[Peace-discuss] Moral posturing on Darfur

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Part of the story. The rest would include how Darfur fit into the US military 
and propaganda campaign in the Mideast.  --CGE]

	Friday 5 March 2010
	Darfur: every celebs’ favourite African war
	A new book reveals how celebrities’ and human rights activists’
	simple-minded moral posturing on Darfur made the conflict even worse.
	Philip Hammond

‘I had come for an adventure’, says freelance foreign correspondent Rob Crilly 
of his time in Sudan. ‘Changing the world or saving Darfur were not part of my 
agenda.’ This characteristically frank and unpretentious comment captures the 
core strength of his book Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War: its 
honesty.

That honesty means that Crilly refuses to ignore awkward facts that don’t fit 
the accepted narrative about the ongoing conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan. 
His fair-minded efforts to understand the motivations of the various actors 
involved ultimately lead him to challenge head-on the over-simplifications and 
distortions perpetuated by many Western journalists and Save Darfur campaigners. 
‘By focusing on criminalising a government and making military intervention the 
top priority’, he argues, ‘[the Save Darfur Coalition] has made peace more 
elusive and increased the suffering of ordinary Darfuris’. His challenge 
springs, not from having some axe of his own to grind, but from the good 
reporter’s desire to really nail the story.

Crilly conveys the excitement and glamour of the foreign correspondent’s work, 
sometimes in unpromising circumstances. His most animated account of pursuing 
elusive leads and racing to scoop his rivals concerns the apparently trivial 
story of Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher in a Khartoum school who was 
arrested in 2007 for allowing her pupils to name a teddy bear ‘Mohammed’. When a 
snooty US colleague dismisses this light human-interest piece as a frivolous 
distraction from the serious stories needing to be told about Darfur, Crilly’s 
robust retort is: ‘I think you are talking bollocks.’ Insisting it is a ‘bloody 
great story’, Crilly recounts his ‘elation’ at being in the right place at the 
right time to reap fame and fortune from telling the tale. And, as he chases 
down the story, it turns out that this minor episode of cultural 
misunderstanding yields valuable insights into the workings of the Sudanese 
political system.

Gibbons was released after the intercession of two British Muslim peers, 
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi and Lord Nazir Ahmed: it was not lectures and threats 
that produced a result but ‘an appeal to common sense’, which offered President 
Omar al Bashir a face-saving way out instead of backing him in to a corner. 
Might this tell us something about the international approach to Sudan over 
Darfur, wonders Crilly – that shrill Western hectoring is actually 
counterproductive, making an already shaky regime feel even more threatened?

This is not to suggest that Crilly is in any way sympathetic to Bashir’s 
government. He frequently deplores its cruelty and vividly describes the 
suffering it has caused. What he does not do, however, is demonise it as an evil 
regime hell-bent on genocide. Instead, he suggests that Bashir has pursued a 
strategy of ‘counter-insurgency on the cheap’, in the words of Sudan scholar 
Alex de Waal. Crilly’s encounters with Sudanese soldiers reveal an unreliable 
military with doubtful loyalties – the army is full of Darfuris and also 
includes men from southern Sudan who until recently were themselves at war with 
the government. Recruiting proxy militia forces – the Janjaweed, or ‘devils on 
horseback’ – with promises of land and money, and giving them ‘the chance to 
loot and steal’, argues Crilly, ‘seemed to be the way a government with a thin 
grip on its vast country fought for survival’. Previous Sudanese presidents did 
much the same thing, he notes, and so did the British when they were Sudan’s 
imperial rulers.

Although this is a personal account, full of colourful anecdotes and wry asides, 
Crilly resists the temptation to put himself at the centre of the story. Since 
the early 1990s the fashion has been for Western journalists to use other 
people’s wars as a backdrop for their own existential voyages of moral 
self-discovery. Crilly’s more down-to-earth approach shuns the simplification 
and narcissism of that emotive and ‘attached’ style of journalism. Arriving in 
Sudan in September 2004, shortly after then US secretary of state Colin Powell 
had described the situation in Darfur as ‘genocide’, Crilly quickly finds that 
the war as understood in the West is ‘slipping out of focus’, as ‘black and 
white certainties’ start ‘mixing into grey’. Rather than seeking, as so many 
have done, to speak on behalf of the victims of conflict, Crilly’s aim is to 
‘broadcast the real voices from the aid camps, the rebel villages and the Arab 
camel markets’.

