The Rumble Continues - Save Darfur Can't Save Darfur

by Michael Bear

category: Humanitarian Relief

Published January 27, 2009 @ 04:50PM PT

The Save Darfur Coalition can't actually save Darfur.

Now, I admit that I wanted to stir up a little trouble - why else highlight the recent statement by John Holmes, the UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, that groups like Save Darfur do more harm than good.

In response to which my co-blogger Michelle wrote an impassioned defense of Darfur advocacy groups:

"The political will to end genocide and mass atrocity is not organic --- it must be demanded. While Save Darfur clearly exaggerated the death toll in Darfur in its 2006 poster campaign, the collective efforts of a million activists that year put Darfur on the political radar in this country, and have kept it there ever since."

And I agree - the Darfur advocacy movement has done tremendous work making Darfur into a national and international political issue.  Yet often 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.

The traditional humanitarian critique of Save Darfur and others is that they don't understand the reality of the situation on the ground.

For instance, both John Holmes and Michelle refer to incidents when Save Darfur overstated the number of people killed in the conflict.

Which might seem like a trivial point, except it gets at something deeper - if you don't understand the facts, even the most basic facts, it's hard to offer useful recommendations on how to end the slaughter.

As David Rieff explained in a June 2007 OpEd in the LA Times, when groups like Save Darfur were advocating for outside military intervention:

"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....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."

In all the activist rhetoric about genocide, one critical fact is lost - as bad as the situation is, it could be far worse.  If you don't understand this simple point, you don't understand the stakes involved.

For the most part, the Sudanese Government has not unleashed large scale attacks against the millions huddled in IDP camps.

(There are exceptions, of course - for instance, Government troops attacked Kalma camp in late August, killing and wounding a large number of civilians.)

Hundreds of thousands of people have already been killed, but the vast majority of these deaths occured early in the conflict.  It's been years since we've seen killings on that scale.

Similarly, although humanitarian agencies face crippling bureaucratic impediments, the fact is that - for the most part - they are able to operate.  According to the most recent UN Darfur Humanitarian Profile, the UN, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and NGOs delivered food to 3.4 million people in October.  Almost 2.5 million people had access to primary health care.

A concerted attack on large IDP camp like Kalma, which houses as many as 90,000 people, could make Srebrenica seem like a day in the park. If the Sudanese Government ever did force the UN and NGOs to leave, then millions of people would risk starvation.

Any call for action must be weighed against the possible consequences on the ground.

To give credit where credit is due, Darfur advocacy groups have recently become far more sophisticated in this respect.  Today, Save Darfur and other groups are no long calling for a military intervention, but instead for more limited goals.

They want the US to 1) appoint a high level envoy, 2) lead a coordinated international effort to pressure the Sudanese Government and enforce existing bans on offensive military flights and arms trading, and 3) establish mechanisms for the prevention of future genocides.

Yet this in turn gets to the greatest misconception of all.  It's not just that Save Darfur can't save Darfur - the US can't save Darfur, and Europe can't save Darfur.  There's no single policy or combination of policies which can be adopted in Washington or London or Brussels which will end the conflict.

There's no silver bullet, there's no magic cure.

The simple fact is that neither the US nor Europe has the leverage or the means to force the Sudanese Government or the rebels to negotiate and uphold a sustainable peace.

For instance, it took over two decades to end the most recent conflict in South Sudan, a conflict that claimed far more lives than Darfur; a conflict which only ended when both sides realized they had nothing to gain by continuing to fight.

That said, there is a role for advocacy in all of this.  The US has some influence, although limited - some policies are more effective than others.  Furthermore, as Michelle herself said:

"[T]hese things do not happen overnight --- social movements develop in fits and starts, leaps forward followed by missteps and stumbles. But we have made progress, and each small victory gets us closer to the ultimate goal: The end of hostilities and the restoration of peace and stability for the people of Darfur."

I just think these things take, far, far longer than Save Darfur and other organizations seem to realize.  The conflict in Darfur has dragged on for six years, and there's no sign that it will soon end.

[Photo blatantly stolen from Michelle's post]