A glimmer of real hope regarding the situation in Darfur!
I just got an email from those great peacemakers at the Catholic lay organization Sant’ Egidio to say that after a gathering at their homeplace in Rome,
- the representatives of the two movements opposing the government of Sudan, who interrupted the negotiates in December 2004, have committed themselves to return to the negotiations table under the aegis of the African Union, without preliminary conditions. This is a first step towards peace, so much needed by this people that is greatly suffering.
An agreement was achieved, once again, within the walls of an ancient house of prayer where, every day, the Gospel teaches how to become craftsmen of peace.
I don’t yet see the announcement in the English-language pages on their website. Actually, this “news” is not completely new, but was contained in, for example, this May 13 story from Reuters.
Many people in the human rights community worldwide have become very energized around the campaign to arrest, prosecute, and punish the perpetrators of the worst rights abuses in Darfur. I hope they become equally– or even more– energized around the campaign to find a decent, sustainable, rights-respecting peace for the peoples of Darfur and of all of Sudan.
The more I study the phenomenon of atrocities in our world, the more clear it becomes to me that atrocitious violence on a scale that commands the attention of the whole world is committed primarily in situations of grave political conflict, whether that conflict is internal to a country, or straddles national borders.
It is in circumstances of grave, violent conflict that the normal (thank God!) human inhibitions against the killing and desecration of other human persons can rapidly dissolve… People in such circumstances can all too easily become entangled in frenzies of killing and atrocious violence of a type that in normal times they would find, quite rightly, to be quite abhorrent. War is itself a violent, tortured universe to inhabit, one that itself imposes grave rights abuses on everyone in its path.
Therefore, the best way to end the atrocities is to end the war. After the war has ended and people are on the path to the kind of sustainable peace in which their remaining differences can be solved through equality-based, non-violent, and rights-respecting means– that is the time to (as and when the people of that community choose to) explore issues of “accountability” about the past.
Many of the people worldwide who shout for “prosecutions!” have little idea of what sustained, atrocity-laden conflict does to societies and to the people who constitute them. From their little bubble-universes they think that a pertformance in a courtroom can somehow, “magically”, make everything right again.
Actually, building peace is both much harder–and at one level, much simpler– than that.
Let’s therefore keep the focus on doing all we can, including prayer, to help the peace negotiations over Darfur to succeed.
(P.s. You can read a little about the remarkable role that Sant’ Egidio played in shepherding the crucial peace negotiations in Mozambique, 1990-92, in this paper of mine. Also, here.)
Helena,
Have you seen the LA Times report, or the Village Voice article by Nat Hentoff writing about that same report, regarding the CIA connection with the government of Lieutenant General Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir? Hentoff is saying that this connection is the cause of the administration’s paralysis on the Darfur issue.
What’s going on here? Apologies in advance, since I have not been as up to speed on this issue as I’d like.
Vivion, what do you mean by paralysis? Do you expect your US government to go and sort things out everywhere in the world? Do you know that from where the rest of us sit, there is no difference between your liberal imperialism and the kind that you disapprove of?
In Darfur, no doubt, the horsemen are on the way out and the farmers are taking over. The world has taken the side of the farmers, which is probably just as well, because they always win in the end. But the enormous sense of self-righteousness that is so common in the US in relation to Darfur is completely inappropriate. It is absurd but it is also dangerous.
Dominic,
First, you may not realize this, but your tone comes across in print as extremely sarcastic and negative. I am not perfect in my postings, and let my emotions out more than I’d like, but I do try to make an effort to be civil and apologize when it’s due. I’d appreciate assurance that you are trying to do the same. This is not the first time I’ve had this impression from your replies to my posts.
Second, it seems as though you are assuming that I am a liberal imperialist, which is not true. Please do not make further assumptions about my political inclinations before you write anything.
Third, the point I was trying to make was that it appears that the CIA is negatively implicated in what is going on in Darfur, and I was asking whether Helena (or anyone) knew more about that. I would assume you would disapprove of CIA involvement as much as great galloping liberals.
Fourth, may I politely inquire what you think should be happening? Or are you seeing it as merely some structural conflict resulting from shifting to an agrarian production system (some irony here), which we should all view dispassionately?
-v.
Vivion,
I think my tone is probably due to fear rather than sarcasm. As far away as it is from South AFrica, I fear an invasion of Sudan. And I have been to Sudan, many years ago.
