The
Politics of Naming: Genocide,
Civil War, Insurgency
By Mahmood Mamdani
31 May, 2007
London Review
Of Books
The similarities between Iraq
and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed
over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly
paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said
to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified
as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence
in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a
cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called
genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named?
What difference does it make?
The most powerful mobilisation
in New York City is in relation to Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect
the reverse, for no other reason than that most New Yorkers are American
citizens and so should feel directly responsible for the violence in
occupied Iraq. But Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination,
a place with messy politics. Americans worry about what their government
should do in Iraq. Should it withdraw? What would happen if it did?
In contrast, there is nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without
history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly
identifiable as ‘Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable
as ‘Africans’.
A full-page advertisement
has appeared several times a week in the New York Times calling for
intervention in Darfur now. It wants the intervening forces to be placed
under ‘a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military
action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel’.
That intervention in Darfur should not be subject to ‘political
or civilian’ considerations and that the intervening forces should
have the right to shoot – to kill – without permission from
distant places: these are said to be ‘humanitarian’ demands.
In the same vein, a New Republic editorial on Darfur has called for
‘force as a first-resort response’. What makes the situation
even more puzzling is that some of those who are calling for an end
to intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur; as
the slogan goes, ‘Out of Iraq and into Darfur.’
What would happen if we thought
of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics –
a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? Why should an
intervention in Darfur not turn out to be a trigger that escalates rather
than reduces the level of violence as intervention in Iraq has done?
Why might it not create the actual possibility of genocide, not just
rhetorically but in reality? Morally, there is no doubt about the horrific
nature of the violence against civilians in Darfur. The ambiguity lies
in the politics of the violence, whose sources include both a state-connected
counter-insurgency and an organised insurgency, very much like the violence
in Iraq.
The insurgency and counter-insurgency
in Darfur began in 2003. Both were driven by an intermeshing of domestic
tensions in the context of a peace-averse international environment
defined by the War on Terror. On the one hand, there was a struggle
for power within the political class in Sudan, with more marginal interests
in the west (following those in the south and in the east) calling for
reform at the centre. On the other, there was a community-level split
inside Darfur, between nomads and settled farmers, who had earlier forged
a way of sharing the use of semi-arid land in the dry season. With the
drought that set in towards the late 1970s, co-operation turned into
an intense struggle over diminishing resources.
As the insurgency took root
among the prospering peasant tribes of Darfur, the government trained
and armed the poorer nomads and formed a militia – the Janjawiid
– that became the vanguard of the unfolding counter-insurgency.
The worst violence came from the Janjawiid, but the insurgent movements
were also accused of gross violations. Anyone wanting to end the spiralling
violence would have to bring about power-sharing at the state level
and resource-sharing at the community level, land being the key resource.
Since its onset, two official
verdicts have been delivered on the violence, the first from the US,
the second from the UN. The American verdict was unambiguous: Darfur
was the site of an ongoing genocide. The chain of events leading to
Washington’s proclamation began with ‘a genocide alert’
from the Management Committee of the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum;
according to the Jerusalem Post, the alert was ‘the first ever
of its kind, issued by the US Holocaust Museum’. The House of
Representatives followed unanimously on 24 June 2004. The last to join
the chorus was Colin Powell.
The UN Commission on Darfur
was created in the aftermath of the American verdict and in response
to American pressure. It was more ambiguous. In September 2004, the
Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, then the chair of the African
Union, visited UN headquarters in New York. Darfur had been the focal
point of discussion in the African Union. All concerned were alert to
the extreme political sensitivity of the issue. At a press conference
at the UN on 23 September Obasanjo was asked to pronounce on the violence
in Darfur: was it genocide or not? His response was very clear:
Before you can say that this
is genocide or ethnic cleansing, we will have to have a definite decision
and plan and programme of a government to wipe out a particular group
of people, then we will be talking about genocide, ethnic cleansing.
What we know is not that. What we know is that there was an uprising,
rebellion, and the government armed another group of people to stop
that rebellion. That’s what we know. That does not amount to genocide
from our own reckoning. It amounts to of course conflict. It amounts
to violence.
By October, the Security
Council had established a five-person commission of inquiry on Darfur
and asked it to report within three months on ‘violations of international
humanitarian law and human rights law in Darfur by all parties’,
and specifically to determine ‘whether or not acts of genocide
have occurred’. Among the members of the commission was the chief
prosecutor of South Africa’s TRC, Dumisa Ntsebeza. In its report,
submitted on 25 January 2005, the commission concluded that ‘the
Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide . . . directly
or through the militias under its control.’ But the commission
did find that the government’s violence was ‘deliberately
and indiscriminately directed against civilians’. Indeed, ‘even
where rebels may have been present in villages, the impact of attacks
on civilians shows that the use of military force was manifestly disproportionate
to any threat posed by the rebels.’ These acts, the commission
concluded, ‘were conducted on a widespread and systematic basis,
and therefore may amount to crimes against humanity’ (my emphasis).
