Saturday, February 19, 2005
Darfur: support the rebels. posted by Richard Seymour
So, the UN won't call it genocide, but it "may be no less serious and heinous than genocide" according to the UN's Commission of Enquiry for Darfur in a report written by Louise Arbour. Arbour, to be sure, is a partisan spokesperson. Both she and her successor in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY, Tribunal) helped Nato avoid facing trial for war crimes committed during the assault on Serbia, specifically the targeting of the civilian infrastructure. Nevertheless, the crimes of the Sudanese government are not in doubt, and have been documented extensively . For the workshy, they include summary executions, torture, rape , the horrifyingly standard array of repressive measures by a government seeking to secure its territorial control. (There are similarities with what is being done to Aceh by the Indonesian government, similar political dynamics hold, although the differences ought to be too obvious to bear repetition).Some, however, have been led astray by the calls in some quarters for war on Sudan. It is a red herring, since it seems highly unlikely that this will take place. Before getting back to that, it is worth looking at some of what has been said about Darfur of late.
Not more than six months ago, the US was accusing others of complicity in the Darfur genocide. Aid workers retorted that the US was hyping up genocide fears to serve its own interests. The Economist reported that the Darfur rebels murder too , which borders on pedantry - since when did insurgents have bloodless hands? Mercedes Taty of Medicin Sans Frontieres said :
I don’t think that we should be using the word "genocide" to describe this conflict. Not at all. This can be a semantic discussion, but nevertheless, there is no systematic target — targeting one ethnic group or another one.
It doesn’t mean either that the situation in Sudan isn’t extremely serious by itself. But, I think it’s important not to mix things and not to standardize our words. So, I would say no, I can not speak about genocide.
Nevertheless, MSF described an extremely needful situation. Malaria, starvation and inadequate water supplies combined with displacement and militia attacks to create vast numbers of starving, desperate people.
Despite the fact that ceasefires have been negotiated with the secular Sudanese Liberation Army/Movement (SLA/M), and the Islamist Justice and equality movement (Jem), the Sudanese government is known to be routinely ignoring the conditions of the ceasefire to continue attacks. Hence, an international spokesperson for the SLA/M told Democracy Now in December that the West should either supply them with the weapons they need to overthrow their government, or they should apply pressure to the regime through various means. The rebels, too are said to be violating the ceasefire , but in all likelihood this is a response to the continuing atrocities of the Janjawid militias.
On January 16th, a preliminary peace deal was signed in Cairo between the government and opposition forces. Subsequently, a deal was reached in the capital of Chad, N'Djamena this week. However, villages continued to burn, the government forces have yet to withdraw from land taken since the September 8th peace agreement, and the rebels say they will not return to full peace talks without seeing some movement on these issues.
At the moment, there are international moves to try genocidaires in the International Criminal Court. Guess who's blocking these moves? The US government, for well-known reasons, oppose the ICC, and would rather set up an ad hoc tribunal based in Tanzania. Human rights organisations and the UN oppose this for a number of perfectly excellent reasons: it would be unnecessary procrastination, involving a great deal of time in construction; ad hoc tribunals are time-limited, thus providing an incentive for non-cooperation, since the Sudanese government may simply decide to sit it out; the US proposal actually costs more than the ICC, and they expect countries that already pay for the ICC to stump up for their ad hoc tribunal; the ICC is widely supported in Africa, especially in the African Union; an ad hoc tribunal would be dependent on the goodwill of the US to keep it running.
As Human Rights Watch notes, "The United States could kill the court at any time." Which I sort of feel is the whole point. Britain's public position is that it supports the ICC proposal - but only if the US agrees . China, which has enormous oil interests in Sudan, would rather not pursue the ICC route either. Clearly, the ICC is only one means, and probably not a particularly effective means, of answering the disastrous and needful situation in Darfur.
A number of factors command this situation if you ask me. First, the legitimate demands of the rebels and the illegitimacy of the Bashir regime. Second, the absolute moral idiocy of hoping that the self-interest of the West will generate sincere 'humanitarian intervention' or that it would be effective in any case. Third, the desperate neediness of the displaced, diseased and starving, and the paucity of humanitarian measures to date. In that context, I can only agree with Peter Hallward's recommendation made last August:
Had we been serious about the claims of Darfur's farmers for a more equitable distribution of wealth, we should have explored ways of contributing to their non-violent pursuit, or else supported the Sudan Liberation Army when it launched its initially successful rebellion in February 2003 - not simply waited to provide charity to its survivors in the refugee camps of 2004.
And if we are still serious about the SLA's claims now, then we should debate their merits and decide whether, and how, to help those struggling to achieve them. This is a political question before it is a moral or humanitarian one. Today's humanitarian crisis is precisely a result of past political failure.
(Sidenote: Hallward's article came in for some dishonest, myopic criticism from the philosopher-blogger Jonathan Derbyshire here . Suffice to say, having a realistic appreciation of the moral culpability of those Western voices no claiming the moral highground is "downplaying Khartoum's crimes", while the penultimate sentence in the quoted passage is travestied as 'political not moral', as if instead of providing the analytical framework for understanding moral question, politics somehow obliterated morality. He misrepresents Hallward's recommendations by casually dropping the first and most important of them. There's more, but Derbyshire's whole piece is a shocking example of low-rent polemicising from someone who is trained in philosophy).
The rebels are entirely justified in what they seek, and the government deserves to lose its fight against them. What we must do is support the rebels - not uncritically - and pressure our governments to provide sufficient humanitarian aid to those in need of it. Recall the response to the tsunami; public contributions easily and swiftly dwarved initial promises made by the government, shaming them into upping their game. We haven't had that kind of campaign over Darfur, but it would be a good start. And the SLA's request for arms is not an unreasonable one either - if Britain can flood war-torn Sierra Leone with arms which end up in the hands of children, and contribute to the genocide in the Congo (real genocide, 4 million killed) by arming every actor in it, it can help the rebels in Sudan. It could also help peace negotiaitons: the main problem to date has been the intransigence of a government which feels it has the upper-hand. More power to the rebels would perhaps force them to reconsider their position. I'm not saying it will happen. To use a New Labour metaphor, pigs might fly before we see it. But such would constitute a reasonable response to the calamitous situation in Darfur. We should, as Hallward rightly points out, treat the crisis in Sudan in terms of "actors and principle rather than victims and confusion".