On the thesis of anti-humanitarian intervention in Darfur
A Reply to David Rieff, in response to his argument against humanitarian intervention in Darfur
By Eric Reeves
May 30, 2006 — David Rieff, contributing editor at The New Republic, has recently
published a lengthy essay arguing against the need for humanitarian
intervention in Darfur (“Moral Blindness: The Case Against Troops for
Darfur,” May 26, 2006,
https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=20060612&s=rieff061206). Rieff’s
central concern is of considerable significance: what will be the
consequences of military force, specifically Western military force,
intervening to halt genocide in Darfur and to protect acutely vulnerable
civilians and humanitarians? Unfortunately, Rieff’s contribution to the
discussion of the issue is fatally compromised by egregious factual error
and a conspicuously limited understanding of the current state of Darfur’s
crisis. He is also disturbingly selective in his use of evidence
(particularly in treating the issue of genocide), and indulges at times a
breathtaking disingenuousness. Since this last is a charge Rieff directs
at this writer, who figures prominently in Rieff’s essay, I take this
occasion to reply at length.
RIEFF ON CURRENT REALITIES IN DARFUR
If there is a singularly shocking sentence in Rieff’s essay, it is the
following:
“Yes, in the end, some form of international military deployment in Darfur
may be necessary, both to protect Darfuri civilians from attacks by the
government of Sudan and its Janjaweed surrogates and to enforce the recent
Abuja peace agreement.”
“In the end”? “May be necessary”? This reflects a perspective of supreme
callousness, as if we have somehow not already reached far beyond the “end”
of what is morally acceptable in the form of human destruction and
suffering. Rieff seems very little interested in statistics: he cites only
one, “our planet’s 1.5 billion Muslims.” Tellingly, despite this
demographic fact, Rieff manages to avoid noting that the population of
Darfur is entirely Muslim—a fact that we must hope will increasingly
register with Darfuris’ numerous co-religionists around the world. But
Rieff has no time for the more urgently relevant statistics: the number of
conflict-affected civilians (UN estimates for Darfur and eastern Chad
approach a staggering 4 million human beings); the number of displaced
civilians (reaching to 2.5 million in Darfur and eastern Chad); the number
of human beings beyond all humanitarian reach (over 700,000); and the
number of people who are already victims of genocidal violence and its
ghastly aftermath of malnutrition and disease (over 450,000; see my most
recent mortality assessment [April 28, 2006],
http://www.sudanreeves.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=102).
Even less does Rieff talk about the effects of funding shortfalls on
humanitarian deliveries and the recent cuts in food aid to the
conflict-affected populations of Darfur, which even with recent
supplementary contributions leave people with diets less than two-thirds of
the normal ration for human survival. This occurs as the Khartoum regime
refuses to draw down its huge strategic grain reserve in any way truly
responsive to the massive food needs in western, southern, and eastern
Sudan. Nor does Rieff talk about the relentless obstruction of humanitarian
assistance by Khartoum, which terribly attenuates relief efficiency and
capacity, and ultimately translates into further deliberate human
destruction.
Nor does Rieff talk about other smaller, but still telling statistics:
Human Rights Watch recently reported what all evidence suggests was an
extraordinarily brutal Janjaweed attack on civilians far inside Chad.
During the week in mid-April 2006, when Khartoum-backed Chadian rebels
attempted a coup against President Idris Deby in N’Djamena, more than 100
non-Arab civilians were slaughtered:
“In the village of Jawara, which was visited last month by researchers from
[Human Rights Watch], 38 people gathered together praying under a tree were
killed in one swoop. Another 37 who came back to the village later to bury
the dead were also massacred, HRW said. Those attacks took place on 12 and
13 April, according to villagers. [ ]
“HRW said it also learnt of a further 43 people killed in three villages
close to Jawara in eastern Chad at around the same time. ‘The bodies were
still out in the open. There were blood stains on the floor, machetes, and
bodies,’ said HRW researcher David Buchbinder. ‘These attacks were deeper
inside Chad than we have ever seen before, and there were far more people
killed–we are talking about hundreds of people butchered with machetes and
knives.'” (UN IRIN [dateline: N’Djamena], May 25, 2006)
Such deaths, and the fact that they continue unabated—both in Chad and
Darfur—figure nowhere in Rieff’s account. And yet all accounts of
current realities on the ground in Darfur suggest continual large-scale
violence, growing insecurity for the humanitarian operations upon which
literally millions of lives depend, and increasing desperation in the camps
for displaced persons.
