A Reply to David Rieff, in response to his argument against
humanitarian intervention in Darfur
Eric Reeves
May 30, 2006
David Rieff, contributing editor at The New Republic, has recently
published a lengthy essay arguing against the need for humanitarian
intervention in Darfur ("Moral Blindness: The Case Against Troops for
Darfur," May 26, 2006,
https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=20060612&s=rieff061206). Rieff's
central concern is of considerable significance: what will be the
consequences of military force, specifically Western military force,
intervening to halt genocide in Darfur and to protect acutely
vulnerable civilians and humanitarians? Unfortunately, Rieff's
contribution to the discussion of the issue is fatally compromised by
egregious factual error and a conspicuously limited understanding of
the current state of Darfur's crisis. He is also disturbingly
selective in his use of evidence (particularly in treating the issue
of genocide), and indulges at times a breathtaking disingenuousness.
Since this last is a charge Rieff directs at this writer, who figures
prominently in Rieff's essay, I take this occasion to reply at length.
RIEFF ON CURRENT REALITIES IN DARFUR
If there is a singularly shocking sentence in Rieff's essay, it is the
following:
"Yes, in the end, some form of international military deployment in
Darfur may be necessary, both to protect Darfuri civilians from
attacks by the government of Sudan and its Janjaweed surrogates and to
enforce the recent Abuja peace agreement."
"In the end"? "May be necessary"? This reflects a perspective of
supreme callousness, as if we have somehow not already reached far
beyond the "end" of what is morally acceptable in the form of human
destruction and suffering. Rieff seems very little interested in
statistics: he cites only one, "our planet's 1.5 billion Muslims."
Tellingly, despite this demographic fact, Rieff manages to avoid
noting that the population of Darfur is entirely Muslim---a fact that
we must hope will increasingly register with Darfuris' numerous
co-religionists around the world. But Rieff has no time for the more
urgently relevant statistics: the number of conflict-affected
civilians (UN estimates for Darfur and eastern Chad approach a
staggering 4 million human beings); the number of displaced civilians
(reaching to 2.5 million in Darfur and eastern Chad); the number of
human beings beyond all humanitarian reach (over 700,000); and the
number of people who are already victims of genocidal violence and its
ghastly aftermath of malnutrition and disease (over 450,000; see my
most recent mortality assessment [April 28, 2006],
http://www.sudanreeves.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=102).
Even less does Rieff talk about the effects of funding shortfalls on
humanitarian deliveries and the recent cuts in food aid to the
conflict-affected populations of Darfur, which even with recent
supplementary contributions leave people with diets less than
two-thirds of the normal ration for human survival. This occurs as
the Khartoum regime refuses to draw down its huge strategic grain
reserve in any way truly responsive to the massive food needs in
western, southern, and eastern Sudan. Nor does Rieff talk about the
relentless obstruction of humanitarian assistance by Khartoum, which
terribly attenuates relief efficiency and capacity, and ultimately
translates into further deliberate human destruction.
Nor does Rieff talk about other smaller, but still telling statistics:
Human Rights Watch recently reported what all evidence suggests was an
extraordinarily brutal Janjaweed attack on civilians far inside Chad.
During the week in mid-April 2006, when Khartoum-backed Chadian rebels
attempted a coup against President Idris Deby in N'Djamena, more than
100 non-Arab civilians were slaughtered:
"In the village of Jawara, which was visited last month by researchers
from [Human Rights Watch], 38 people gathered together praying under a
tree were killed in one swoop. Another 37 who came back to the village
later to bury the dead were also massacred, HRW said. Those attacks
took place on 12 and 13 April, according to villagers. [ ]
"HRW said it also learnt of a further 43 people killed in three
villages close to Jawara in eastern Chad at around the same time. 'The
bodies were still out in the open. There were blood stains on the
floor, machetes, and bodies,' said HRW researcher David Buchbinder.
'These attacks were deeper inside Chad than we have ever seen before,
and there were far more people killed--we are talking about hundreds
of people butchered with machetes and knives.'" (UN IRIN [dateline:
N'Djamena], May 25, 2006)
Such deaths, and the fact that they continue unabated---both in Chad
and Darfur---figure nowhere in Rieff's account. And yet all accounts
of current realities on the ground in Darfur suggest continual
large-scale violence, growing insecurity for the humanitarian
operations upon which literally millions of lives depend, and
increasing desperation in the camps for displaced persons.
