A clearer view of Darfur

How often do you read a book that confirms long-held suspicions, lucidly spells out and expands upon ideas you have not heard expressed by others, is deeply informative about a subject in you were previously satisfied with passing knowledge but it turns out is fundamentally important, and shatters some little-considered assumptions? I would guess that any of these benefits are rare, but you might never see the combination.

Of course, anyone who aspires to write about "big ideas" hopes that their book will have this effect on a few readers, but I'm not claiming that I have such a book in progress. But I have just finished one that had this combined effect on me: Saviors and Survivors -- Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror by Mahmood Mamdani. I might have to write a fan letter.

Before gushing some more, also have to thank my cousin, Angus Clarkson, who recommended the book. He works for the UN in Sudan and cites Mamdani as the most authoritative writer on the topic of Darfur. I thought I was going to learn a little about the complexities of the situation, but Mamdani's analysis is much deeper and the truth much different than I expected.

The truth that has been in short supply in media reports on the conflict in Darfur. It isn't simply a case of over-simplification. The number of casulaties has been greatly inflated. The ethnic divisions have been portrayed as much more strongly polarised than in reality, and worse the portrayal of the conflict as being between good Christians and bad Muslims is partial and over-simplified to the extent that it is simply wrong. The label of "genocide" is definitely misplaced.

I stongly recommend you read the book, obviously, but in summary: the factors that led to the conflict of the early 2000s in Darfur were the artificial ethnic division created by British colonialism and entrenched in post-colonial law giving land-ownership to some but not all, a drought across the Sahel deeper and longer lasting than ever recorded before, changes in land use from subsistence to commerce, and the use of the region for proxy wars between global powers that made machine guns and other weapons commonplace. The result is inevitable conflict over access to resources--conflict that could not be resolved by traditional methods of local mediation, mainly because the causes and consequences were not restricted to the local.

It has long been my suspicion that cultural changes are rarely the result of mass migration, which Mamdani confirms with respect to Sudan. Migration back and forth, up and down the continent has been a constant throughout recorded history, but not in overwhelming numbers. The most obvious cultural influence is Arab, which was adopted through admiration, to aid commerce or through coertion rather than by the spread of ethnic Arabs. At the same time, it is important to realise that cultural influences have come from south, east and west as well as the north, creating the richness of Sudanese cultures. Racist colonialism could not accept that advanced agrarian and civilised culure could have evolved without the influence of lighter-skinned people, but it did.

The counter-examples, where mass migration has led to overwhelming change, share certain characteristics. Subjugated minorities become a constant source of rebellion and have to be isolated or wiped out, which is what native reservations in North America and Australia, or the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, or the townships of apartheid South Africa are perfect examples of.

Possibly the most important question Mamdani attempts to answer is why the facts about Darfur have been so distorted by Western media and the influential pressure group, Save Darfur. The answer is that there is a mixture of sophisticated colonialism and an unsophisticated vision of the world as polarised by the "war on terror". The rhetoric of the "new generation draws the line" is of people that have to be saved from their own "failed states", which contradicts itself because the intervention to protect the survivors does not nurture the grass-roots political structures needed to strengthen or resuscitate the alledgedly crumbling or absent democracy.

Similarly, the protagonists in a given conflict are portrayed as good Christians, our allies and/or victims, under attack from bad Muslims, our enemies and/or the bad guys. This distorted picture allows any conflict to be added to the catalogue of crimes perpetrated by Muslim terrorists against the free Christian world. This helps justify military intervention, directly or by proxy.

The resolution of conflicts in Darfur, which Mamadani points out already fell to sub-emergency levels in 2005, lies in de-militarisation, improvement of the rights of the landless, and a revival of traditional methods of local mediation, at the very least. The people of the Sahel are capable of resolving their issues themselves despite the pressures of climate change.

As John F Kennedy said, in a very different context: "We choose to [do] things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." If an ideology is to prove its functionality, it is by working in the most difficult situations: World War II and the rise of Nazism being the most obvious test. I feel that Mamdani's analysis does fit with a Ghandist perspective, although I appreciate that there are elements of self-determination that he is uncomfortable with. My guess is that we could agree that local determinism has to be without isolationism.

Something I had never appreciated was that the International Criminal Court has been established with aims that appear to be apolitical but under the control of the UN Security Council. The result is that all of the prosecutions so far have been of men who oppose, or are seen to oppose, US/Western interests. The conflict in Darfur has been portrayed in the UN as a one-sided genocide, so it is no surprise that it is President al-Bashir that has been indicted by the ICC. We will never see George W Bush or Jacques Chirac in the dock although their proxies in the Darfur conflict have also committed war crimes.

It is impossible to compress the wealth of information and insight in Saviors and Survivors into a single blog post. I can only urge you to read it yourself. If nothing else, you will learn the meaning of the Sudanese saying: "Only a turtle knows how to bite another turtle."