Over at Brains Like a Shoe, my personal blog, I have posted in three parts a review of Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror – a controversial critique of the Darfur advocacy movement. The review was published in the latest issue of The SAIS Review of International Affairs. To download the PDF copy with full footnotes, click here.
“When Killers Become Victims: Darfur in Context”
SAIS Review, Volume 29, Issue 2, Summer-Fall, 2009 (pages 133-144)
Darfur. In 2002, the word meant nothing to most Americans, and little more to the country’s journalists, academics, and foreign policy makers. A scant seven years later, though, Darfur represents for many “a place where evil lived.” What happened in the intervening years is an interesting story of grassroots mobilization, in which hundreds of thousands of people learned cogent details about the crimes of Darfur, which they repeated to their friends and families and elected representatives. They explained first and foremost that the Sudanese government and its proxy militia, known as the janjaweed, were responsible for a large-scale campaign of death and destruction in western Sudan. Their stories highlighted the innocent civilians directly targeted by the government’s counterinsurgency operation against rebel movements in Darfur, and invariably listed the grim details of the hundreds of thousands dead, the millions internally displaced, and the facts surrounding the world’s largest emergency humanitarian operation. Urging a response from the United States government, many also highlighted how these ruthless attacks on specific ethnic groups and their villages constituted the twenty-first century’s first genocide.
With the publication of Saviors and Survivors in the spring of 2009, Mamdani has reentered the fray, this time selecting Save Darfur as his primary target. Denouncing the coalition for its ignorance of the historical and political realities in Darfur and Sudan, he writes that his book “is an argument against those who substitute moral certainty for knowledge, and who feel virtuous even when acting on the basis of total ignorance.” His more damning charges contend that Save Darfur intentionally portrayed the conflict simplistically as ‘Arab’ versus ‘African’ to appeal to Americans’ post-9/11 fear and antipathy of ‘savage’ Arab jihadists. He writes, “When Save Darfur advocates described the nature of evil in Darfur, it is unfailingly in the language of race.” This narrative, Mamdani argues, also serves as the basis for Save Darfur’s erroneous claim of genocide, which for American activists opens the door to humanitarian intervention directed by major international powers against weak states.
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Anger blinds analysis, and many parts of Saviors and Survivors read like an angry harangue against the Darfur advocacy movement, the history of British imperialism, and American foreign policy in Sudan and all of Africa—often done in a tone that equates all three. Somewhere in the midst of these excoriations Mamdani also takes time to account briefly for the mass killings and displacements that have occurred in Darfur over the last six years, although in this telling of the Darfur conflict, the Sudanese government avoids the long-arm of Mamdani’s wrath. He writes, for example, “[T]he conflict in Darfur began as a civil war in which the government was originally not involved.” This sentence is especially interesting since it seems to contradict Mamdani’s own writing from 2004 in which he states, “the security cabal in Khartoum . . . responded [to the first Darfuri rebel attacks in what became the civil war] by arming and unleashing several militia, known as the Janjawid. The result is a spiral of state-sponsored violence and indiscriminate spread of weaponry.” While opposing external intervention as a solution, back then Mamdani does hint at the International Criminal Court as an avenue for investigating crimes committed in Darfur.
On his mission to teach Save Darfur a lesson, Mamdani himself ignores critical elements of the violence in Darfur, and in the process, strips the victims and perpetrators of their political agency. (Similar charges have been leveled at Mamdani’s treatment of the Rwandan genocide in When Victims Become Killers.) Mamdani is right to highlight the historical and political realities that led to the most recent outbreak of fighting in Darfur at the beginning of this decade. Save Darfur and others in the movement have been guilty at times of simplifying the nature of the conflict in order to attract and retain supporters. Indeed, Save Darfur shares this fault with advocacy organizations working on a whole host of other domestic and international issues, all of which vie for the same media space. Mamdani is right to point out the problematic consequences of such simplification. But Mamdani is wrong to use such instances to reason away the catastrophic violence and its impact on Darfuri society. Unable to delink his frustration with uninformed American liberal (or neo-conservative) interventionism from his analysis of facts on the ground, his book attacks the victims of violence for distrusting a brutal regime in Khartoum and seeking external assistance from the international community. To that end, he demeans Darfuris living in IDP and refugee camps as “consumers” who have abdicated their responsibility as “citizens” and committed all their hopes for salvation to humanitarian intervention.
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Saviors and Survivors, then, may already be outdated, as it ultimately seeks to demonstrate the manifold consequences of the Bush administration’s Manichean “war on terror” by taking us to Darfur. Mamdani’s book cannot accomplish this feat, though, without dismissing the voices of victims and downplaying what at one point Mamdani calls “Bashir’s own little war on terror.” There is no question that in some instances Save Darfur overreached in its advocacy—but its intentions have always been similar to those who advocate for unheard victims in places like Iraq and Palestine (both causes that seem very close to Mamdani’s heart). To Save Darfur’s credit, the coalition has constantly been evolving and seeking to redress its deficiencies and errors. Its real test will be how it responds to the decisions of an administration that purports to understand the complexities of the issues in Sudan and desires to craft a comprehensive strategy to deal with them.
Great stuff, Sean. Congrats!