For any others interested in Darfur, Alex de Waal, the world's leading scholar on the region, and John Prendergast, a director of ENOUGH! and a Clinton White House official, engaged in actually a rather fiery debate in a Newsweek Web Exclusive on Thursday. You can find it here.
Summary after the fold.
For me the exchange is most interesting for the specifics they delve into, like the workings of the failed Abuja accords. But the main event is the vitriol spewed back and forth over the question of whether activists are crucial helpers (Prendergast) in Darfur and situations like it or whether they harm (de Waal) the proceedings.
There are some questionable arguments on both sides and, as usual, we should be struck by the range of possible disagreement between reasonable, knowledgeable, intelligent experts. de Waal seems to think that, in pushing for certain policies, activists raised expectations among rebel groups, and that this was part of why negotiations fell through; Prendergast thinks this is ridiculous and that de Waal underestimates the value of activism in US politics. de Waal suggests that the "genocide" was a "disproportionate counterinsurgency strategy," while Prendergast thinks it was genocide, and that as a counterinsurgency strategy, it worked, making a mess of Darfur and muddying the waters in terms of regime responsibility.
Here's an example of the rhetoric. de Waal:
You, however, served in government. You were a senior official on African policy in an administration that fired cruise missiles that destroyed a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum and which endorsed regime change by rebels in both Sudan and Zaire. In the latter case, that regime change happened and ushered in the humanitarian disaster that is the Democratic Republic of Congo today. Do you ever ask yourself what you might have done differently to avert that disaster?
Most of your response is an exercise in pyromania of straw men. But although careless with both facts and logic, it deserves a response.
And Prendergast:
Thankfully, in this duel to the rhetorical death we were only given two bullets. I used up most of my nine lives in the last 25 years living and traveling in war zones, so I wouldn't want to spend any more of them on answering these extraordinary claims.
Activists need to know there are solutions out there, and that these solutions can be driven by activists. Some of your writings (and no, I haven't read all of them) tend to blame activists for things getting worse on the ground in Darfur, and for the failure of the Darfur Peace Agreemeent of 2006. At least that is what most activists perceive your intentions to be. And I understand that. It is hard to get published these days on Sudan, so an argument like that is very attractive to editors. The fact that it is not true is irrelevant, it appears.
Exciting and informative, although strangely, there's not that much substantive policy discussion.