I think your fourth point is the one that counts. When people are killing each other it means that you have lond since lost your best options to assist. If I may cut briefly to our country, you may know that there are uprisings or at least demonstrations taking place all over South Africa. Some “left-wing” people would like to rush off and assist the people. Can you see how daft that is? If they wanted to lead they should have been there with the people before it got to this. If they go now they just look stupid.
Then if you do want to get involved with organising the people, you must have a good idea of what is happening. If it is basically a class stuggle between nomads and settlers then you must know that and not treat it like something else. Genocide done by Nazis against the Jews and others is one thing and Darfur is not the same thing.
Your original mention of the CIA was to associate it with the Sudanese government. I took it that you were denouncing both. I don’t think that helps. It looks like you are trying to get up a list of bad guys, using history not to understand but to create a charge-sheet.
I wonder if you know how poor Sudan is? Or how huge it is? Or the extraordinary geography of it, and the difficulty of shifting stuff around it?
People, perhaps not you, make furious demands that the Sudanese government does this or that, under threats. To me it seems ridiculous. People portray the Sudanes government as orchestrating this and that. Maybe it is, but I’d like to know how.
Dominic,
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I’ll confess my gross ignorance of the situation, history, cultural context of Sudan from the beginning; my original post was in the spirit of inquiry. I am not condemning a particular side; my assumption is that if the CIA is involved, that’s often a bad thing. So I’m trying to find out what’s up with the CIA involvement.
I also understand that there are some cases where it is impossible to do anything constructive to help. Do you believe this to be such a case? (Believe me, I am the first one to be suspicious of a military solution to anything, if that is what you are afraid of.)
A lot of lefties over here are condemning the lack of U.S. action (of whaterver sort) in Sudan, and portraying it as racist and hypocritical.
If I were you, I wouldn’t be afraid of an invasion any time soon, since I don’t think the U.S. has a significant strategic interest in the Sudan, quite apart from the fact that I don’t think the American public would support it. The question I feel I need to sort out is what, if anything, can be done?
On second reading, it seems pretty clear that you don’t think anything could or should be done.
Which just leaves the CIA question to be answered, as in, are we mucking things up even more than they would be otherwise?
“A lot of lefties over here are condemning the lack of U.S. action”. I’ve seen some of that. It scares me.
I wouldn’t want to leave it at “nothing can be done”. There needs to be much more understanding in the USA about countries where your government is interfering (which is nearly all of them), and about the way the world works and its history, and then informed anti-imperialist solidarity that looks forward and works patiently over a long period of time and doesn’t assume that it can go around firefighting.
At present it seems that the huge power of destruction that you have is set in motion by very small groups of lobbyists in Washington.
Sudan was labeled a rogue state at some stage and Clinton hit a drug factory in Khartoum with a cruise missile. But the US always wants to have its cake and eat it so no doubt there were back channels, which would have been the “CIA” contacts you are talking about. One result was that the US got Sudan to expel Osama bin Laden. Bashir has since said he thought that was very stupid of the US to insist on this, because the Sudanese were keeping very good tabs on bin Laden and making sure he did not get up to any mischief. The rest is history, as they say.
The biggest effect you can have is right there in the USA. This is the kind of solidarity that people tend to ask for. Get your government to behave properly. Don’t send Bolton to the UN. That sort of thing.
Vivion– I’m sure the Bush administration–like the Clintonites before them– has all kinds of relationships with the Sudanese government. Back to the time when the Clintonites persuaded the Sudanese to kick Osama Bin L out of the country…
I guess I share some of D’s concern at the well-orchestrated campaigns by many “liberals” in the US and elsewhere that the US/UN/someone should “do something!” about Darfur… It does look suspiciously like the war-drum beating that occurred around the rights-related fears expressed in ’98-’99 around the situation in Kosovo, which led to the highly misguided and illegal US military campaign against Serbia… Which, as you may remember, itself led to the very ethnic cleansing in Kosovo that the US had said it was fearful of… and has left Kosovo in a pretty bad situation even today.
“Do something”– yes: support peacemaking diplomacy and the rights of all Sudanese to a decent, peaceful life with a decent livelihood.
People simply cannot have even their basic rights (e.g. to life and to physical integrity of the person) assured so long as the place where they live is ensnared in a long-running armed conflict. Too many “rights” activists living in the comfortably secure west forget this, and hence start throwing their weight around like self-appointed rights absolutists.
Hence the baying of some of them for the war in Kosovo in ’98-’99– and their apparent baying for escalation again now, in Darfur.