Crilly meets the civilian victims of indiscriminate government bombing raids and 
brutal Janjaweed militiamen. But he also seeks out the voices of those who go 
‘un-vox-popped’ in most reporting because they do not easily fit into 
reductionist accounts of a ‘genocide in Darfur’ perpetrated by ‘lighter-skinned 
Arabs’ against ‘black Africans’. He talks to the Arabic-speaking victims of 
rebel attacks, for example, and to former militia members who have defected to 
the rebels, discovering not an epic tale of Good versus Evil but a more prosaic 
and more complex story of shifting allegiances and ambiguous divisions. ‘Delving 
into context’, he finds, ‘showed that rational actors were at work, defending 
the interests of both sides’.

Equally, while he listens sympathetically to the rebels of the Sudan Liberation 
Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, he instinctively mistrusts their 
‘glowing media profile’ and refuses to gloss over the rebels’ political 
fragmentation, their attacks on African Union peacekeepers, obstruction of 
humanitarian aid and recruitment of child soldiers. Unlike many of his 
colleagues, Crilly exercises proper journalistic scepticism when courted by 
media-savvy rebel groups who want to appeal to an international audience. 
Instead of simplifying the picture, his objective is to ‘tease out… loose ends, 
to complicate, and correct, the story of Darfur’.

Of course, complexity does not always go down well with newspapers eager for 
attention-grabbing headlines (Crilly wrote for The Times and the Daily Mail, 
among others). ‘Hmm, it’s a bit “Inside Baseball” isn’t it?’ was the response of 
editors who thought his attempts to present a more nuanced picture were too 
laden with esoteric detail. Sometimes they would even insert terms such as 
‘black’ and ‘African’ into his articles in order to make them conform to the 
clear but misleading narrative that dominated news coverage. ‘[I]t was only 
after a couple of years covering the conflict that I began to object,’ he 
recalls, ‘pointing out that everyone in Darfur was black and African.’ While 
candid about his own mistakes, Crilly is highly critical of Western media 
coverage of Darfur – especially the simple-minded moralism of crusading 
journalists such as Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times.

The main focus of criticism, though, is the celebrity campaigners and human 
rights activists of the Save Darfur lobby – the target of the book’s ironic 
title. He pokes fun at some of their media-friendly stunts, such as the 2008 
‘Day for Darfur’ when celebrities smashed up toys to symbolise the suffering of 
Darfuri children – ‘Matt Damon took a baseball bat to a dolls’ house… Thandie 
Newton blowtorched a Barbie.’ But his criticism is deadly serious. It was the 
campaigners and ‘celebrity diplomats’ who did most to ‘[turn] Sudan’s desert 
conflict into the world’s favourite African war’, yet they did so only by 
simplifying and distorting it. In the process, Crilly concludes, far from 
‘saving Darfur’ the campaigners have actually made things worse.

By exaggerating death tolls and depicting this ‘messy war’ as the ‘first 
genocide of the twenty-first century’, he argues, the activists and celebrities 
bear much of the responsibility for framing Darfur as a problem demanding 
drastic solutions – not quiet diplomacy but UN troops, not patient mediation but 
arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court (ICC). It is a timely 
point. The book’s publication this month coincides with the ICC’s decision – 
welcomed by the Save Darfur Coalition – to re-examine the possibility of adding 
the charge of genocide to its indictment against President Bashir. Coming just 
ahead of elections in Sudan scheduled for this spring, the court’s move to 
further criminalise the country’s president is unlikely to improve the chances 
of a negotiated peace settlement.

Even though it was ‘the search for adventure’ that took Crilly to Darfur, he 
says that in the end it also became his ‘favourite African war’. After five 
years of trying to get inside the minds of the rebels, militiamen and refugees, 
they got under his skin too. Crilly was honest enough to admit that ‘the more I 
travelled through Darfur the more it seemed everything I knew about it was 
wrong’, and to reappraise his preconceptions in light of experience. Save Darfur 
campaigners should read his book and do the same.

Philip Hammond is reader in media and communications at London South Bank 
University, and is the author of Media, War and Postmodernity, published by 
Routledge in 2007. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War, by Rob Crilly, is published by 
Reportage Press. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

This article is republished from the February 2010 issue of the spiked review of 
books...

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8277/

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