Posts
since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
Abdul Mohammed
Political, humanitarian and security issues were all defined by activist constituency. All other entities, including the UN and AU that have considerable presence on the ground as well as their own sources of information and analysis, were intimidated into silence, and often reduced to responding to an agenda created on the other side of the world, by organizations with only a fraction of the knowledge. With thousands of monitors and a detailed local knowledge and analysis, the UN was overshadowed by hit and run missions from western human rights groups. These missions which arrived often, spent a few days mining the information of UN and AU staff members and Sudanese professionals, and then went away and imposed their own interpretations on the information they had extracted.
This externally driven a priori definition of Sudan's crisis had to be challenged, and Mahmood has succeeded in doing that.
`Saviors and Survivors' addresses four compelling arguments: Arabs are defined by some as "outsiders" while the Africans are labeled "indigenous"; certain activists have become detached and unaccountable; the role of Africa and African institutions in responding to Darfur is under-acknowledged; and that politics plays a prime role in any solution.
The way the Darfur issue has been discussed in the international community has consolidated the depiction that Arabs are outsiders to Sudan, and within Sudan, they are outsiders to specific communities. This depiction is creating its own momentum and people in Sudan are defining the issues in this manner.
In Darfur, the Arabs are now compelled to say, "We are Darfurians." They need to insist that they are part of the solution and not just a problem. This notion of Arabs as immigrants entered the communal discourse well before the war but has been entrenched by saturation in western media.
The redefinition of Arabs as outsiders has serious implications not just in Sudan but across West Africa. As resources dwindle, arms become available, and as competition for power intensifies, the issue of indigenous versus outsider becomes a driving narrative. It is a way of framing politics by exclusion, which has been a destructive force in conflicts such as Côte d'Ivoire.
This is a danger that must be seriously considered and tackled before it locks entire countries into its logic. Mahmood has seen these processes at work in different parts of Africa, most notably Uganda and Rwanda, and highlighting it in Darfur is consistent with his previous work. We should pay attention to his warning, as it is based on a deep understanding of how these processes operate.
Mahmood obliges us to focus on the activists and specifically the danger of activism becoming an end in itself. Rather than acting in solidarity with a domestic political agenda, activism on Darfur become entranced with its own image and is ending up spinning on itself. Mahmood, and a generation of Africans are all activists, coming from a background of political struggle for liberation and democracy.
Activism as practiced today, in the United States especially and focused on Africa, has a completely different character. We feel dismayed and let down that the word "activist", which we once owned and proudly wore as a badge, has been appropriated by others with such different worldviews.
Western activists are now empowered with unprecedented resources, not for purposes of the traditional NGO work of advocacy in solidarity with domestic political forces, but advocacy that is focused on overwhelming domestic political actors and defining a solution to the problem that forces the international players to buy into it. The activists are very ambitious in this, using the genocide narrative, which they have adopted because of its power to compel western governments to intervene. Once they have taken on this narrative, they have no choice, except to demand for regime change.
Even when they deny it, this is where their narrative leads. Individuals within these groups may have a better and more nuanced understanding, but the thrust of what they do, whether they intend it or not, is to consolidate power relations that reduce people in the countries they are concerned with to mere victims, spectators in the politics of their own countries. From the perspective of Darfur, this approach has really gone beyond accountability and solidarity into destabilization and continuation of conflict.
The label "victim" is in serious danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, the antithesis of the liberation which we aspired to a generation ago.
Mahmood has raised this question in a typically forthright and uncompromising manner. What he has succeeded in doing, something no-one else has done, is to force the activists to reflect upon the politics of their strategy and to demonstrate, in the clearest way possible, that there are other intellectually coherent and legitimate ways of seeing the Darfur crisis.
The activists had become used to dominating the public discourse on Darfur in the international sphere. After Mahmood's intervention, they need to raise their intellectual game. It is interesting to observe that they have hardly ever been able to do this, and keep recycling the same arguments as though the mere fact of repetition would make them win the argument.
Mahmood raises the issue of African institutions and how they responded to Darfur. He makes a point that in the case of Darfur, Africans actually took a much more forceful stand than they were credited for as they were the first involved, before anybody else. The African Union (AU) responded with what Africa has, which was moral condemnation, political engagement and human resources. Before anybody else, African states and the AU were engaged with negotiating a ceasefire, demanding an end to the atrocities, and sending a mission of ceasefire monitors. The AU observer mission relied on Africans with the financial support from outside, which unfortunately proved to be an unsustainable formula.
The AU presence, by all accounts, improved the situation on the ground in 2004 during the worst days of the crisis. The AU mediation achieved the one political breakthrough recognized by all parties, the 2005 Declaration of Principles, and conducted the most intense discussion of the details of power-sharing, wealth-sharing and security arrangements yet undertaken. As the months and years have passed since the end of the Abuja Peace Talks, much-maligned by the activists, [the process] has looked better in comparison with what has been possible since.