Yet, the commission insisted, they did not amount to acts of genocide:
‘The crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing
. . . it would seem that those who planned and organised attacks on
villages pursued the intent to drive the victims from their homes, primarily
for purposes of counter-insurgency warfare.’
At the same time, the commission
assigned secondary responsibility to rebel forces – namely, members
of the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement –
which it held ‘responsible for serious violations of international
human rights and humanitarian law which may amount to war crimes’
(my emphasis). If the government stood accused of ‘crimes against
humanity’, rebel movements were accused of ‘war crimes’.
Finally, the commission identified individual perpetrators and presented
the UN secretary-general with a sealed list that included ‘officials
of the government of Sudan, members of militia forces, members of rebel
groups and certain foreign army officers acting in their personal capacity’.
The list named 51 individuals.
The commission’s findings
highlighted three violations of international law: disproportionate
response, conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, targeting
entire groups (as opposed to identifiable individuals) but without the
intention to eliminate them as groups. It is for this last reason that
the commission ruled out the finding of genocide. Its less grave findings
of ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘war crimes’
are not unique to Darfur, but fit several other situations of extreme
violence: in particular, the US occupation of Iraq, the Hema-Lendu violence
in eastern Congo and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Among those in
the counter-insurgency accused of war crimes were the ‘foreign
army officers acting in their personal capacity’, i.e. mercenaries,
presumably recruited from armed forces outside Sudan. The involvement
of mercenaries in perpetrating gross violence also fits the occupation
in Iraq, where some of them go by the name of ‘contractors’.
The journalist in the US
most closely identified with consciousness-raising on Darfur is the
New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, often identified as
a lone crusader on the issue. To peruse Kristof’s Darfur columns
over the past three years is to see the reduction of a complex political
context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains
and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told
apart. It is a world where atrocities mount geometrically, the perpetrators
so evil and the victims so helpless that the only possibility of relief
is a rescue mission from the outside, preferably in the form of a military
intervention.
Kristof made six highly publicised
trips to Darfur, the first in March 2004 and the sixth two years later.
He began by writing of it as a case of ‘ethnic cleansing’:
‘Sudan’s Arab rulers’ had ‘forced 700,000 black
African Sudanese to flee their villages’ (24 March 2004). Only
three days later, he upped the ante: this was no longer ethnic cleansing,
but genocide. ‘Right now,’ he wrote on 27 March, ‘the
government of Sudan is engaged in genocide against three large African
tribes in its Darfur region.’ He continued: ‘The killings
are being orchestrated by the Arab-dominated Sudanese government’
and ‘the victims are non-Arabs: blacks in the Zaghawa, Massalliet
and Fur tribes.’ He estimated the death toll at a thousand a week.
Two months later, on 29 May, he revised the estimates dramatically upwards,
citing predictions from the US Agency for International Development
to the effect that ‘at best, “only” 100,000 people
will die in Darfur this year of malnutrition and disease’ but
‘if things go badly, half a million will die.’
The UN commission’s
report was released on 25 February 2005. It confirmed ‘massive
displacement’ of persons (‘more than a million’ internally
displaced and ‘more than 200,000’ refugees in Chad) and
the destruction of ‘several hundred’ villages and hamlets
as ‘irrefutable facts’; but it gave no confirmed numbers
for those killed. Instead, it noted rebel claims that government-allied
forces had ‘allegedly killed over 70,000 persons’. Following
the publication of the report, Kristof began to scale down his estimates.
For the first time, on 23 February 2005, he admitted that ‘the
numbers are fuzzy.’ Rather than the usual single total, he went
on to give a range of figures, from a low of 70,000, which he dismissed
as ‘a UN estimate’, to ‘independent estimates [that]
exceed 220,000’. A warning followed: ‘and the number is
rising by about ten thousand a month.’
The publication of the commission’s
report had considerable effect. Internationally, it raised doubts about
whether what was going on in Darfur could be termed genocide. Even US
officials were unwilling to go along with the high estimates propagated
by the broad alliance of organisations that subscribe to the Save Darfur
campaign. The effect on American diplomacy was discernible. Three months
later, on 3 May, Kristof noted with dismay that not only had ‘Deputy
Secretary of State Robert Zoellick pointedly refused to repeat the administration’s
past judgment that the killings amount to genocide’: he had ‘also
cited an absurdly low estimate of Darfur’s total death toll: 60,000
to 160,000’. As an alternative, Kristof cited the latest estimate
of deaths from the Coalition for International Justice as ‘nearly
400,000, and rising by 500 a day’. In three months, Kristof’s
estimates had gone up from 10,000 to 15,000 a month. Six months later,
on 27 November, Kristof warned that ‘if aid groups pull out .
