I started this as a response to
Atlantic Review's diary on Darfur as originally posted on EuroTrib but it is very wide ranging so I thought it better to post it as a diary in itself.
As you will see, I have very great concerns about how the Darfur conflict is being presented. I am particularly concerned that the professed concerns that the Bush administration have are not for humanitarian reasons but more connected with extending their "war on terra" onto another continent.
I want to use this diary to caution against having our natural empathy for people in dire distress subverted and used for evil ends by Bush and Bin Laden. I hope it also helps explain my antipathy to those who use Darfur as a distraction from other human rights abuses or permit themselves to be used for this purpose. Neither, despite their best efforts, should we call this "genocide".
The position of the displaced in Darfur is certainly a huge humanitarian crisis. Those who attack villages, kill and rape are the worst sort of criminals as are those who attack and rape women leaving the refugee camps to gather firewood. To a large extent the west is complicit in this for failing to provide adequate support to the AU forces. There is even a suggestion today that the AU wil not withdraw at the end of its mandate simply because
it does not have enough money for the evacuation.
It is undeniable that war crimes are being committed in Darfur. In a report to the UN Security Council in June, the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court reported back on the then current situation. He refused to characterised the situation as genocide until he had received all the information and evidence required. An earlier report by a special adivser to Kofi Annan had suggested that the position did not meet the strict criteria of genocide as the actions of the Janjaweed and their masters the Khatoum government were not solely directed against one ethnic group. That is indeed the case as there have been conflicts between that governmnet and black African (mostly Christian) groups in the south of Sudan as well as in the west where Darfur is. There have however also been conflicts between the governmnet and dissident groups in the predominantly Muslim east of the country. The BBC has a useful exposition of the history of the term and its strict definition within the UN Charter.
In his book Rwanda and Genocide in the 20th Century, former secretary-general of Medecins Sans Frontieres, Alain Destexhe says: "Genocide is distinguishable from all other crimes by the motivation behind it.
"Genocide is a crime on a different scale to all other crimes against humanity and implies an intention to completely exterminate the chosen group.
"Genocide is therefore both the gravest and greatest of the crimes against humanity."
Loss of meaning
Mr Destexhe believes the word genocide has fallen victim to "a sort of verbal inflation, in much the same way as happened with the word fascist".
Because of that, he says, the term has progressively lost its initial meaning and is becoming "dangerously commonplace".
Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, [now a Canadian MP and candidate for Liberal Party leader] agrees.
"Those who should use the word genocide never let it slip their mouths. Those who unfortunately do use it, banalise it into a validation of every kind of victimhood," he said in a lecture about Raphael Lemkin.
"Slavery for example, is called genocide when - whatever it was, and it was an infamy - it was a system to exploit, rather than to exterminate the living.
Lemkin is the Jewish-Polish lawyer who coined the term by combining the Greek word "genos" (race or tribe) with the Latin word "cide" (to kill). Every memebr of his family except his brother and himself were killed in the Holocaust. His work led to the adoption of the UN Convention on Genocide in December 1948, which came into effect in January 1951.
Article Two of the convention defines genocide and the convention imposes a general duty on states that are signatories to "prevent and to punish" genocide. Thus any and all actions up to armed intervention are authorised once crimes are identified as genocide.
Until recently I had wholeheartedly brought into the need for even armed intervention by non-African forces to protect the individuals being attacked (and to a large extent still do). I must admit I had not paid too much atention to what had been going on within the UN other than being pleased that something was being done and dispairing at the inability of the AU forces to properly respond. Alarm bells started to ring when during the Israel/Palestine/Lebanon fighting the apologists for the Israeli war crimes being committed in Lebanon, including those on GIYUS, started to use the Darfur situation as a diversion. Of course if I had been paying proper attention I should have started this when the Bush administration showed such enthusiasm for using the UN and applying the rule of International Law, especially when they started criticising the UN for not being sufficiently robust to call the actions of the Sudanese "genocide", the only country to do so.
My consideration turned to the situation before the invasion of Iraq when they were weeping crocodile tears over the children in that country suffering because of the abuse of the oil-for-food program. I was aware of that well before even 2001 thanks to Emma Nicholson and her campaigns (she is now a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords). Elsewhere I made comments to the effect that the UN should change the scheme to deny Saddam the funds and to direct them where they were properly intended. I started to look at whether, like then, our natural humanitarian sympaties were being exploited for darker purposes.
The US Department of State claimed a leading role for the administration in pressing the case for concentrating on Darfur as recently as their press briefing on 6 September:
I think it's a safe bet to say that we would not be here discussing this as one of the most important foreign policy issues of the day without the leadership of the United States Government in bringing this issue to the floor of the -- and bringing it to the attention of the international community and getting the international community to act.
