Author: Helena

Eight days ago on that Sunday I was still reeling from my recent trip to Jordan, dealing with my chaotic travel home from Philadelphia, etc., and come to think of it I don’t think I even read the WaPo that day. I should have, because it carried Emily Wax’s extremely interesting piece 5 Truths about Darfur. (Hat-tip to a Jeffersonian friend who urged me to read it.)
She is the WaPo’s East Africa bureau chief, and a reporter on Africa whose writing I have come to admire over the past few years.
She writes,

much of the conventional wisdom surrounding the conflict — including the religious, ethnic and economic factors that drive it — fails to match the realities on the ground. Tens of thousands have died and some 2.5 million have been displaced, with no end to the conflict in sight.

Note, please, her carefully non-alarmist representation of the number of people who have died because of the conflict in Darfur: “tens of thousands”. That, as opposed to the decidedly alarmist figures that are bandied about with no accompanying evidence… I have even seen some unauthenticated reports of “200,000 killed”.
Even one person killed because of political violence is bad enough. “Tens of thousands”, and we should be very concerned indeed. But Wax is close to the ground, and close to the aid coordinators and AU officers who are probably the people who have the best sources of information inside Darfur on the true scale of the casualties.
As a matter of basic integrity and ethics in human-rights work opr journalism, one should always try to get the best authenticated sources of information possible, and when using estimates of casualties to err on the side of conservatism
Anyway, here’s how Wax continues:.

Here are five truths to challenge the most common misconceptions about Darfur:
1 Nearly everyone is Muslim…
2 Everyone is black
Although the conflict has also been framed as a battle between Arabs and black Africans, everyone in Darfur appears dark-skinned, at least by the usual American standards. The true division in Darfur is between ethnic groups, split between herders and farmers. Each tribe gives itself the label of “African” or “Arab” based on what language its members speak and whether they work the soil or herd livestock. Also, if they attain a certain level of wealth, they call themselves Arab.
Sudan melds African and Arab identities. As Arabs began to dominate the government in the past century and gave jobs to members of Arab tribes, being Arab became a political advantage; some tribes adopted that label regardless of their ethnic affiliation. More recently, rebels have described themselves as Africans fighting an Arab government. Ethnic slurs used by both sides in recent atrocities have riven communities that once lived together and intermarried.
“Black Americans who come to Darfur always say, ‘So where are the Arabs? Why do all these people look black?’ ” said Mahjoub Mohamed Saleh, editor of Sudan’s independent Al-Ayam newspaper. “The bottom line is that tribes have intermarried forever in Darfur. Men even have one so-called Arab wife and one so-called African. Tribes started labeling themselves this way several decades ago for political reasons. Who knows what the real bloodlines are in Darfur?”
3 It’s all about politics
Although analysts have emphasized the racial and ethnic aspects of the conflict in Darfur, a long-running political battle between Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir and radical Islamic cleric Hassan al-Turabi may be more relevant.
A charismatic college professor and former speaker of parliament, Turabi has long been one of Bashir’s main political rivals and an influential figure in Sudan. He has been fingered as an extremist; before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks Turabi often referred to Osama bin Laden as a hero. More recently, the United Nations and human rights experts have accused Turabi of backing one of Darfur’s key rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement, in which some of his top former students are leaders…
“Darfur is simply the battlefield for a power struggle over Khartoum,” said Ghazi Suleiman, a Sudanese human rights lawyer. “That’s why the government hit back so hard. They saw Turabi’s hand, and they want to stay in control of Sudan at any cost.”
4 This conflict is international
China and Chad have played key roles in the Darfur conflict.
In 1990, Chad’s Idriss Deby came to power by launching a military blitzkrieg from Darfur and overthrowing President Hissan Habre. Deby hails from the elite Zaghawa tribe, which makes up one of the Darfur rebel groups trying to topple the government. So when the conflict broke out, Deby had to decide whether to support Sudan or his tribe. He eventually chose his tribe.
Now the Sudanese rebels have bases in Chad; I interviewed them in towns full of Darfurians who tried to escape the fighting. Meanwhile, Khartoum is accused of supporting Chad’s anti-Deby rebels, who have a military camp in West Darfur. (Sudan’s government denies the allegations.) Last week, bands of Chadian rebels nearly took over the capital, N’Djamena. When captured, some of the rebels were carrying Sudanese identification.
Meanwhile, Sudan is China’s fourth-biggest supplier of imported oil, and that relationship carries benefits…
5 The “genocide” label made it worse