AMIS deployed at the very same time when the activists were raising the bar on Darfur.
The activists' argument was that the issue could only be met by an international force, preferably NATO, though they were ready to settle for the UN. The debate the activists have unleashed actually came at the expense of the African presence. Instead of arguing for upgrading AMIS, or at most changing the mission into another multilateral institution, the rationale for the campaign became to prove how the Africans are incapable and are failing. They hammered this point so much so that it degenerated into claiming the complicity of Africans with what they called genocide.
In spite of the attack against them, the Africans persevered and helped negotiate a hybrid arrangement of a joint UN-AU force.
Serious damage was done by the activists against African peacekeeping capacities, which have now been tarred as inadequate throughout the continent. The agenda of building an African peacekeeping force with a force structure and doctrine appropriate to the particularities of African conflicts, which was a vibrant issue just a few years ago, has been set back if not killed off completely. Within Darfur, the activists' messages were so inciting that the IDP communities saw the African character of UNAMID as an impediment to their aspiration. The kind of grumbling about institutional shortcomings that is the staple of any field mission or operational NGO was inflated into a universal verdict of condemnation.
Once recycled by activist op-ed writers in the United States, the same opinions returned to Darfur with the imprint of legitimacy from on high. Anything the Africans have done is not good enough for the activists, who instead demand the UN, by which they mean white people. This attitude is spilling over into the UN as well, so that UN-AU relations are unnecessarily complicated, making it difficult for the African peacekeepers and staff within UNAMID to do their jobs without constant grumbling and backbiting.
In spite of all this, the Africans continue to be helpful in Darfur and continue to exercise influence. Africa continues to provide peacekeepers for Darfur and it is taking the lead in political and peace initiatives.
Mahmood's analysis privileges politics. Instead of seeing the politics of Darfur through the simplified lens of good and evil, Mahmood sees the humanitarian crisis and human rights violations through the lens of politics. In doing so, he is speaking the same language as his most politically astute Sudanese critics, who fully recognize that the labels "genocide" and "criminal" are tools in the political lexicon and not the anchor for analysis. Internationally, the entire narrative of "Darfur" has been framed within by a depoliticized "evil."
Mahmood's book provokes us to think politically about what has happened in Darfur and how the legacy of marginalization which Darfurians are suffering from can only be redressed by political reform. By political reform, Mahmood refers to changing the way politics has been conducted, which requires a political struggle and redefinition of the issues, and creating a new dispensation for the whole of Sudan. He clearly articulates that the issue of justice does not exist in abstract. Justice exists within a political order; unless the political framework allows, justice cannot be done. He argues that it is only when the configuration of the political space is changed that justice will be served.
This is exactly what we have been hearing from the Darfurian people. In every consultation we have held, whenever we have asked the question about justice, the answer has not come back in terms of privileging trials and punitive accountability. Rather, the response has been in terms of dealing with inequities in development and political representation, overcoming marginalization and restoring livelihoods, and establishing the rule of law and the presence of the state and its services.
Only in that context and in that order do Darfurians speak about punitive accountability.
An important conclusion that follows from this is that changing the political dispensation can only be done by the Sudanese. Any authentic and legitimate political reform is primarily the product of the struggle of the Sudanese people.
The slogan of "Save Darfur" becomes meaningless because the emphasis is put on external factors. It reduces the people of Darfur and Sudan into spectators rather than being agents of change. Unfortunately, this slogan, because of its intensity and the resources behind it, was able to penetrate certain circles within the Darfurian and Sudanese elite, distorting their ability to focus internally, and encouraging them to put their priority on external salvation.
We hear this too, especially among the most frustrated constituencies in Darfur who are the IDPs. What is especially tragic is that this externally-oriented militancy has strengthened very reactionary forces in Sudan who want to perpetuate the marginalization of Darfur. It has given them the mantle of nationalism.
`Saviors and Survivors' has succeeded in doing something very significant, which is prompting a dialogue on American activism about Darfur and how it stands in relation to the politics of Sudan. Mahmood has succeeded in arresting the monopoly of the "Save Darfur" monologue on Darfur. To date, the response of "Save Darfur" and other groups like "Enough", to his critique, have not been substantive. It has been disappointingly thin, and has remained stuck on trying to prove that Darfur is "ongoing genocide."
It shows the activists have built their arguments on slogans and their horizons do not extend beyond their own world. Mahmood has challenged that. But the activists still stick to the politics of injured party, and refuse to go beyond first principles. In this political retrogression, I wonder if we should still use that honourable word "activists" to describe them.