Rieff can bring himself to say only that, “yes, in the end, some form of
international military deployment in Darfur may be necessary….” How many
hundreds of thousands of deaths are encompassed in this casual phrase, “in
the end”? And “may be necessary”? Is it possible that the current
trajectory of violence and destruction “may not” require a military
response?
Rieff’s refusal to accept the need for an urgent, fully sufficient military
response to the cataclysm of current and prospective human destruction is
the context for his assessment as a whole, and its most salient feature..
IS IT GENOCIDE?
Rieff wants to disable the argument that genocidal realities in Darfur give
a surpassing urgency to intervention. His strategy is two-fold: [1] glibly
suggest it may not be genocide, and [2] suggest that a genocide
determination has been construed as excessively obliging of international
action. Rieff is intellectually disgraceful in both efforts.
Rieff declares, falsely, that there are “many reputable groups abroad [ ]
who reject claims like those made by Reeves [i.e., that realities in Darfur
are genocide].” Who are these groups, Mr. Rieff? Why don’t you name them?
Instead, Rieff cites only Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières
(MSF); and while it is true that the controversial head of MSF-France,
Jean-Hevre Bradol, has made some extraordinary comments on the issue of
genocide in Darfur, as has one MSF physician, Mercedes Taty, these comments
bear close scrutiny before serving as the basis for any reasonable doubt
about the existence of genocide in Darfur.
It is first important to note that in its public reporting MSF has
systematically elided all data pertaining to the ethnicity of those it
treats in Darfur. It has done so since the beginning of its field-work in
Darfur, and continues to do so to this day. This self-censorship (those the
organization treats have been overwhelmingly from non-Arab/African tribal
groups) is evidently the price MSF is willing to pay to retain humanitarian
access.
But how can the same organization that is systematically removing (or
failing to include) data on ethnicity from its reports on Darfur be taken
seriously when it speaks to the issue of ethnic crimes in Darfur? And what
are we to make of the preposterous assertions made by MSF’s Taty and
Bradol, flying in the face of every credible human rights report that has
been published on Darfur over the past three years: “[Taty said] there is
no systematic target—targeting one ethnic group or another one [in
Darfur]” (MSNBC, April 16, 2004). Bradol declared, “Our teams have not
seen evidence of the deliberate intention to kill people of a specific
group.” (The Financial Times, July 6, 2004).
These assertions are outrageously and demonstrably false, as many within
MSF will acknowledge privately. Indeed, it is hardly accidental that,
besides Rieff’s, the only use made of MSF commentary on “genocide” in
Darfur has been by Khartoum’s propaganda organ in London, the absurdly
mendacious “European-Sudanese Public Affairs Council.”
Compounding the credibility of MSF in speaking on genocide in Darfur is a
perverse misreading of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Bradol, head of MSF-France, wrote in
an MSF edition of “Stories from the Field” (Issue 25, July 2004):
“Since Médecins Sans Frontières started working in Darfur in December 2003,
teams have not witnessed the intention to kill all individuals of a
particular group. We have information about massacres, but never any
attempt to eliminate all the members of a specific group.”
Of course these “specific groups” are ethnic groups, and Bradol knows full
well that the 1948 Convention twice refers explicitly to the destruction of
targeted groups “in whole or in part.” There is no requirement in a
genocide determination that ***all*** members of a group be targeted for
elimination. The importance of both parts of this key phrase (“in whole or
in part”) has been repeatedly confirmed and interpreted by international
legal bodies, including the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (see my
discussion of the important review by the Appeals Chamber of the
International Tribunal for violations of international law in the former
Yugoslavia in the case of “Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic,” Case No.
IT-98-33-T,
http://www.sudanreeves.org/index.php?name=Sections&req=viewarticle&artid=196).
Rieff’s casual deployment of MSF as an authority on genocide in Darfur is a
mark of intellectual dishonesty or irresponsible ignorance. Moreover,
Rieff pointedly ignores the many voices declaring genocide in Darfur,
including those who know Darfur best: Julie Flint (UK) and Alex de Waal of
Justice Africa (UK), whose fine recent book “Darfur: A Short History of a
Long War” is by far our best account of the origins of the Darfur genocide
and ethnic hatred that has so deeply wounded Darfuri society. Physicians
for Human Rights, which has done superb work on the ground in Darfur and
eastern Chad in researching the consequences of ethnically-targeted
destruction, has also declared genocide in Darfur (see especially “DARFUR:
Assault on Survival,” January 11, 2006,
http://www.phrusa.org/research/sudan/news_2006-01-11.html). Numerous
international genocide and human rights scholars have also publicly
declared the realities in Darfur to be genocide. So too have the US
Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, Africa Action (Washington), the
Committee on Conscience of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem in
Jerusalem, and senior officials of the UK and German Governments. The
Parliament of the European Union voted 566 to 6 in September 2004 to
declare the realities in Darfur to be “tantamount to genocide” (this weasel
phrase was a means of declaring genocide without using the word in a
fashion that might trigger contractual obligations under the 1948 Genocide
Convention, to which all the nations of the EU are party).