This portion is particularly interesting. Wax makes, basically, two arguments under this heading. Firstly,

in September 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell referred to the conflict as a “genocide.” Rather than spurring greater international action, that label only seems to have strengthened Sudan’s rebels; they believe they don’t need to negotiate with the government and think they will have U.S. support when they commit attacks. Peace talks have broken down seven times, partly because the rebel groups have walked out of negotiations. And Sudan’s government has used the genocide label to market itself in the Middle East as another victim of America’s anti-Arab and anti-Islamic policies.

In other words, Powell’s attaching of the ‘genocide’ label has been extremely politically polarizing within Sudan, hardening the attitudes of both “sides” to the conflict in Darfur and setting back the chances for reaching a negotiated peace…
And secondly, she makes this,quite distinct argument under the rubric of No. 5:

Perhaps most counterproductive, the United States has failed to follow up with meaningful action. “The word ‘genocide’ was not an action word; it was a responsibility word,” Charles R. Snyder, the State Department’s senior representative on Sudan, told me in late 2004. “There was an ethical and moral obligation, and saying it underscored how seriously we took this.” The Bush administration’s recent idea of sending several hundred NATO advisers to support African Union peacekeepers falls short of what many advocates had hoped for.
“We called it a genocide and then we wine and dine the architects of the conflict by working with them on counterterrorism and on peace in the south,” said Ted Dagne, an Africa expert for the Congressional Research Service. “I wish I knew a way to improve the situation there. But it’s only getting worse.”

I think Wax is probably right here. After all, the whole point of the 1948 Convention on Genocide was that it actually obligates its signatories to act to “prevent, suppress, or punish” any act of genocide regardless of where in the world it is committed… That was why there was such a big fuss made in 1994 over whether the Clinton administration would declare that the killings in Rwanda constituted a genocide, or not. At least Clinton and his people seemed to take quite seriously the commitment that, if the Rwandan killings did indeed constitute genocide, then the US would be obligated to intervene to suppress that genocide.

As for the Bush administration– as we all know– it takes the power and truth-value of words extremely lightly when it chooses. I can imagine Karl Rove saying something like,”Sure, call it a genocide if that seems politically advantageous to do, here at home, with all these people clamoring for it. But you don’t think we’re going to do anything about it, do you?”
And thus, the value of the whole approach pioneered by the authors of the Genocide Convention has been completely annulled. (Rove: “Who cares? The Genocide Convention is no better than the Kyoto Treaty or the NPT, is it?”)
…Anyway, belatedly, I’d like to thank Emily Wax for a well-grounded and well-argued article there. I wish I’d read it earlier.

Let us first focus our energies on making sure that we and our governments are doing all we can to get literally life-saving basic humanitarian aid to the people of Darfur. They are women, men, and children with pressing physical, social, and psychological needs. They are not a “cause” to be taken up (or dropped) by well-meaning outsiders.
And yet, the international “community” has not yet responded in even a halfway acceptable way to the pleas of the World Food Program and others for enough basic food aid to be sent there.
The NYT reported Saturday that the WFP,

said it had received just a third of the $746 million it had requested from donor nations for all of its operations in Sudan. As a result, individual rations that include grain, blended foods, beans, oil, sugar and salt for people in Darfur, where a brutal ethnic and political conflict has raged since 2003, will be reduced from 2,100 calories a day to 1,050 calories — about half the level the agency recommends.

This is beyond tragic. It is also, surely, the very first thing we should be campaigning about. Go to Oxfam’s site and send them a donation. Then call your representatives in Congress or your local parliament and tell them to quadruple the government’s food aid to Darfur-– and to do it now.
Then, we have to recognize that it is not only the pro-government forces in Sudan who are impeding the delivery of such aid as is available. This sobering press release issued last Friday by he UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) states:

