Darfur: Moral Blindness

A critique of Eric Reeves, a leading proponent of intervention in Darfur followed by his response...

Darfur: Moral Blindness

A piece from David Rieff in The New Republic - via Sudan Watch

Obviously, the reason advocates of a U.S. military intervention in Darfur have not dwelt on these issues of global governance and of U.S. security is that they view them as insignificant when compared with the moral imperative of intervening in what Eric Reeves, the most eloquent and passionate proponent of intervention, has called the first genocide of the twentieth century. For Reeves, and for the many thousands of grassroots activists who have been instructed by him, the world that failed to prevent the slaughter of the Rwandan Tutsis must not fail the Darfuris. As Reeves has written, "Will the genocide be allowed to continue? Will international deference continue as the regime's génocidaires predictably and relentlessly assert the claim of 'national sovereignty?' How many must die before the world says, 'Enough?'"

Reeves's use of the term génocidaires reflects not only his moral commitment to stopping the killing in Darfur, but, more problematically, an analytical framework that is not beyond challenge. Yes, in the United States, it is universally believed--so much so that the claim is even enshrined in a unanimous congressional declaration--that a slow motion genocide has been taking place in Darfur. But many reputable groups abroad, including the French section of Doctors Without Borders, whose physicians have been on the ground in Darfur for a very long time, reject claims like those made by Reeves. Does this matter, since everyone agrees the government of Sudan has committed or abetted the most terrible crimes in Darfur? On the most obvious level, the answer is no. The Genocide Convention is itself a deeply flawed document, and the crimes of the authorities in Khartoum have been unspeakable. But, on another level, the recurrent use of the term "genocide" is a way of delegitimizing any questioning of the intervene-now-no-matter-the-cost line. We failed to intervene in Rwanda, and now we know we were wrong; Darfur is the Rwanda of today; hence the only correct thing to do is intervene at once in Darfur. Q.E.D.

The problem with this--the eternal problem posed by the assertion of this kind of Kantian categorical imperative in matters of war and peace--is the problem of politics. Except for those who frankly favor the anti-government insurgents in Darfur--and they are more to be found on the Christian right, which has supported Minni Minnawi's Sudan Liberation Movement as it once supported John Garang's insurgency in Southern Sudan--advocates of a U.S. deployment have been maddeningly vague about what will transpire in Darfur after foreign forces halt the killing.

To his credit, Reeves has written that any outside military force would have to ensure that the rebel guerrillas do not take advantage of the foreign presence to improve their position on the ground. But that is what an international deployment will almost inevitably do, which is why Minnawi and others have been campaigning so hard for one. The deployment of foreign troops, whose mission will be to protect Darfuri civilians, will allow the guerrillas to establish "facts on the ground" that will strengthen their claims for secession. That is what makes the interventionists' claim that the intervention will be purely "humanitarian"--that it will protect civilians being murdered, raped, and displaced by the Janjaweed but do little or nothing else--so disingenuous. For it is virtually certain that this is not the way events will play out if U.S. or nato forces deploy. To the contrary, such a deployment can have only one of two outcomes. The first will be the severing of Darfur from the rest of Sudan and its transformation into some kind of international protectorate, à la Kosovo. But, at least in Kosovo, the protectorate was run by Europeans--by neighbors. In Darfur, by contrast, it will be governed by Americans (who are already at war across the Islamic world) and possibly by nato (i.e., Africa's former colonial masters). Now there's a recipe for stability.

If anything, the second possibility is even worse. Assuming the intervention encounters resistance from the Janjaweed and the government of Sudan (and perhaps Al Qaeda), the foreign intervenors will arrive at the conclusion that the only way to bring stability to Darfur is, well, regime change in Khartoum: In other words, the problems of Darfur are, in fact, the product of Al Bashir's dictatorship, and these problems can be meaningfully addressed only by substituting a more democratic government. Such an intervention may well end up being Iraq redux, and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise. But, then, it was disingenuous to pretend that the United States could democratize Iraq at the point of a gun.

The idea that, after Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Iraq, intelligent activists can still speak of humanitarian intervention as if it were an uncomplicated act of rescue without grave implications is a testimony to the refusal of the best and brightest among us to think seriously about politics.

Is this what the marriage of human rights and American exceptionalism has led us to? If so, God help us. My own view is that the main culprit here is human rightsism, a worldview that is based, as John Gray has put it, "on the moral intuitions of the liberal academy ... a legalistic edifice from which politics has been excluded." Were politics present in their thinking, pro-Darfuri intervention activists would not use the reductionist dichotomy of victims and abusers that has been the staple myth of humanitarian intervention. The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. So do the extended families of the Janjaweed themselves, who, lest we forget, are also Darfuris. To describe the former simply as victims deprives them of any agency. To describe the latter simply as killers precludes actually understanding the conflict as anything other than an eruption of human wickedness, rather like a volcano or an earthquake.

One debilitating defect of the liberal interventionism is that it ignores the political implications of what it calls for. Another is that, perhaps out of the honorable motives of despair and outrage, it champions the use of American hard power while acting as if American soft power, were it to be diligently and seriously applied, can never 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. Most gravely of all, liberal interventionism ignores the global political context in which it calls for the use of the U.S. military.

Leave aside Iraq--and the detestation with which the United States is now regarded--and focus on history. Reeves may sneer at the idea of national sovereignty and bemoan the African Union's insufficiently aggressive line toward the government of Sudan. The fact remains that the consensus in postcolonial Africa has been to maintain the national borders that existed at the time of independence, despite their obvious artificiality, because, in redrawing them, Africa might reap the whirlwind. But that is why there was so little sympathy in Africa for Katangese or Biafra secession; it is why most African leaders insist that the Eritrean secession remain an exception for the sake of continental stability. There is nothing stupid, venal, or contemptible about this. And, whatever Reeves may imagine, there are many thoughtful African leaders whose reluctance to confront Khartoum is based in large part on these considerations.

A sense of contemporary Africa should lead those concerned with the fate of Darfuris to emphasize an African--or, at the very most, a U.N.--response, rather than an U.S. or a nato one. To their credit, the interventionists can put themselves in the place of the suffering peoples of Darfur. To their discredit, they cannot put themselves in the place of most people in the world who abhor U.S. military action. Again, the reigning global interpretation of American power may be false, but it is also dominant. And unless, like the conservative writer Norman Podhoretz and his ilk, you believe the United States should be harshly prosecuting what he has called "World War IV" against radical Islam, you are obliged to acknowledge that an intervention, however good it may be for the Darfuris, may be terrible for the rest of the world. If, on reflection, Reeves and those who think like him believe that it is worth doing anyway, that is a perfectly defensible position. What is indefensible is not seeing--or pretending not to see--the problem.

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Eric Reeves response: Darfur: RE: Moral Blindness

Eric Reeves responds to this recent piece by David Rieff - via the COC blog

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.

posted by Eugene Oregon at 9:59 AM