Rieff can bring himself to say only that, "yes, in the end, some form
of international military deployment in Darfur may be necessary...."
How many hundreds of thousands of deaths are encompassed in this
casual phrase, "in the end"? And "may be necessary"? Is it possible
that the current trajectory of violence and destruction "may not"
require a military response?
Rieff's refusal to accept the need for an urgent, fully sufficient
military response to the cataclysm of current and prospective human
destruction is the context for his assessment as a whole, and its most
salient feature.
IS IT GENOCIDE?
Rieff wants to disable the argument that genocidal realities in Darfur
give a surpassing urgency to intervention. His strategy is two-fold:
[1] glibly suggest it may not be genocide, and [2] suggest that a
genocide determination has been construed as excessively obliging of
international action. Rieff is intellectually disgraceful in both
efforts.
Rieff declares, falsely, that there are "many reputable groups abroad
[ ] who reject claims like those made by Reeves [i.e., that realities
in Darfur are genocide]." Who are these groups, Mr. Rieff? Why don't
you name them? Instead, Rieff cites only Doctors Without Borders/
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF); and while it is true that the
controversial head of MSF-France, Jean-Hevre Bradol, has made some
extraordinary comments on the issue of genocide in Darfur, as has one
MSF physician, Mercedes Taty, these comments bear close scrutiny
before serving as the basis for any reasonable doubt about the
existence of genocide in Darfur.
It is first important to note that in its public reporting MSF has
systematically elided all data pertaining to the ethnicity of those it
treats in Darfur. It has done so since the beginning of its
field-work in Darfur, and continues to do so to this day. This
self-censorship (those the organization treats have been
overwhelmingly from non-Arab/African tribal groups) is evidently the
price MSF is willing to pay to retain humanitarian access.
But how can the same organization that is systematically removing (or
failing to include) data on ethnicity from its reports on Darfur be
taken seriously when it speaks to the issue of ethnic crimes in
Darfur? And what are we to make of the preposterous assertions made
by MSF's Taty and Bradol, flying in the face of every credible human
rights report that has been published on Darfur over the past three
years: "[Taty said] there is no systematic target---targeting one
ethnic group or another one [in Darfur]" (MSNBC, April 16, 2004).
Bradol declared, "Our teams have not seen evidence of the deliberate
intention to kill people of a specific group." (The Financial Times,
July 6, 2004).
These assertions are outrageously and demonstrably false, as many
within MSF will acknowledge privately. Indeed, it is hardly
accidental that, besides Rieff's, the only use made of MSF commentary
on "genocide" in Darfur has been by Khartoum's propaganda organ in
London, the absurdly mendacious "European-Sudanese Public Affairs
Council."
Compounding the credibility of MSF in speaking on genocide in Darfur
is a perverse misreading of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Bradol, head of MSF-France,
wrote in an MSF edition of "Stories from the Field" (Issue 25, July
2004):
"Since Médecins Sans Frontières started working in Darfur in December
2003, teams have not witnessed the intention to kill all individuals
of a particular group. We have information about massacres, but never
any attempt to eliminate all the members of a specific group."
Of course these "specific groups" are ethnic groups, and Bradol knows
full well that the 1948 Convention twice refers explicitly to the
destruction of targeted groups "in whole or in part." There is no
requirement in a genocide determination that ***all*** members of a
group be targeted for elimination. The importance of both parts of
this key phrase ("in whole or in part") has been repeatedly confirmed
and interpreted by international legal bodies, including the Tribunal
for the Former Yugoslavia (see my discussion of the important review
by the Appeals Chamber of the International Tribunal for violations of
international law in the former Yugoslavia in the case of "Prosecutor
v. Radislav Krstic," Case No. IT-98-33-T,
http://www.sudanreeves.org/index.php?name=Sections&req=viewarticle&artid=196).
Rieff's casual deployment of MSF as an authority on genocide in Darfur
is a mark of intellectual dishonesty or irresponsible ignorance.
