Advocates or Humanitarians - Kristof and Save Darfur

by Michael Bear

category: Humanitarian Relief

Published January 14, 2009 @ 10:57AM PT

Just to set the record straight, in case anyone was wondering - Save Darfur does many things, but it is not a humanitarian agency.

Instead, it's a worldwide coalition that raises awareness and advocates on behalf of the people of Darfur.  Don't get me wrong, this is incredibly important; that said, it doesn't directly deliver assistance, nor does it have staff on the ground in Darfur.

The only reason I bring this up is that there seems some confusion in high places, as shown by the recent to-do between the Bush Administration and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

A senior Administration official recently framed the US decision to airlift supplies to Darfur as "further evidence that Nicholas Kristof's portrayal...of this administration's response to the genocide in Darfur was inaccurate."

He was referring to Kristof's New York Times column from December 27th, outlining the various actions that Bush could have taken to put pressure on Sudan's Government, but did not.

(Among the measures Kristof listed were blocking mobile and internet access in Khartoum, an ever-tighter blockade on Port Sudan, and finally attacking Sudanese military aircraft in Darfur.)

Anyhows, as the LA Times reported:

"Kristof reported that these options were ruled out by Hadley and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Hadley acknowledged Monday that military responses had been considered and rejected, but he said the decision was driven by pleas from leading church, advocacy and humanitarian organizations that feared such actions would only make things worse for Darfuris. That came as news to the Save Darfur Coalition, an umbrella organization for Darfur advocacy groups that has long favored a tougher response by Washington, and whose spokesman told this page on Tuesday that the coalition hadn’t been consulted by the administration."

Kristof responded by saying: "Doesn’t it see particularly pusillanimous for the White House to blame its own craven paralysis on humanitarian groups that it hasn’t even consulted?"

And here we get into a little Talmudic exegesis - Kristof seems to imply that not consulting Save Darfur is the same as not consulting "humanitarian groups".

Yet one has little do with the other. Save Darfur is an advocacy coalition, not a humanitarian group.  If you want to know the humanitarian impact of various policies, than it's better to ask an operational aid agency than an advocacy coalition.

(And yes - I have been waiting to use the phrase "Talmudic exegesis" for weeks.  Months.  I know, I do need a life.)

All of which has a rather tempest in a teapot feel to it, except for the fact that it points to a fundamental difference between humanitarian organizations (including the UN and NGOs) and advocacy organizations.

Namely, that humanitarian organizations are often quite restricted in what they can publicly say - a humanitarian agency with staff in Darfur has to think twice about publicly criticizing the Sudanese Government, for fear the Government will either harass or arrest the NGO's staff, or force the NGO to close their programs.

Advocacy organizations - having no actual presence in Darfur - are under no such constraint.  Which at times leads to tension between humanitarian and advocacy organizations, especially over calls for military intervention in Darfur.

As David Rieff wrote in the LA Times in 2007, when calls for a no-fly zone were increasing:

"The crisis in Darfur has exposed many fault lines. One of the cruelest is the emerging divide between the human rights activists grouped around the Save Darfur coalition in the U.S. (and S.O.S. Darfur in Western Europe) and the humanitarian workers in relief groups working on the ground in Darfur and across the border in Chad with refugees and internally displaced people.

...

Generally, humanitarian aid groups see nothing wrong with advocacy organizations like Save Darfur campaigning to mobilize world public opinion about the plight of the Darfurians (though some of the mainline relief NGOs, notably Doctors Without Borders, have disputed the assertion that what’s going on in Darfur is, in fact, genocide). But they are quick to point out that human rights activists do not remain on the ground in Darfur and do not have the burden of looking after the immediate needs of the refugees and the internally displaced. To the relief groups, the chief danger of an outside military intervention is that, to paraphrase that infamous remark by the American officer in Vietnam, the interveners will destroy Darfur in order to save it."

Something to keep in mind as Darfur advocacy towards the incoming Obama Administration begins in earnest.

[N.B. - Save Darfur does include humanitarian organizations among its 180 coalition members, but is not itself a humanitarian organization.]

[Photo from Wikimedia Commons]