. . the death toll could then rise to 100,000 a month.’ Anyone
keeping a tally of the death toll in Darfur as reported in the Kristof
columns would find the rise, fall and rise again very bewildering. First
he projected the number of dead at 320,000 for 2004 (16 June 2004) but
then gave a scaled down estimate of between 70,000 and 220,000 (23 February
2005). The number began once more to climb to ‘nearly 400,000’
(3 May 2005), only to come down yet again to 300,000 (23 April 2006).
Each time figures were given with equal confidence but with no attempt
to explain their basis. Did the numbers reflect an actual decline in
the scale of killing in Darfur or was Kristof simply making an adjustment
to the changing mood internationally?
In the 23 April column, Kristof
expanded the list of perpetrators to include an external power: ‘China
is now underwriting its second genocide in three decades. The first
was in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the second is in Darfur, Sudan.
Chinese oil purchases have financed Sudan’s pillage of Darfur,
Chinese-made AK-47s have been the main weapons used to slaughter several
hundred thousand people in Darfur so far and China has protected Sudan
in the UN Security Council.’ In the Kristof columns, there is
one area of deafening silence, to do with the fact that what is happening
in Darfur is a civil war. Hardly a word is said about the insurgency,
about the civilian deaths insurgents mete out, about acts that the commission
characterised as ‘war crimes’. Would the logic of his 23
April column not lead one to think that those with connections to the
insurgency, some of them active in the international campaign to declare
Darfur the site of genocide, were also guilty of ‘underwriting’
war crimes in Darfur?
Newspaper writing on Darfur
has sketched a pornography of violence. It seems fascinated by and fixated
on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in gruesome
detail and chronicling the rise in the number of them. The implication
is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology (‘race’)
and, if not that, certainly in ‘culture’. This voyeuristic
approach accompanies a moralistic discourse whose effect is both to
obscure the politics of the violence and position the reader as a virtuous,
not just a concerned observer.
Journalism gives us a simple
moral world, where a group of perpetrators face a group of victims,
but where neither history nor motivation is thinkable because both are
outside history and context. Even when newspapers highlight violence
as a social phenomenon, they fail to understand the forces that shape
the agency of the perpetrator. Instead, they look for a clear and uncomplicated
moral that describes the victim as untainted and the perpetrator as
simply evil. Where yesterday’s victims are today’s perpetrators,
where victims have turned perpetrators, this attempt to find an African
replay of the Holocaust not only does not work but also has perverse
consequences. Whatever its analytical weaknesses, the depoliticisation
of violence has given its proponents distinct political advantages.
The conflict in Darfur is
highly politicised, and so is the international campaign. One of the
campaign’s constant refrains has been that the ongoing genocide
is racial: ‘Arabs’ are trying to eliminate ‘Africans’.
But both ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ have several meanings
in Sudan. There have been at least three meanings of ‘Arab’.
Locally, ‘Arab’ was a pejorative reference to the lifestyle
of the nomad as uncouth; regionally, it referred to someone whose primary
language was Arabic. In this sense, a group could become ‘Arab’
over time. This process, known as Arabisation, was not an anomaly in
the region: there was Amharisation in Ethiopia and Swahilisation on
the East African coast. The third meaning of ‘Arab’ was
‘privileged and exclusive’; it was the claim of the riverine
political aristocracy who had ruled Sudan since independence, and who
equated Arabisation with the spread of civilisation and being Arab with
descent.
‘African’, in
this context, was a subaltern identity that also had the potential of
being either exclusive or inclusive. The two meanings were not only
contradictory but came from the experience of two different insurgencies.
The inclusive meaning was more political than racial or even cultural
(linguistic), in the sense that an ‘African’ was anyone
determined to make a future within Africa. It was pioneered by John
Garang, the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA)
in the south, as a way of holding together the New Sudan he hoped to
see. In contrast, its exclusive meaning came in two versions, one hard
(racial) and the other soft (linguistic) – ‘African’
as Bantu and ‘African’ as the identity of anyone who spoke
a language indigenous to Africa. The racial meaning came to take a strong
hold in both the counter-insurgency and the insurgency in Darfur. The
Save Darfur campaign’s characterisation of the violence as ‘Arab’
against ‘African’ obscured both the fact that the violence
was not one-sided and the contest over the meaning of ‘Arab’
and ‘African’: a contest that was critical precisely because
it was ultimately about who belonged and who did not in the political
community called Sudan. The depoliticisation, naturalisation and, ultimately,
demonisation of the notion ‘Arab’, as against ‘African’,
has been the deadliest effect, whether intended or not, of the Save
Darfur campaign.