Moreover, Rieff pointedly ignores the many voices declaring genocide
in Darfur, including those who know Darfur best: Julie Flint (UK) and
Alex de Waal of Justice Africa (UK), whose fine recent book "Darfur: A
Short History of a Long War" is by far our best account of the origins
of the Darfur genocide and ethnic hatred that has so deeply wounded
Darfuri society. Physicians for Human Rights, which has done superb
work on the ground in Darfur and eastern Chad in researching the
consequences of ethnically-targeted destruction, has also declared
genocide in Darfur (see especially "DARFUR: Assault on Survival,"
January 11, 2006,
http://www.phrusa.org/research/sudan/news_2006-01-11.html). Numerous
international genocide and human rights scholars have also publicly
declared the realities in Darfur to be genocide. So too have the US
Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, Africa Action (Washington), the
Committee on Conscience of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad
Vashem in Jerusalem, and senior officials of the UK and German
Governments. The Parliament of the European Union voted 566 to 6 in
September 2004 to declare the realities in Darfur to be "tantamount to
genocide" (this weasel phrase was a means of declaring genocide
without using the word in a fashion that might trigger contractual
obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention, to which all the
nations of the EU are party).
The only other prominent expressions of doubt about whether or not
genocide has occurred in Darfur come from Human Rights Watch (which
has long emphatically declared that what is occurring in Darfur
amounts to massive "ethnic cleansing" and "crimes against humanity")
and a UN Commission of Inquiry, whose report of January 2005 on Darfur
is a travesty of legal reasoning and reflects nothing so much as the
desperate political desire by Kofi Annan's UN Secretariat not to be
burdened with the consequences of a genocide determination, which
would expose the UN Security Council as woefully inadequate to respond
to such determination.
[See my two lengthy analyses of this UN Darfur Commission of Inquiry
Report, both of which address at length issues that Rieff simply
ignores,
http://www.sudanreeves.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=489&page=1
and
http://www.sudanreeves.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=488&page=1
Rieff would have us believe that a genocide determination is somehow
peculiarly "American": "Yes, in the United states it is universally
believed [ ] that a slow motion genocide has been taking place in
Darfur"---but nowhere else, he implies. This is again demonstrably
false, and Rieff either doesn't care or doesn't know---indeed he makes
it very hard to know which.
Rieff also declares peremptorily that the 1948 Genocide Convention is
a "deeply flawed document," this without offering the slightest
indication of what these flaws are, or suggesting even vaguely why
such a troubling judgment is called for. But context would indicate
that what concerns Rieff is the obligation at the heart of Article 1
of the Convention:
"The Contracting Parties [to this Genocide Convention] confirm that
genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a
crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and
punish."
Rieff is distrustful of such principled commitments, and this is
central to his objection to what I have consistently urged, viz. that
this international commitment be honored in Darfur as morally if not
legally binding. For the alternative to honoring the Genocide
Convention is to be left with a document that is nothing but a guide
for historical reference, a vague exhortation, a mere relic of
post-Holocaust literature. But Rieff surely knows that if in the wake
of Rwanda and Darfur the 1948 Convention experiences its demise as a
meaningful guide to international action in the 21st century, it will
find no meaningful successor in the current UN political environment.
In fact, Rieff makes it impossible to resist the conclusion that he
would welcome the demise of such a "demanding" document:
"The recurrent use of the term 'genocide' [by Reeves and others] is a
way of delegitimizing any questioning of the
intervene-now-no-matter-the-cost line."
Evidently, Rieff wishes it to be an open question (not an
international contractual obligation) as to whether or not we respond
to vast, ongoing genocidal destruction. He can survey the massive
past and impending human destruction in Darfur---orchestrated by a
regime that is guilty of previous genocides in the Nuba Mountains and
the oil regions of southern Sudan---and assert, "yes, in the end
perhaps we'll have to stop this---but we need to be flexible in this
decision." Rieff is right to suggest that I and others regard this
"flexibility" as morally intolerable. He is deeply wrong, however, to
suggest that the costs of intervention in Darfur have been
ignored---or that no attention has been given to the required military
nature of such intervention, or its consequences for Darfuri and
Sudanese society.
CONSEQUENCES OF INTERVENTION
Though sharply critical of others for not talking enough about
potentially unfortunate consequences of humanitarian intervention,
Rieff himself nowhere talks about the specific tasks of humanitarian
intervention, what must be done to protect a huge population of
vulnerable civilians over an immense geographic area, as well as to
provide adequate security for the humanitarians and humanitarian
operations on which almost 4 million conflict-affected human beings
now depend. This is of a piece with his failure to give any evidence
of understanding how great the catastrophe in Darfur is, including the
realities of enormous past and impending human mortality. Only
because Rieff is so glib, only because he refuses to look closely at
the numerous and highly demanding tasks of providing security in this
difficult environment, is it possible for him to dodge the issue of
what must actually be done if we wish to halt human destruction.