There are several aspects to this which lead me to believe that the Bush's administration's interest in the region have nothing whatsoever to do with humanitarian concerns. The first is their failure to mention the fighting in the east of the country between the Khatoum government and the Eastern Front.. This is especially surprising in view of the usual motives assigned to Bush's impetus to war in Iraq, oil. The east has the main oil export port for the country and its gold mines. Here though is perhaps the motive for the Khatoum regime's interest in both this area and Darfur. Oil and money. For this reason I am getting more convinced that the motives for the fighting is not genocide but simple greed to get their hands on the money that will flow along with the oil from the oil-rich south and west (ie Darfur) so it can be exported from the port in the east. They may be exploiting tribal and racial differences to enthuse their client militia but such conflicts are nothing new in Sudan. This rather more thoughtful analysis from Ockendon International, one of the several charities working in eastern Sudan for both the Sudanese and the displaced from next door Eritrea.
The current civil war is often thought of as a struggle between northern Islamists and southern Christians. The reality however, is a far more complex mix of power struggles, poverty, race and religion which date back centuries to a time when current day Sudan consisted of a number of smaller nations.
So, as is depressingly familiar in Africa (and elsewhere), we are looking at the result of all those nice straight lines or things like rivers being drawn as borders in colonial and post-colonial times. Countries that are an artificial construct containing disperate rival groups vying for control of power or natural resources often using tribal, racial or religious differences to justify their ascendancy. You only have to look at the litancy of conflicts over the past couple of decades to realise the relevance of this analysis. Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, DR Congo, Sri Lanka, Rwanda, the LRA in Uganda, the civil war in Iraq (here the Ottoman empire rather than the Western European ones), the inter-community rioting in South Africa between the Zulu Inkarta movement and the ANC and the suppression of opposition parties by ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe. I have left that to the end as I want to link it to another example of this sort of conflict, Israel/Palestine.
I want to examine Zimbabwe in some detail mainly because I consider it to be worthy of far greater concern in the international community but also because it points to the motives of those who push the case for Darfur. Before the Iraq war I argued that if regime change to suppress a tyrant was justified, the situation in Zim should be addressed first. Rather like Blair, Mugabe came to power amid great hope for the future of his country so the disappointment is even greater. He often characterises his policies as being justified on "anti-colonial" grounds, an excuse that has conned Mbeke in neighbouring South Africa who continues to support him despite having problems with the estimated 2 million (of 3 million) refugees from Zim in his own country. This critique by Claudia Rosett of the UN report on the enforced evictions of tens (probably hundreds) of thousands from "unauthorised" buildings in the main cities during 2005 gives a background.
Atrocities under Mugabe are nothing new. Since Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain in 1980, Mugabe has ruled with what is apparently the prime directive of remaining in power, whatever the cost.The U.N. report, in its brief history of the country's struggles, fails to mention that one of Mugabe's first moves after coming to power was to invite in North Korean advisers, to train the shock troops known in Zimbabwe as the "Fifth Brigade." In the 1980s, Mugabe dispatched this Fifth Brigade to massacre an estimated 18,000 Zimbabweans opposed to his rule--far more than the number of people slaughtered, say, at Srebenica, and more than six times the number murdered in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
The world paid no notice. Most of those who died were not members of Zimbabwe's white minority; they were black, most of them belonging to the Ndebele tribe. Mugabe then consolidated power, and was feted for years as a champion of African progress. Indeed, the new U.N. report, while omitting mention of this slaughter, describes Mugabe in admiring terms as "part of that exclusive club of African statesmen" who "fought colonialism and racial discrimination."
The report also gives an odd account of the farm invasions that from 1998 on escalated in Zimbabwe not only into the eviction of white land-owners, but the ruin of the country's agricultural base--replaced not by fair distribution of property and rule of law for blacks, but by plunder, violence, and enrichment of Mugabe's chums at the expense of millions of black Zimbabweans. The model for this was not equitable land reform, but Communist China's cultural revolution, the methods of which Mugabe and his crony "war veterans" learned in the 1960s and early 1970s at the knees of Mao Tse-tung himself. And the mobs who invaded the farms, while described as war veterans, did not consist on the ground of the aging satraps of Mugabe's elite circle--who profited from the policy. They were youth militia, unleashed by the aging Mugabe in an effort to thwart a growing opposition movement, and keep his grip on power.
Mugabe has used his youth brigades as a means of terrorising the opposition during election periods. That 2002 report mentioned the abuses carried out in the "base camps" of his militia but the BBC found a couple of years later that the training camps for the youth brigades were even worse. There the inductees were trained to torture, kill and rape. with rape often being used as a way of breaking the will of the girls undergoing training. Denial of access to food rations and tight control of food aid is one means Mugabe uses to consolidate power. Rather like Saddam and his Tikriiti clan, Mugabe gives political preference to those from his own sub-group of the Shona tribe. The ZANU-PF is almost exclusively drawn from this tribe with the main opposition being drawn from the Ndebele and other smaller tribes. Among those is a small tribe that spreads accross the border into South Africa and other neighbouring countries called the Lemba or Lembaa.
