Rumble, Baby, Rumble: Some Defend Save Darfur

by Michael Bear

category: Humanitarian Relief

Published February 01, 2009 @ 10:02AM PT

My recent post - Save Darfur Can't Save Darfur - has apparently not gone over well in some quarters.  Especially my assertion that:

"[O]ften it seems Darfur activists are raising expectations they can never hope to meet.

Any organization which claims it can save Darfur is courting hubris, at the least.  At the end of the day, Darfur - and Sudan - have to save themselves."

First, David Sullivan at the Enough Project responded:

"So when Michael suggests that neither the U.S. nor Europe has the leverage to bring peace to Darfur, I wonder how he’s come to such a conclusion. Nobody knows exactly how much leverage the United States, Europe, or any combination of governments may have against Khartoum and the Darfur rebels, because there has been no consistent effort to use that leverage and lead a viable peace process, such as that which helped to resolve Sudan’s North-South civil war....

[I]f activists don’t keep trying to save Darfur, no one else will, and from South Africa to the American civil rights movement, we have seen again and again that activists can accomplish things that once seemed impossible."

Followed soon thereafter by my genocide co-blogger Michelle, who refuted my post point by point, including this criticism:

"Civilians in Darfur are caught in the crossfire of an increasingly complex rebel movement and government counterinsurgency methods that not only fail to differentiate between civilian and military installations, but purposefully and systematically target civilians. Would you have said that the victims of the Holocaust should save themselves? Or Rwanda? Cambodia? How is Darfur different?"

An exchange which has been chronicled by Steve Bloomfield on his blog Things Seen and Heard... - which is only fair, seeing as it was Steve's interview with John Holmes, the UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, which kicked off this particular debate.

According to Steve's recent post:

"I once had a long – and sadly off-the-record – chat with one of the leading Darfur campaigners in the UK. Why, I asked, did he insist on calling the crisis a ‘genocide’? After a bit of back and forth, he admitted that it wasn’t really a genocide now. But, he added, “what you’ve got to understand Steve is that we only get 30 seconds on the Today programme.”

My problem with describing it as a genocide is that genocides have have simple solutions. You stop the genocidaires. The Holocaust would have ended if Hitler had been overthrown. The Rwandan gencoide would have come to a halt if the Hutu militias had been disarmed. But the crisis in Darfur won’t stop if the janjaweed and Bashir’s armed forces are forcibly disarmed or if the Khartoum government is overthrown. It is a nasty, messy war with many players.

In short, it is a complex problem which requires a complex solution. If we describe it in simple terms we will continue to come up with simple solutions."

Needless to say, I don't quite agree with Michelle and David.  My response in a few days, once I'm back from Garissa-town...

[The Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle - Photo from boxingclassics.net]