On the Re-writing of the Darfur Narrative

By Eric Reeves

June 14, 2009 — The historical narrative of the Darfur genocide is presently being
re-written. Despite dozens of human rights reports that have established
the basic realities of ethnically-targeted human destruction in Darfur
and Eastern Chad over the past seven years, an effort is being made to
minimise the scale of that destruction, elide the role of ethnicity in
the conflict and downplay the responsibility of the Khartoum regime.

This large-scale revision has been taken up by those – particularly
on the left – with an ideological aversion to humanitarian
intervention. If the catastrophe can be portrayed as non-genocidal and
essentially local in character, then advocacy efforts – initially for
humanitarian intervention and currently for robust support of a weak and
ineffectual UN/African Union peace operation – are misguided and
misplaced.

The most conspicuous effort at re-writing history is Mahmood
Mamdani’s “Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on
Terror.” The book focuses on the purported misperceptions and
distortions of the American-based Save Darfur Coalition, which Mamdani
argues is an unwitting supporter of the “war on terror”. “Darfur
[has become] not just an illustration of the grand narrative of the War
on Terror but also a part of its justification,” Mamdani writes. He
would have us believe that in turning the Darfur conflict into a moral
rather than a political issue, Americans in SDC can “feel themselves
to be what they are not in Iraq: powerful saviors.” “Darfur is a
place of refuge. It is a surrogate shelter. It is a cause about which
they can feel good.”

It is true that some advocacy efforts have been prone to
oversimplification, naïveté and occasionally misguided policy
initiatives. Some corrective is no doubt needed. But Mamdani’s points
are tendentious and overstated, and should not distract from the
substantial consensus about events that has been authoritatively
established by human rights reporting, UN investigations and some
excellent on-the-ground news reporting. Perversely, human rights
reporting on Darfur is invisible in Mamdani’s text.

The most authoritative data for violent mortality in Darfur and Eastern
Chad comes from a statistically rigorous study by the Coalition for
International Justice in August/September 2004. Several studies using
these and other data found that total mortality was approximately
400,000 people between February 2003 and mid-2006. This figure includes
both violent mortality as well as mortality from conflict-related
disease and malnutrition.

But Mamdani and others choose to rely on studies that exclude the CIJ
data and underestimate the death toll. The Centre for Research on the
Epidemiology of Disasters, for example, estimated that just 118,142
people died from September 2003 through January 2005. This figure not
only excludes many months of extreme violence and very substantial
mortality, but has no adequate data for violent mortality in particular.

Current mortality is also understated. Relying on figures from the
hapless UN/African Union force (UNAMID), the new narrative suggests
monthly death tolls from violence in the scores. But UNAMID can’t
begin to lay claim to a comprehensive survey of violence involving
either civilians or combatants. Indeed, it often cannot reach the sites
of violence or survey violently displaced populations. It is deeply
misleading to offer UNAMID mortality numbers as representative of
current violence against civilians or total mortality from all causes.

The new Darfur narrative also minimises the role of ethnicity in an
effort to deny that genocide has occurred. Such assertions conveniently
ignore the many reports of Arab villages being spared by Khartoum’s
military and Janjaweed militia allies while neighbouring villages of the
Fur, Massaleit, Zaghawa and other non-Arab (African) tribal groups are
destroyed. The use of explicitly racial epithets during violent attacks
and rapes also goes unremarked.

In turn, the role of Khartoum’s National Islamic Front/National
Congress Party regime is consistently understated, despite overwhelming
evidence from the world’s most distinguished human rights
organisations of a hand-in-glove relationship between the Janjaweed and
the regime. This relationship includes Khartoum’s supply, recruitment
and military coordination with the Janjaweed in attacks on purely
civilian targets. Such attacks have occurred on a large scale as
recently as February of this year.

Nor is the regime itself scrutinised in the new narrative. The roles of
key figures in orchestrating the Darfur genocide, such as Ali Osman
Taha, Nafi’e Ali Nafi’e, and Saleh Gosh, are completely unexamined.
Indeed, neither Nafi’e nor Gosh appears in Mamdani’s index. And yet
all that Mamdani and his fellow travellers proffer as a solution to the
Darfur catastrophe is a glib urging of continued negotiations with these
very men, despite their genocidal behaviour and demonstrated contempt
for signed agreements and the diplomatic process generally. Mamdani
suggests no meaningful solutions to the need for safe return by the
millions of displaced persons, compensation for overwhelming losses, the
rendering of justice for atrocity crimes, or disarming the Janjaweed.
The assumption appears to be that re-writing the Darfur narrative,
diminishing the nature and scale of human destruction, is solution
enough.

But the massive crisis is expanding, particularly with Khartoum’s
March expulsion of roughly half the humanitarian capacity in Darfur.
Peace talks are going nowhere. Only concerted pressure on the regime,
and those international actors supporting its brutal policies, will
serve to augment humanitarian and protection capacity and produce
meaningful negotiations. This was the case with the north/south
Comprehensive Peace Agreement, and remains as true today. Acquiescence,
continuation of the status quo will yield only genocide by attrition
among the targeted populations.

It should hardly be surprising that this new narrative is
unrecognisable to Darfuris themselves. It is not American advocacy
efforts that distort the truths of recent history. Rather, betrayal of
the truth comes most consequentially from those who have decided that
the recent history of Darfur must be re-written if it is to comport with
ideological fixations and pre-determined conclusions about humanitarian
intervention in the face of genocide.

Eric Reeves is author of “A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in
the Darfur Genocide”. This article is also published on the The online edition of The Guardian.