[Peace-discuss] Save Darfur? Recolonize Africa

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Saviors and Survivors
	by Alex de Waal

Mahmood Mamdani's "Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on 
Terror" is the most ambitious book yet on the Darfur crisis.  Unlike the vast 
majority of other writing on the crisis, which is political science, human 
rights, or ethnographic narrative, specific to the Darfurian or the Sudanese 
situation, Mamdani places Darfur in deep and broad world-historical contexts.

The historical account is deep in that Mamdani sees the Darfur war less as the 
outcome of the immediate political grievances of Darfurians and the Sudan 
Government's specific objectives, but rather as the product of long encounter 
between the colonial and neo-colonial powers and Africa.  His account describes 
how under the independent Sultanate, Darfurian society was adopting 
administrative and social structures that transcended and down-played ethnic 
identities, but the colonial encounter -- brief but profound -- created 
administrative tribalism and a racial hierarchy.  Mamdani argues that the legacy 
of this intrusion and distortion, as it played out especially in the system of 
land ownership based on tribally-owned dars, can be seen in the recurrent 
internal wars in Darfur from 1987 to 1999 and the wider war that erupted in 2003.

In this account, we see common threads from Mamdani's previous books.  "Citizen 
and Subject" dealt with how European colonialism imposed concepts of tribe and 
race on Africa, generating specific oppositions and tensions, for example 
between those labeled as 'natives' and 'settlers.' "When Victims Become Killers" 
developed the account for Rwanda, tracing the legacy of European imperialism in 
the social, economic, and ideological construction of eliminationist violence. 
The 'survivors' of Mamdani's Darfur book are the people of Darfur (and Sudan in 
general) who struggle to retain agency amid a comparable history, written by 
powerful outsiders using the language of race and tribe in pursuit of colonial 
and Cold War interests.

The historical account is broad in that it brings to bear some of the great 
issues of our day -- American power during the age of the War on Terror -- on 
Darfur.  Again, a dichotomizing, even Manichean worldview imposed by a global 
power determines events in a distant land.  In this, we see continuities from 
Mamdani's "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim" -- the 'bad Muslims' in this case being the 
Sudanese Arabs, both the rulers in Khartoum and the Darfurian Janjawiid, and the 
'good Muslims' implicitly being the 'African' civilians and rebels.  Mamdani 
sees the Save Darfur campaign as representing a refracted version of the moral 
logic of the War on Terror, with the Arabs in both cases branded as evil, except 
this time because they are genocidaires instead of terrorists.  The campaign to 
bring international troops to Darfur and to indict the Sudanese leadership at 
the International Criminal Court, and the willful ignorance about the successes 
of the African engagement with Darfur and the changing situation on the ground, 
are all portrayed as the product of this agenda.

Mamdani concludes:

     "For Africa, a lot is at stake in Darfur.  Foremost are two objectives, 
starting with the unity of Africa: The Save Darfur lobby in the United States 
has turned the tragedy of the people of Darfur into a knife with which to slice 
Africa by demonizing one group of Africans, African Arabs. . .  At stake also is 
the independence of Africa.  The Save Darfur lobby demands, above all else, 
justice, the right of the international community -- really the big powers in 
the Security Council -- to punish 'failed' or 'rogue' states, even if it be at 
the cost of more bloodshed and a diminished possibility of reconciliation.  More 
than anything else, 'the responsibility to protect' is a right to punish but 
without being held accountable -- a clarion call for the recolonization of 
'failed' states in Africa.  In its present form, the call for justice is really 
a slogan that masks a big power agenda to recolonize Africa"...

[Alex de Waal is the director of Justice Africa.  This article was first 
published in Making Sense of Darfur on 12 April 2009...]

Full articel at <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/dewaal130409.html>