Rieff suggests that in place of a credible, well-equipped, large-scale
(roughly 20,000 personnel) international force---including a heavy
NATO-quality brigade at its core---we might substitute another version
of the African Union force that has failed so abjectly over the past
two years, and whose failure grows daily:
"[If used 'diligently,' American 'soft power' could produce] the
intervention that might actually work, for example, one undertaken by
African countries with, perhaps, the participation of forces from
Islamic countries outside the region."
It is not at all clear how the force suggested here would be any
different in character or effectiveness from the current failing
African Union mission in Sudan, except that Rieff adds ("perhaps") the
resources from a few Islamic countries---no doubt the Pakistanis and
Bangladeshis are high on his list. None of the key issues of mandate,
intelligence capacity, logistics, equipment, firepower,
communications, "inter-operability" of forces, or in-theater transport
needs are addressed. If Rieff were actually to read some of the ample
research published by human rights and policy groups on what is
required in Darfur, he might begin to see the foolishness of this
scandalously superficial proposal for a security force in Darfur.
Were Rieff to look seriously at the assessments coming from the
International Crisis Group, Refugees International, or the Brookings
Institution---all of which have published substantially on the
military challenges and consequences of intervening in Darfur---he
might see how extraordinarily casual he is being with millions of
African lives.
[See my two-part overview of the research from these organizations,
"Ghosts of Rwanda: The Failure of the African Union in Darfur,"
November 13 & 20, 2005, speaking extensively of the military
conditions on the ground in Darfur at the time, as well as the
preceding year and a half, during which time the challenges to
military intervention increased significantly;
http://www.sudanreeves.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=535&page=1
and
http://www.sudanreeves.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=534&page=1
]
Even normally cautious human rights leaders and humanitarian
officials, who have in the past failed to ask in timely fashion for
required interventions, are speaking out now, demanding a robust UN
force of approximately 20,000 military personnel, with robust rules of
engagement and Chapter 7 authority (peacemaking, not merely
peacekeeping, authority). So far few have had the nerve to ask about
the consequences of an inevitable veto by Permanent Security Council
members Russia and China of any further resolution brought under
Chapter 7, and thus the inevitable need for NATO forces. But at least
the need for NATO-quality forces is widely recognized.
Indeed, even UN Secretary General Kofi Annan finally, if only
temporarily, found his voice on the need for robust intervention to
save Darfur, speaking last January of the need for "tactical air
support, helicopters, and the ability to respond very quickly." Asked
if such a force would include rich countries, like the US and European
nations, Annan said at the time, "Those are the countries with the
kind of capabilities we will need, so when the time comes, we will be
turning to them. We will need very sophisticated equipment, logistical
support. I will be turning to governments with capacity to join in
that peacekeeping operation if we were to be given the mandate"
(Reuters, January 13, 2006). He was certainly not talking about the
Pakistanis or the Bangladeshis here.
What would be the consequences of humanitarian intervention in Darfur,
with all necessary military resources? The first answer is that there
much we simply cannot know in advance, despite Rieff's
characteristically facile and pessimistic conclusions. Rieff goes to
great effort to force us to see such intervention through the lens of
the war in Iraq, rather than through the lens of our failure in 1994
to halt the Rwandan genocide---the slaughter of some 800,000 Tutsis
and Hutu moderates. But Darfur is neither Rwanda nor Iraq, though as
a moral precedent, our failure in Rwanda must surely tell us more
about the international community as a whole than the US-led war in
Iraq. Though Rieff hints, disingenuously, that I share the views of
editors at The New Republic about the war in Iraq, I do not. Indeed,
I am quite as convinced as Rieff that one of the costs of this war is
an enormous depletion of US political and diplomatic capital, in the
UN and elsewhere.
But this is far different from assenting to Rieff's argument that
intervening in Darfur amounts to an ignoring of Darfuri "politics."
This bears emphasizing, since it is "politics" that Rieff highlights
in explaining why we should not intervene in Darfur: "The problem with
responding [to massive genocidal destruction as a matter of moral
principle] is the problem of politics." "Politics," Rieff wants to
argue, makes everything so very complicated that we had best attend to
political considerations before moral ones. Of course it's quite
possible to do both, as presumably Rieff believes he himself is doing.