The Lemba self-identify as Jews. Their oral tradition is that they are descended from Jews who migrated from a place called Sena which is probably in modern day Yemen. They share many customs familiar in the traditions of the Jews from Europe and the Middle East with some variations you might expect from the use of oral rather than written communication. Many were forced by Christian missionaries to convert to get access to education but they still carry on complying with dietary laws such as avoiding pig meat or that from animals similar to pigs like hippos. Because of these differences the Rabbinical authorities in Israel decline to recognise them as proper Jews and they are therefore denied the "Right of Return". A somewhat similar position applied to the Ethiopean Jews who were finally airlifted to Israel after Rabin came to an accommodation that they would undergo a formal conversion. Their representative organisation (which uses an elephant set against a Star of David as its symbol) has had talks with the South Africa Board of Jews but so far there is no sanctuary in Israel for the "Black Jews" of Zimbabwe suffering under Mugabe.
For me it is all the more surprising that the Israeli government ignores the greater human rights abuses in Zimbabwe while calling upon those Sudan as diversion from those it commits in Palestine and Lebanon. Even the Jewish groups supporting the Global Day for Darfur seems to ignore them. That is despite the AJC declaring its aims on the GDD site as
The American Jewish Committee has worked since 1906 to safeguard and strengthen Jews and Jewish life worldwide by promoting democratic and pluralistic societies that respect the dignity of all peoples. We work in a deliberate and diplomatic manner that gains trust, earns access, and, most important, produces results. Both the breadth of our interests and the manner in which we pursue them differentiate AJC and contribute to our success.
When on other diaries I point out the failure to address the oppression of the Lemba and ask the simple question "why?", I receive no answer.
Now I do not question the humanitarian motives of those supporting the groups sponsoring the Global Day for Darfur. I am more concerned, and rather angry if my suspicion is proven, that this goodwill and the plight of the Dafurians are being abused by those with other agendas. Here I am pointing the finger at the Bush administration and the neo-cons.
I have already ruled out a direct link between Bush and Sudanese oil (although here you can question the motives of the Russians and Chinese in failing to agree to a more forceful UNSC resolution and immediate sanctions on the regime.) I believe they are attempting to present the Darfur situation as what Ockenden International emphasises it is not: "a struggle between northern Islamists and southern Christians". In other words they are attempting to present this as part of the "clash of civilisations" in the "war on terra". It is not or perhaps that should be not yet. Why then should the Bush junta be so keen on focussing on Sudan?
You may remember that in 1996 after the bombings of US bases the Sudanese government offered to arrest Osama Bin Laden (and after he was refused an asylum request in the UK the previous September)but this was declined and he slipped away to Afghanistan. Of course most Americans only recall theUS bombing of the pill factory he owned after the Embassy bombings in 1998. Indeed, the Clinton administration failure to "get him dead" forms part of the accusations in "The Path to 9/11".
Despite that very dubious connection, Bin Laden has made overtures to the Sudanese and himself tried to bring the Darfur conflict into play. In April this year he released a tape.
In it, the speaker identified as Bin Laden described the situation in Iraq and Sudan's troubled Darfur region as evidence of a "Zionist-Crusader war against Islam", referring to Israel and Christian states.He called for Islamist militants to prepare for a "long war against the Crusader plunderers in western Sudan".
"Our goal is not defending the Khartoum government but to defend Islam, its land and its people," he added.
Both sides in the Darfur conflict are predominantly Muslim and one rebel group is linked to a Sudanese Islamist group.
Bin Laden was based in Sudan until he was expelled following US pressure on Khartoum.
Sudan's foreign ministry was quick to distance itself from the appeal.
"Sudan has nothing to do with such statements," spokesman Jamal Mohammed Ibrahim said. "We are not concerned with any mujahideen or any crusade or any war with the international community. We are keen on reaching a peaceful solution to the crisis in Darfur."
(layout made a bit more compact)
This effort by Bin Laden to bring Sudan into the "war on terra" - maybe in revenge for their betraying him? - continued in a tape this June:
"We will continue, God willing, to fight you and your allies everywhere," he said, "in Iraq and Afghanistan and in Somalia and Sudan until we waste all your money and kill your men."
So here we have what is perhaps the real reason the Bush administration is so concentrated on Sudan. Bin Laden, despite his attempts being unsuccesful in the country itself, is attempting to convince them that Darfur is part of their "global war on terror". Of course by Bush intervening in this way that is exactly what he has suceeded in doing. Further armed intervention (rather than a peacekeeping/policing operation) will be the spark for an African version of Iraq. Those affiliated to Al-Qaeda may not be there (or be a minute presence) at the moment but as soon as a US led or inspired force arrives it will be the focus of those misled into thinking that it is part of their global violent jihad.