If we’re sincerely concerned about situations where massive numbers of people have actually been killed in war-zones, we should look first and foremost at eastern DRC… But there, the prime provoker/perpetrator is the Kagame government in Rwanda, which many guilt-ridden westerners are still reluctant to confront over this issue, even rehtorically, and which indeed acts as a major US government cat’s-paw in several places throughout the continent, including Darfur.
Peace, decent livelihoods, and the “west” to stop butting in (and above all, to stop selling arms!): I think that’s what most of the peoples of Africa basically want.
Thanks to both Helena and Dominic for your long, thoughtful comments.
There needs to be much more understanding in the USA about countries where your government is interfering (which is nearly all of them), and about the way the world works and its history, and then informed anti-imperialist solidarity that looks forward and works patiently over a long period of time and doesn’t assume that it can go around firefighting.
I can only sigh and shake my head. Of course there does. It won’t ever happen. People aren’t interested, or simply have no idea the extent to which the U.S. is involved around the world. Then there’s the sheer magnitude of trying to get an intelligent handle on every country affected by U.S. policy, assuming one has good intentions!
Finally, assuming a populace perfectly informed about every country in the entire globe, why would we think we should do anything differently? The Democrats aren’t much different in the long run than the Republicans are; they represent imperialism with a nicer face. And that counts for something like 80-90% of the public.
I think it would be the same in any country that turned into a superpower. It’s the nature of power of that sort. The U.S.S.R. wasn’t any better. Nor would China be, if it ever knocks us out of the running.
In the meantime, I’ve learned something from both of you, and feel I have a little bit more to go on in evaluating the issue. So that’s a start.
I agree with Helena and Dominic up to a point. I’m skeptical about any quick-fix solutions to long-running conflicts, and intervention (especially if directed only at the immediate problem rather than the underlying causes) often creates more problems than it solves.
Darfur is just such a case. The conflict there, like the one in the south, has been going on intermittently since the 1950s. It’s the classic Cain v. Abel, with farmers and pastoralists fighting over a scarce resource (land). The current flareup has multiple causes: a land squeeze resulting from increasing population and irredentism; the rising expectations of outlying regions in the wake of the Machakos accords; the central government’s desire to crush same; patronage networks between the janjaweed and the parties in power in Khartoum; the identification of the Fur with the opposition figure Hassan el-Turabi; and the various regional interests of Chad and Eritrea. The situation isn’t completely under the Sudanese government’s control, and it isn’t something that can be solved permanently by putting troops on the ground. The only real solution is one that (1) resolves the political status of the region vis-a-vis Khartoum, and (2) provides sufficient long-term developmental aid to increase the carrying capacity of the land and alleviate population pressure. Both of those will require at least some degree of cooperation from the Sudanese government, which “furious demands” aren’t likely to facilitate.
At the same time, it’s sometimes necessary to put out a fire. There are occasions, such as when genocide and/or ethnic cleansing are in progress, when solving the immediate problem is an imperative not only to preserve human life but to prevent the conflict from spiraling out of control. Ideally the people of the affected country would take measures on their own, but sometimes they won’t or can’t.
For instance, to take an example that Helena raised, if we had acted in Rwanda in 1994, we might not have had to deal with Kagame and the DRC civil war afterward, and I doubt the Tutsis would have cared much whether their butts were saved by the West or someone else. I don’t think categorical opposition to intervention on ideological grounds makes any more sense than categorical support of intervention; instead, the decision depends on the urgency of the situation, balancing of harms, the desires of the parties, potential for regional instability, etc. The decision to intervene in the Balkans wasn’t carefully thought out and proved disastrous in many ways, but the decision not to intervene in Rwanda may fall into the same category.
Jonathan, greetings.
Was it not the case that the UN was intervening in Rwanda and bungled it?
Vivion, if you look for a maximalist position of conscientising the whole population of the USA about all the countries of the world and all its history you are bound to conclude it is too much.
Why don’t you rather start at the minimum end. Take Sudan. How many hostile imperialist lobbyists and officials are there in Washington working on Sudan? Ten, twenty, a hundred if you include a lot of part-timers? How difficult would it be to knit together a network that would match the warmongers with equal or greater numbers, and better knowledge, and peaceful intentions – people like Jonathan? Not very.
This is how we used to work in London. I can’t remember all the names but there were small specialist organisation for Namibia, Mozambique, Angola, and Zimbabwe and many specialist groups following different aspects of the South African struggle. All these were known to each other and produced periodicals and events, published books, and had comment ready for the media. Some were think-tanks or lobby groups. Others were membership organisations with local structures and annual conferences electing a national leadership.
You get down to work now. This is no time for sighing.
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