At a public debate on rethinking Darfur in late 2009 in the Makerere University main hall, Mahmood Mamdani, having published Saviors and Survivors just recently, argued that there was no genocide in Darfur. Fellow discussant Dismas Nkunda one of the Directors of the Darfur Consortium argued otherwise, and indeed passionately.
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Book: Saviors and Survivors; Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror Title: Keynes: The Return of the Master Volume: 398 Pages Publisher: Verso Books/Fountain Publishers Kampala Reviewer: Yusuf Serunkuma |
As he does in his book, the professor argued that calling for external intervention in Darfur as “saving” blacks from Arab perpetrated genocide was stripping the crisis of context — and was potentially fatal.
The high point of the Darfur crisis came about when the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued a warrant of arrest for the Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir in July 2008. Bashir’s charges included conspiracy to commit genocide along with other war crimes. He was also charged with racially polarising Darfur between blacks and Arabs, subjecting survivors to slow death from malnutrition and torture in the IDP camps. The single source of violence in all these charges is the government he heads. To these, Mamdani says all “bear no historical scrutiny”.
After an arguably good divulge of history, the Darfur crisis is showed to have been born in the times of migration and settlement in Africa. The coming of the imperial masters peaked here and created a silent but very active volcano which has come to respond too vigorously to other forces creating humanitarian disorder. What is happening in this area is a civil war, just like the war in Northern Uganda, in Congo, Chad and like the other wars in Africa. It is a conflict over land that has been aggravated by the Saherian drought and the war in neighboring Chad. More dangerously, the cold war of 1970-90 — the yearning to contain Gaddafi/USSR — oil/commercial reasons — by Ronald Reagan, set Darfur on an uncertain road and set pace for future events. The current war on terror where America is paranoid of any Muslim led regime is another factor — as an active player in this conflict. All this is opposed to the common song of Muslims/Arabs attempting to Islamise the Africans.
Citing the President’s Special Envoy to Sudan Andrew S. Natsios’s responses to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 2007 on whether there was genocide in Darfur; Mamdani underscores a very supportive fact. The envoy observed:
“So I think this is a very bad idea to think that this is all Africans versus all Arabs. That is simply not true, and it may make peace harder if people think all the bad guys are all the Arabs and the good guys are all the African tribes. That is simply not the case…”
The battle of the numbers: the debate over how many have died has been one of the lead movers of any intervention into the crisis. The Save Darfur Movement and co. quote figures ranging from 200,000 to 450,000 of excess death and all this is said to be death caused by violence. And dramatically, they call several other parties such as China to get involved. But when the Government Accountability Office did an arguably most honest study of numbers, the figure was far less the rhyme; “it estimated that 158,000 people had died between 2003- 05 and 138,000 of them were excess deaths”. But if numbers qualify the tag “genocide”, two wars broke out in 2003, one internal and an invasion — the war in Iraq; perhaps Mamdani asks by implication; where would genocide be?
The Save Darfur Coalition, the cheerleaders in the arrest of Omar Bashir, has chosen to act ignorantly and arguing that in Rwanda, there was a delayed response which led to thousands of death. But is this movement one team? Mamdani calls them an “externally imposed rescue and punishment” team, not different from the movement of the war on terror. They are not movements for peace. On peace, perhaps the highpoint of this book, Mamdani stresses the need for a traditional/internally driven initiative, a thing in the form of “survivors’ justice” — the kind that hallmarked the post-apartheid era: the need to protect the civilian population and finding an inclusive political order.
Along with addressing the crisis in Darfur, Mamdani tackles very serious issues underlining global politics in the context of Africa. He starts with highlighting the inappropriate way the western media covers Africa and thus informing the world through the lens of just war, and by a novice reporter. The unity and independence of Africa stand out as his other preoccupation. He argues that the “save Darfur lobby in the United States have turned the tragedy of the people into a knife with which to cut and slice Africa by demonising one group of Africans –African Arabs. Undergirding the claim that genocide has occurred in Darfur is another born of colonial historiography”.
In Saviors and Survivors, Africa gets an exclusive guide to rethinking its future. Putting the politicised ICC, UN, humanitarian movements in context, it is accusatory, incisive and breathtaking. Like he does in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, this addicted researcher is set on rethinking the world.
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written by jonathan erasmus, March 24, 2010
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written by EA, March 28, 2010
http://blogs.ssrc.org/sudan/category/sudan/saviors-and-survivors/
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written by Rigosong, May 03, 2010
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written by Rigosong, May 03, 2010
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