The only other prominent expressions of doubt about whether or not genocide
has occurred in Darfur come from Human Rights Watch (which has long
emphatically declared that what is occurring in Darfur amounts to massive
“ethnic cleansing” and “crimes against humanity”) and a UN Commission of
Inquiry, whose report of January 2005 on Darfur is a travesty of legal
reasoning and reflects nothing so much as the desperate political desire by
Kofi Annan’s UN Secretariat not to be burdened with the consequences of a
genocide determination, which would expose the UN Security Council as
woefully inadequate to respond to such determination.
[See my two lengthy analyses of this UN Darfur Commission of Inquiry
Report, both of which address at length issues that Rieff simply ignores,
http://www.sudanreeves.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=489&page=1
and http://www.sudanreeves.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=488&page=1
Rieff would have us believe that a genocide determination is somehow
peculiarly “American”: “Yes, in the United states it is universally
believed [ ] that a slow motion genocide has been taking place in
Darfur”—but nowhere else, he implies. This is again demonstrably false,
and Rieff either doesn’t care or doesn’t know—indeed he makes it very
hard to know which.
Rieff also declares peremptorily that the 1948 Genocide Convention is a
“deeply flawed document,” this without offering the slightest indication of
what these flaws are, or suggesting even vaguely why such a troubling
judgment is called for. But context would indicate that what concerns
Rieff is the obligation at the heart of Article 1 of the Convention:
“The Contracting Parties [to this Genocide Convention] confirm that
genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime
under international law which they undertake to prevent and punish.”
Rieff is distrustful of such principled commitments, and this is central to
his objection to what I have consistently urged, viz. that this
international commitment be honored in Darfur as morally if not legally
binding. For the alternative to honoring the Genocide Convention is to be
left with a document that is nothing but a guide for historical reference,
a vague exhortation, a mere relic of post-Holocaust literature. But Rieff
surely knows that if in the wake of Rwanda and Darfur the 1948 Convention
experiences its demise as a meaningful guide to international action in the
21st century, it will find no meaningful successor in the current UN
political environment.
In fact, Rieff makes it impossible to resist the conclusion that he would
welcome the demise of such a “demanding” document:
“The recurrent use of the term ‘genocide’ [by Reeves and others] is a way
of delegitimizing any questioning of the intervene-now-no-matter-the-cost
line.”
Evidently, Rieff wishes it to be an open question (not an international
contractual obligation) as to whether or not we respond to vast, ongoing
genocidal destruction. He can survey the massive past and impending human
destruction in Darfur—orchestrated by a regime that is guilty of previous
genocides in the Nuba Mountains and the oil regions of southern Sudan—and
assert, “yes, in the end perhaps we’ll have to stop this—but we need to
be flexible in this decision.” Rieff is right to suggest that I and others
regard this “flexibility” as morally intolerable. He is deeply wrong,
however, to suggest that the costs of intervention in Darfur have been
ignored—or that no attention has been given to the required military
nature of such intervention, or its consequences for Darfuri and Sudanese
society.
CONSEQUENCES OF INTERVENTION
Though sharply critical of others for not talking enough about potentially
unfortunate consequences of humanitarian intervention, Rieff himself
nowhere talks about the specific tasks of humanitarian intervention, what
must be done to protect a huge population of vulnerable civilians over an
immense geographic area, as well as to provide adequate security for the
humanitarians and humanitarian operations on which almost 4 million
conflict-affected human beings now depend. This is of a piece with his
failure to give any evidence of understanding how great the catastrophe in
Darfur is, including the realities of enormous past and impending human
mortality. Only because Rieff is so glib, only because he refuses to look
closely at the numerous and highly demanding tasks of providing security in
this difficult environment, is it possible for him to dodge the issue of
what must actually be done if we wish to halt human destruction. Rieff
suggests that in place of a credible, well-equipped, large-scale (roughly
20,000 personnel) international force—including a heavy NATO-quality
brigade at its core—we might substitute another version of the African
Union force that has failed so abjectly over the past two years, and whose
failure grows daily:
“[If used ‘diligently,’ American ‘soft power’ could produce] the
intervention that might actually work, for example, one undertaken by
African countries with, perhaps, the participation of forces from Islamic
countries outside the region.”