But understanding "politics" in Darfur requires some attention to
facts, and this is not Rieff's strong suit. In an astonishing and all
too revealing moment of ignorance, Rieff declares that, "The
deployment of foreign troops, whose mission will be to protect Dafuri
civilians, will allow the guerrillas to establish 'facts on the
ground' and will strengthen their claims for secession." But of
course neither faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A),
and even less the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), have a
secessionist agenda, public or private. Indeed, within Darfur the JEM
is widely despised because its political ambitions are national in
nature, not focused enough on Darfuri political needs. But neither
Minni Minawi nor Abdel Wahid el-Nur, the two SLM/A leaders who lead
rival factions, has ever suggested or pushed for secession. Here
Rieff appears to have badly confused the demands of Darfuris for
greater national and regional political representation with the
demands of southern Sudanese---who overwhelmingly favor secession.
Indeed, southerners secured in the north/south Comprehensive Peace
Agreement (January 2005) the right to a self-determination referendum,
with secession as an option.
This confusion on Rieff's part tells us how little he knows about the
background of Darfur, and how little he knows about the "politics" of
the region, even as he makes this his central concern. Those of us
who argue for humanitarian intervention are "testimony to the refusal
of the best and brightest among us to think seriously about politics."
What, we must ask, does "politics" consist in for Rieff? Fundamental
mistakes about the most relevant "political" realities are hardly a
sign that Rieff and his ilk have any claim on realism or an
understanding of what is "best" for places like Darfur.
In this same vein, Rieff simply assumes that international
intervention will encounter resistance from the Janjaweed and
Khartoum's regular forces. Rieff gives no sign of understanding the
political relationship between the leadership in Khartoum's National
Islamic Front and the military it presently controls. His conclusion
about the NIF ordering a suicidal resistance to robust international
intervention is almost certainly another error. It is far more
likely, as I have recently argued in The Guardian (UK), that Khartoum
would not engage for fear of incurring annihilating losses, including
to its highly valued and exceedingly vulnerable military aircraft.
Such losses could easily turn the military against the political
leadership, not something that Omar el-Bashir, Ali Osman Taha, and
other senior NIF members will risk.
It is much more likely that the intervening force would immediately
begin undertaking the critical civilian and humanitarian security
tasks on the ground:
"Such [an intervening] force could produce an immediate and complete
stand-down of Khartoum's regular forces, including helicopter
gunships. The Janjaweed could be put on notice that they would be
destroyed if they assembled in groups larger than a couple of dozen
(this would have the effect of 'disarming' these brutal militias,
since they function as a quasi-military force only when they aggregate
in the hundreds or thousands). Camps for displaced persons could be
protected from marauding remnants of the Janjaweed and other violent
elements. Vital humanitarian corridors and operations could be
protected. And there would be sufficient manpower available to start
the process of providing security for people as they return to their
lands. Crucially, staunching the flow of genocidal violence into an
increasingly unstable eastern Chad could also begin" (May 15, 2006,
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/eric_reeves/2006/05/darfur_3.html)
Given the tenor of his criticism of my work, I would have Rieff
particularly note the sentence that follows: "Yes, there are risks and
significant costs to such an operation; it will be neither short nor
easy." These difficulties and costs have been regularly articulated
in my writings for more than two years; on the basis of present
evidence it is simply not possible for me to believe that Rieff has
felt obliged to engage with these efforts.
Again, there is much that simply can't be known now about the
consequences of intervention. In the same essay in The Guardian, I
suggest that gathering intelligence will be key to the success of any
intervention, and that there is an extraordinary resource at hand:
"We must bear in mind that these African tribal populations make up a
distinct majority in Darfur. They represent a huge built-in network of
intelligence observers should the threatened migration of non-Sudanese
jihadists to Darfur actually occur."
A highly seasoned military analyst, with many months' experience on
the ground in Darfur and very considerable experience in Sudan, has
suggested to me that while this is certainly a possibility, it will
require careful planning and preparation. Will such efforts guide an
actual intervention? There is no telling, even as it would very be
foolish to forego such assets for lack of adequate planning.
Certainly, however, we gather something of the response to Western-led
intervention from the remarkable greeting accorded Jan Egeland, the
Norwegian head of UN aid operations during his recent trip to Kalma
camp in South Darfur. Crowds of people, undeterred by the menacing
presence of Khartoum's security forces, chanted, "Welcome, welcome,
U.S.A.! Welcome, welcome, international force!" The people who
greeted Egeland at Kalma camp were not exceptional; I have yet to
speak with any non-Arab Darfuri who would not welcome a UN-led or,
preferably, NATO-led intervention. Indeed, I receive from Darfuris, in
Darfur and the diaspora, constant, often anguished pleas for such
intervention.