Over the past few weeks aid workers operating for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and U.N. agencies have come under continuous attacks and harassment by armed groups in the area of Shangil Tobayi, Tawilla and Kutum in North Darfur. Several reports indicate that many of these attacks have been waged by SLA factions [that is, factions of an anti-government force ~HC]. Armed robbery and hijackings have endangered humanitarian workers assisting over 450,000 vulnerable people living in the area. Moreover, credible information point to the use of hijacked vehicles for military purposes by these armed groups. This is unacceptable and contrary to International Humanitarian Law.
The SRSG [Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General] Jan Pronk appeals to the SLM/A to take all necessary steps to assure the safety of humanitarian personnel and property in areas under their control and the consistent implementation of agreements. Unless these attacks and harassment stop immediately, the U.N. and its partners will be obliged to suspend all relief assistance to this particular area till effective safety for humanitarian personnel and assets is guaranteed. The U.N. will hold responsible the armed groups, including those related to the SLA, and their leaders, for the failure to assist the vulnerable populations under their control.

I noted, too, that on last Friday’s BBC t.v. news report, Orla Guerin– whose reporting from Darfur I had earlier criticized– spoke openly about Darfuri villagers having been expelled violently from their village or villages by the rebels, and having sought refuge inside one of the bases for the AU forces. She spoke as a crowd of the expelled villagers could be seen behind her in the frame…
Now, of course, there is the additional political development of the nearly-secured peace agreement between the Sudan government and the rebels, that AU negotiators have been working on for two years now.
Yesterday, the Government of Sudan expressed its acceptance of the deal. But today, the two main rebel groups still seemed unprepared to accept it. In this piece, Reuters’ Estelle Shirbon writes:

Chances of a peace agreement for Sudan’s Darfur region looked slim on Monday despite a 48-hour extension to negotiations, observers said, citing rebel inflexibility.
Mediators from the African Union (AU) agreed in the early hours after a deadline expired to give the government of Sudan and two rebel groups until midnight Tuesday to agree on a proposed peace plan, the result of two years of talks.
But on Monday morning, Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha left the Nigerian capital Abuja, venue of the talks. Taha had arrived three weeks ago and held face-to-face meetings with rebel leaders that had raised hopes of a deal.
A diplomat who is closely involved in the talks said Taha left because his latest meetings with rebel leaders had given him the impression they were not open to substantial talks.
“His meetings with the (rebel) movements yesterday were so bad. They were, frankly, so insulting to the government,” said the diplomat, who described his mood as “depressed”.

So it looks as though the rebel leaders’ inflexibility may now be consigning the people of Darfur to further months or even years of civil war. This, when we know that far too many of the civilian people of Darfur have already had their homes, communities, and livelihoods wrecked by the gunmen from both pro- and anti-government groups… Surely, the most urgent imperative should be to find a formula that will allow everyone to de-escalate, disarm, return to their home communities, and start rebuilding lives and livelihoods shattered by the violence!
I have to ask whether the rebel groups’ intransigence was perhaps stoked by the one-sidedly anti-Khartoum tenor of much of the Darfur-related mobilization in the US over the past few weeks? (Did that mobilization perhaps give the rebels the idea they could get more political support from Washington than they have been able to win, so far, from the African Union? If so, I suspect they will be sorely disappointed…)
Wouldn’t it, honestly, have been better if from the get-go the people involved in the US “Save Darfur” coalition had focused their efforts somewhat less on one-sided finger-pointing, and much more on the urgent need for solid humanitarian aid, and the creation of the political climate of civil peace which is the only climate in which such aid can both be delivered in the shorter term and help to rebuild and heal war-torn communities over the longer term?
By the way, Jonathan Edelstein recently had a good post on the draft peace agreement out of Abuja, on his blog, here.
His analysis of the draft was this:

If I’m reading between the lines accurately, the proposal falls somewhat short of what the southern Sudanese got in the Machakos protocol, offering some degree of local control over land and resources but not a full-fledged autonomous government or a secession option. This is probably to be expected. Unlike the south, Darfur has a significant pro-government constituency (the pastoralists), and the rebel movements can’t claim to speak for the region as a whole. In addition, the Darfur rebels aren’t as militarily powerful as the SPLA/M, and thus don’t have the leverage to overcome Khartoum’s opposition to regional autonomy. The AU draft is, in practical terms, the most that the rebel movements are likely to get.

Finally, maybe the only thing we can do at this late hour in the diplomacy is to pray for peace and rebuilding in Darfur… And to hope that wisdom, compassion, mercy, generosity of spirit, and restraint can guide the actions of all concerned… Including our own.