It is not at all clear how the force suggested here would be any different
in character or effectiveness from the current failing African Union
mission in Sudan, except that Rieff adds (“perhaps”) the resources from a
few Islamic countries—no doubt the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are high
on his list. None of the key issues of mandate, intelligence capacity,
logistics, equipment, firepower, communications, “inter-operability” of
forces, or in-theater transport needs are addressed. If Rieff were actually
to read some of the ample research published by human rights and policy
groups on what is required in Darfur, he might begin to see the foolishness
of this scandalously superficial proposal for a security force in Darfur.
Were Rieff to look seriously at the assessments coming from the
International Crisis Group, Refugees International, or the Brookings
Institution—all of which have published substantially on the military
challenges and consequences of intervening in Darfur—he might see how
extraordinarily casual he is being with millions of African lives.
[See my two-part overview of the research from these organizations, “Ghosts
of Rwanda: The Failure of the African Union in Darfur,” November 13 & 20,
2005, speaking extensively of the military conditions on the ground in
Darfur at the time, as well as the preceding year and a half, during which
time the challenges to military intervention increased significantly;
http://www.sudanreeves.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=535&page=1
and
http://www.sudanreeves.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=534&page=1]
Even normally cautious human rights leaders and humanitarian officials, who
have in the past failed to ask in timely fashion for required
interventions, are speaking out now, demanding a robust UN force of
approximately 20,000 military personnel, with robust rules of engagement
and Chapter 7 authority (peacemaking, not merely peacekeeping, authority).
So far few have had the nerve to ask about the consequences of an
inevitable veto by Permanent Security Council members Russia and China of
any further resolution brought under Chapter 7, and thus the inevitable
need for NATO forces. But at least the need for NATO-quality forces is
widely recognized.
Indeed, even UN Secretary General Kofi Annan finally, if only temporarily,
found his voice on the need for robust intervention to save Darfur,
speaking last January of the need for “tactical air support, helicopters,
and the ability to respond very quickly.” Asked if such a force would
include rich countries, like the US and European nations, Annan said at the
time, “Those are the countries with the kind of capabilities we will need,
so when the time comes, we will be turning to them. We will need very
sophisticated equipment, logistical support. I will be turning to
governments with capacity to join in that peacekeeping operation if we were
to be given the mandate” (Reuters, January 13, 2006). He was certainly not
talking about the Pakistanis or the Bangladeshis here.
What would be the consequences of humanitarian intervention in Darfur, with
all necessary military resources? The first answer is that there much we
simply cannot know in advance, despite Rieff’s characteristically facile
and pessimistic conclusions. Rieff goes to great effort to force us to see
such intervention through the lens of the war in Iraq, rather than through
the lens of our failure in 1994 to halt the Rwandan genocide—the
slaughter of some 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates. But Darfur is neither
Rwanda nor Iraq, though as a moral precedent, our failure in Rwanda must
surely tell us more about the international community as a whole than the
US-led war in Iraq. Though Rieff hints, disingenuously, that I share the
views of editors at The New Republic about the war in Iraq, I do not.
Indeed, I am quite as convinced as Rieff that one of the costs of this war
is an enormous depletion of US political and diplomatic capital, in the UN
and elsewhere.
But this is far different from assenting to Rieff’s argument that
intervening in Darfur amounts to an ignoring of Darfuri “politics.” This
bears emphasizing, since it is “politics” that Rieff highlights in
explaining why we should not intervene in Darfur: “The problem with
responding [to massive genocidal destruction as a matter of moral
principle] is the problem of politics.” “Politics,” Rieff wants to argue,
makes everything so very complicated that we had best attend to political
considerations before moral ones. Of course it’s quite possible to do
both, as presumably Rieff believes he himself is doing.
