President Bashir, Vice-President Taha, Security Chief Gosh. Now they are spreading their system of terror to other African countries, including Chad and the Central African Republic . Yet our governments continue to cut deals with them - deals they repeatedly break. It is time for the US and European governments to stop appeasing genocide. We call on our governments to fully support the International Criminal Court to indict the perpetrators of genocide, and to help ensure their arrest. It is time for justice, because only justice can bring peace. "

http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/sudan/about/

A counter definition and opinion. Should we consider both sides of the story?

The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency by Mahmood Mamdani
NEWS STORY Friday, March 23, 2007
Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology at Columbia University. His most recent book is Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror.
This article originally appeared in the London Review of Books

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n05/mamd01_.html
There several letters to the editor regarding the article are published, as well as a response from Mamood Mamdani, published 26 April 2007.

Also published in full at http://www.sudanembassy.org/default.asp?page=viewstory&id=485

"At a press conference at the UN on 23 September 2004 Obasanjo was asked to pronounce on the violence in Darfur: was it genocide or not? His response was very clear:
Before you can say that this is genocide or ethnic cleansing, we will have to have a definite decision and plan and programme of a government to wipe out a particular group of people, then we will be talking about genocide, ethnic cleansing. What we know is not that. What we know is that there was an uprising, rebellion, and the government armed another group of people to stop that rebellion. That’s what we know. That does not amount to genocide from our own reckoning. It amounts to of course conflict. It amounts to violence. "

"The journalist in the US most closely identified with consciousness-raising on Darfur is the New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, often identified as a lone crusader on the issue. To peruse Kristof’s Darfur columns over the past three years is to see the reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart. It is a world where atrocities mount geometrically, the perpetrators so evil and the victims so helpless that the only possibility of relief is a rescue mission from the outside, preferably in the form of a military intervention."

"Newspaper writing on Darfur has sketched a pornography of violence. It seems fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in gruesome detail and chronicling the rise in the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology (‘race’) and, if not that, certainly in ‘culture’. This voyeuristic approach accompanies a moralistic discourse whose effect is both to obscure the politics of the violence and position the reader as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer."

"The camp of peace needs to come to a second realisation: that peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised – sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan, unravelling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror."

From the footnotes of the London Book Review article:
‘Those tribes in Darfur who support rebels have increasingly come to be identified as “African” and those supporting the government as the “Arabs”. A good example to illustrate this is that of the Gimmer, a pro-government African tribe that is seen by the African tribes opposed to the government as having been “Arabised”.’ On the other hand, this development was being promoted from the outside: ‘The Arab-African divide has also been fanned by the growing insistence on such divide in some circles and in the media.’

Darfur Crisis
By Mahmood Mamdani
29 October, 2004
Black Commentator
http://www.countercurrents.org/darfur-mamdani291004.htm

"What Should We Do?
First of all, we the civilians - and I address Africans and Americans in particular - should work against a military solution. We should work against a US intervention, whether direct or by proxy, and however disguised - as humanitarian or whatever. We should work against punitive sanctions. The lesson of Iraq sanctions is that you target individuals, not governments. Sanctions feed into a culture of terror, of collective punishment. Its victims are seldom its target. Both military intervention and sanctions are undesirable and ineffective."

"Finally, there is need to beware of groups who want a simple and comprehensive explanation, even if it is misleading; who demand dramatic action, even if it backfires; who have so come to depend on crisis that they risk unwittingly aggravating existing crisis. Often, they use the call for urgent action to silence any debate as a luxury. And yet, responsible action needs to be informed."

"For the African Union, Darfur is both an opportunity and a test. The opportunity is to build on the global concern over a humanitarian disaster in Darfur to set a humanitarian standard that must be observed by all, including America's allies in Africa. And the test is to defend African sovereignty in the face of official America's global "war on terror." On both counts, the first priority must be to stop the war and push the peace process."

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/41564
The politics of apologetics: genocide denial, Darfur version
Kwesi Kwaa Prah (2007-05-22)
Kwesi Kwaa Prah critiques Mahmood Mamdani's writings on Darfur. He posits: 'Mamdani indulges in technicist sophistry, tip-toeing nimbly around the real issues in Darfur and effectively providing solace to the Khartoum regime.'