CHAD
In a deeply revealing omission, Rieff doesn't discuss Chad at all,
even as the military demands of securing eastern Chad are very
considerable, and far beyond the capabilities of even an expanded
African Union force. This is a particularly telling gap in Rieff's
account of Darfur since he declares that I "sneer at the idea of
national sovereignty" and "bemoan the African Union's insufficiently
aggressive line toward the Government of Sudan." The latter is
certainly true, although it is a view shared by a large majority of
observers. The previous statement is simply untrue. National
sovereignty is an important source of continental stability, as Rieff
rightly asserts---but it cannot be legitimately asserted by
génocidaires. Moreover, national sovereignty is precisely what is
being undermined in dramatic fashion in eastern Chad and perhaps
eventually in N'Djamena. The Chadian rebels based in Darfur, clearly
and substantially supported by Khartoum, are actively destabilizing
the border region between Chad and Sudan, and have created a virtual
state of war between the regimes in N'Djamena and Khartoum.
To be sure, Idris Deby, the president of Chad, is a cruel, rapacious
tyrant; he does not deserve to rule Chad. But if he is overthrown by
the FUC rebel coalition supported by Khartoum, Chad's territorial
integrity---its "sovereignty"---will be deeply imperiled, with
additional risks to the Central African Republic and conceivably
Cameroon. Why are such risks not part of the "political" calculus
that Rieff would have us consider? And what about the extreme
security risks to some 350,000 Darfuri refugees and conflict-affected
Chadians, increasingly subject to the kind of violence noted above?
Khartoum-inspired violence has brought humanitarian organizations to
the point of complete withdrawal from eastern Chad, just as the most
dangerous months of the year (the rainy season/"hunger gap") are
beginning. The African Union has no presence of any kind in eastern
Chad, and doesn't begin to have the resources to provide either
security or to halt the flow of genocidal violence across the border.
Does Rieff know this? His silence on these issues is hardly
encouraging. And yet he presumes to pontificate about the importance
of "politics" in understanding the implications of intervention in
Darfur.
CONSEQUENCES
All evidence is that the Abuja "peace agreement" of May 5,
2005---signed by one faction of the SLA (the least representative) and
the Khartoum regime---is already failing. Unless the Abdel Wahid
el-Nur faction of the SLM/A signs on to the agreement in the next day
or two, it will collapse entirely. Rieff gives very little evidence
of understanding the significance of the two factions of the
SLM/A---indeed, he preposterously declares that in the US "the
Christian right has supported Minni Minawi's Sudan Liberation Movement
as it once supported John Garang's insurgency in Southern Sudan." The
SLM/A is, if the creation of one man, Abdel Wahid's, not Minni
Minawi's. In any event, most Americans in the Darfur advocacy
movement can't distinguish meaningfully between what Minni represents,
or even identify his tribe. This is important because he is Zaghawa
(perhaps 8% of Darfur's population), while Abdel Wahid is Fur (perhaps
30% of the population) and much more ethnically ecumenical. Yet
again, Rieff simply doesn't understand the "politics" he declares so
important, even its most important features. Perhaps this is why he
can descend into ghastly nonsense when speaking of "the political":
"The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. [
] To describe [them] simply as victims deprives them of any agency."
In fact, we must wonder what "agency" a nine-year-old girl has when
she is brutally gang-raped by the Janjaweed, or what "agency" a
five-year-old boy has as he is thrown screaming into a bonfire along
with his brothers, or indeed what "agency" a one-year-old boy has when
the Janjaweed slice off his penis and he bleeds to death. "Political
interests" here is an abstraction that can have meaning for very few
besides David Rieff. There are real political issues in Darfur,
including competition over natural resources and power in governance,
as well as competing visions of equitable distribution of land and
wealth. Rieff captures none of this in his account.
If the Abuja accord does fail, if violence then inevitably rapidly
escalates in Darfur and Chad, it will be too late for hundreds of
thousands of lives. We have simply waited too long, with too many
sufficiently encouraged by specious arguments of the sort so abundant
in Rieff's account. In this sense it is perhaps useful to have Rieff
articulate his factitious "realism," to invoke so glibly the difficult
"politics" of Darfur, to pretend that Iraq has somehow changed the
imperative of responding to massive genocidal destruction.
Rieff's ignorance, his disingenuousness, his cowardice are supremely
instructive: for they are those of the world community at its worst.
Eric Reeves
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063
ereeves@smith.edu
413-585-3326
www.sudanreeves.org
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