But understanding “politics” in Darfur requires some attention to facts,
and this is not Rieff’s strong suit. In an astonishing and all too
revealing moment of ignorance, Rieff declares that, “The deployment of
foreign troops, whose mission will be to protect Dafuri civilians, will
allow the guerrillas to establish ‘facts on the ground’ and will strengthen
their claims for secession.” But of course neither faction of the Sudan
Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A), and even less the Justice and Equality
Movement (JEM), have a secessionist agenda, public or private. Indeed,
within Darfur the JEM is widely despised because its political ambitions
are national in nature, not focused enough on Darfuri political needs. But
neither Minni Minawi nor Abdel Wahid el-Nur, the two SLM/A leaders who lead
rival factions, has ever suggested or pushed for secession. Here Rieff
appears to have badly confused the demands of Darfuris for greater national
and regional political representation with the demands of southern
Sudanese—who overwhelmingly favor secession. Indeed, southerners secured
in the north/south Comprehensive Peace Agreement (January 2005) the right
to a self-determination referendum, with secession as an option.
This confusion on Rieff’s part tells us how little he knows about the
background of Darfur, and how little he knows about the “politics” of the
region, even as he makes this his central concern. Those of us who argue
for humanitarian intervention are “testimony to the refusal of the best and
brightest among us to think seriously about politics.” What, we must ask,
does “politics” consist in for Rieff? Fundamental mistakes about the most
relevant “political” realities are hardly a sign that Rieff and his ilk
have any claim on realism or an understanding of what is “best” for places
like Darfur.
In this same vein, Rieff simply assumes that international intervention
will encounter resistance from the Janjaweed and Khartoum’s regular forces.
Rieff gives no sign of understanding the political relationship between the
leadership in Khartoum’s National Islamic Front and the military it
presently controls. His conclusion about the NIF ordering a suicidal
resistance to robust international intervention is almost certainly another
error. It is far more likely, as I have recently argued in The Guardian
(UK), that Khartoum would not engage for fear of incurring annihilating
losses, including to its highly valued and exceedingly vulnerable military
aircraft. Such losses could easily turn the military against the political
leadership, not something that Omar el-Bashir, Ali Osman Taha, and other
senior NIF members will risk.
It is much more likely that the intervening force would immediately begin
undertaking the critical civilian and humanitarian security tasks on the
ground:
“Such [an intervening] force could produce an immediate and complete
stand-down of Khartoum’s regular forces, including helicopter gunships. The
Janjaweed could be put on notice that they would be destroyed if they
assembled in groups larger than a couple of dozen (this would have the
effect of ‘disarming’ these brutal militias, since they function as a
quasi-military force only when they aggregate in the hundreds or
thousands). Camps for displaced persons could be protected from marauding
remnants of the Janjaweed and other violent elements. Vital humanitarian
corridors and operations could be protected. And there would be sufficient
manpower available to start the process of providing security for people as
they return to their lands. Crucially, staunching the flow of genocidal
violence into an increasingly unstable eastern Chad could also begin” (May
15, 2006,
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/eric_reeves/2006/05/darfur_3.html)
Given the tenor of his criticism of my work, I would have Rieff
particularly note the sentence that follows: “Yes, there are risks and
significant costs to such an operation; it will be neither short nor easy.”
These difficulties and costs have been regularly articulated in my writings
for more than two years; on the basis of present evidence it is simply not
possible for me to believe that Rieff has felt obliged to engage with these
efforts.
Again, there is much that simply can’t be known now about the consequences
of intervention. In the same essay in The Guardian, I suggest that
gathering intelligence will be key to the success of any intervention, and
that there is an extraordinary resource at hand:
“We must bear in mind that these African tribal populations make up a
distinct majority in Darfur. They represent a huge built-in network of
intelligence observers should the threatened migration of non-Sudanese
jihadists to Darfur actually occur.”
A highly seasoned military analyst, with many months’ experience on the
ground in Darfur and very considerable experience in Sudan, has suggested
to me that while this is certainly a possibility, it will require careful
planning and preparation. Will such efforts guide an actual intervention?
There is no telling, even as it would very be foolish to forego such assets
for lack of adequate planning.
Certainly, however, we gather something of the response to Western-led
intervention from the remarkable greeting accorded Jan Egeland, the
Norwegian head of UN aid operations during his recent trip to Kalma camp in
South Darfur. Crowds of people, undeterred by the menacing presence of
Khartoum’s security forces, chanted, “Welcome, welcome, U.S.A.! Welcome,
welcome, international force!” The people who greeted Egeland at Kalma
camp were not exceptional; I have yet to speak with any non-Arab Darfuri
who would not welcome a UN-led or, preferably, NATO-led intervention.
Indeed, I receive from Darfuris, in Darfur and the diaspora, constant,
often anguished pleas for such intervention.
CHAD
In a deeply revealing omission, Rieff doesn’t discuss Chad at all, even as
the military demands of securing eastern Chad are very considerable, and
far beyond the capabilities of even an expanded African Union force. This
is a particularly telling gap in Rieff’s account of Darfur since he
declares that I “sneer at the idea of national sovereignty” and “bemoan the
African Union’s insufficiently aggressive line toward the Government of
Sudan.” The latter is certainly true, although it is a view shared by a
large majority of observers. The previous statement is simply untrue.
National sovereignty is an important source of continental stability, as
Rieff rightly asserts—but it cannot be legitimately asserted by
génocidaires. Moreover, national sovereignty is precisely what is being
undermined in dramatic fashion in eastern Chad and perhaps eventually in
N’Djamena. The Chadian rebels based in Darfur, clearly and substantially
supported by Khartoum, are actively destabilizing the border region between
Chad and Sudan, and have created a virtual state of war between the regimes
in N’Djamena and Khartoum.
To be sure, Idris Deby, the president of Chad, is a cruel, rapacious
tyrant; he does not deserve to rule Chad. But if he is overthrown by the
FUC rebel coalition supported by Khartoum, Chad’s territorial
integrity—its “sovereignty”—will be deeply imperiled, with additional
risks to the Central African Republic and conceivably Cameroon. Why are
such risks not part of the “political” calculus that Rieff would have us
consider? And what about the extreme security risks to some 350,000
Darfuri refugees and conflict-affected Chadians, increasingly subject to
the kind of violence noted above? Khartoum-inspired violence has brought
humanitarian organizations to the point of complete withdrawal from eastern
Chad, just as the most dangerous months of the year (the rainy
season/”hunger gap”) are beginning. The African Union has no presence of
any kind in eastern Chad, and doesn’t begin to have the resources to
provide either security or to halt the flow of genocidal violence across
the border.
Does Rieff know this? His silence on these issues is hardly encouraging.
And yet he presumes to pontificate about the importance of “politics” in
understanding the implications of intervention in Darfur.
CONSEQUENCES
All evidence is that the Abuja “peace agreement” of May 5, 2005—signed by
one faction of the SLA (the least representative) and the Khartoum
regime—is already failing. Unless the Abdel Wahid el-Nur faction of the
SLM/A signs on to the agreement in the next day or two, it will collapse
entirely. Rieff gives very little evidence of understanding the
significance of the two factions of the SLM/A—indeed, he preposterously
declares that in the US “the Christian right has supported Minni Minawi’s
Sudan Liberation Movement as it once supported John Garang’s insurgency in
Southern Sudan.” The SLM/A is, if the creation of one man, Abdel Wahid’s,
not Minni Minawi’s. In any event, most Americans in the Darfur advocacy
movement can’t distinguish meaningfully between what Minni represents, or
even identify his tribe. This is important because he is Zaghawa (perhaps
8% of Darfur’s population), while Abdel Wahid is Fur (perhaps 30% of the
population) and much more ethnically ecumenical. Yet again, Rieff simply
doesn’t understand the “politics” he declares so important, even its most
important features. Perhaps this is why he can descend into ghastly
nonsense when speaking of “the political”:
“The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. [ ] To
describe [them] simply as victims deprives them of any agency.”
In fact, we must wonder what “agency” a nine-year-old girl has when she is
brutally gang-raped by the Janjaweed, or what “agency” a five-year-old boy
has as he is thrown screaming into a bonfire along with his brothers, or
indeed what “agency” a one-year-old boy has when the Janjaweed slice off
his penis and he bleeds to death. “Political interests” here is an
abstraction that can have meaning for very few besides David Rieff. There
are real political issues in Darfur, including competition over natural
resources and power in governance, as well as competing visions of
equitable distribution of land and wealth. Rieff captures none of this in
his account.
If the Abuja accord does fail, if violence then inevitably rapidly
escalates in Darfur and Chad, it will be too late for hundreds of thousands
of lives. We have simply waited too long, with too many sufficiently
encouraged by specious arguments of the sort so abundant in Rieff’s
account. In this sense it is perhaps useful to have Rieff articulate his
factitious “realism,” to invoke so glibly the difficult “politics” of
Darfur, to pretend that Iraq has somehow changed the imperative of
responding to massive genocidal destruction.
Rieff’s ignorance, his disingenuousness, his cowardice are supremely
instructive: for they are those of the world community at its worst.
Eric Reeves, Smith College Northampton, MA 01063
– Email: [email protected]
– Website: www.sudanreeves.org