The depoliticisation of the
conflict gave campaigners three advantages. First, they were able to
occupy the moral high ground. The campaign presented itself as apolitical
but moral, its concern limited only to saving lives. Second, only a
single-issue campaign could bring together in a unified chorus forces
that are otherwise ranged as adversaries on most important issues of
the day: at one end, the Christian right and the Zionist lobby; at the
other, a mainly school and university-based peace movement. Nat Hentoff
of the Village Voice wrote of the Save Darfur Coalition as ‘an
alliance of more than 515 faith-based, humanitarian and human rights
organisations’; among the organisers of their Rally to Stop the
Genocide in Washington last year were groups as diverse as the American
Jewish World Service, the American Society for Muslim Advancement, the
National Association of Evangelicals, the US Conference of Catholic
Bishops, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Anti-Slavery
Group, Amnesty International, Christian Solidarity International, Physicians
for Human Rights and the National Black Church Initiative. Surely, such
a wide coalition would cease to hold together if the issue shifted to,
say, Iraq.
To understand the third advantage,
we have to return to the question I asked earlier: how could it be that
many of those calling for an end to the American and British intervention
in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur? It’s tempting
to think that the advantage of Darfur lies in its being a small, faraway
place where those who drive the War on Terror do not have a vested interest.
That this is hardly the case is evident if one compares the American
response to Darfur to its non-response to Congo, even though the dimensions
of the conflict in Congo seem to give it a mega-Darfur quality: the
numbers killed are estimated in the millions rather than the hundreds
of thousands; the bulk of the killing, particularly in Kivu, is done
by paramilitaries trained, organised and armed by neighbouring governments;
and the victims on both sides – Hema and Lendu – are framed
in collective rather than individual terms, to the point that one influential
version defines both as racial identities and the conflict between the
two as a replay of the Rwandan genocide. Given all this, how does one
explain the fact that the focus of the most widespread and ambitious
humanitarian movement in the US is on Darfur and not on Kivu?
Nicholas Kristof was asked
this very question by a university audience: ‘When I spoke at
Cornell University recently, a woman asked why I always harp on Darfur.
It’s a fair question. The number of people killed in Darfur so
far is modest in global terms: estimates range from 200,000 to more
than 500,000. In contrast, four million people have died since 1998
as a result of the fighting in Congo, the most lethal conflict since
World War Two.’ But instead of answering the question, Kristof
– now writing his column rather than facing the questioner at
Cornell – moved on: ‘And malaria annually kills one million
to three million people – meaning that three years’ deaths
in Darfur are within the margin of error of the annual global toll from
malaria.’ And from there he went on to compare the deaths in Darfur
to the deaths from malaria, rather than from the conflict in Congo:
‘We have a moral compass within us and its needle is moved not
only by human suffering but also by human evil. That’s what makes
genocide special – not just the number of deaths but the government
policy behind them. And that in turn is why stopping genocide should
be an even higher priority than saving lives from Aids or malaria.’
That did not explain the relative silence on Congo. Could the reason
be that in the case of Congo, Hema and Lendu militias – many of
them no more than child soldiers – were trained by America’s
allies in the region, Rwanda and Uganda? Is that why the violence in
Darfur – but not the violence in Kivu – is named as a genocide?
It seems that genocide has
become a label to be stuck on your worst enemy, a perverse version of
the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical arsenal that helps you vilify
your adversaries while ensuring impunity for your allies. In Kristof’s
words, the point is not so much ‘human suffering’ as ‘human
evil’. Unlike Kivu, Darfur can be neatly integrated into the War
on Terror, for Darfur gives the Warriors on Terror a valuable asset
with which to demonise an enemy: a genocide perpetrated by Arabs. This
was the third and most valuable advantage that Save Darfur gained from
depoliticising the conflict. The more thoroughly Darfur was integrated
into the War on Terror, the more the depoliticised violence in Darfur
acquired a racial description, as a genocide of ‘Arabs’
killing ‘Africans’. Racial difference purportedly constituted
the motive force behind the mass killings. The irony of Kristof’s
columns is that they mirror the ideology of Arab supremacism in Sudan
by demonising entire communities.[*]
Kristof chides Arab peoples
and the Arab press for not having the moral fibre to respond to this
Muslim-on-Muslim violence, presumably because it is a violence inflicted
by Arab Muslims on African Muslims. In one of his early columns in 2004,
he was outraged by the silence of Muslim leaders: ‘Do they care
about dead Muslims only when the killers are Israelis or Americans?’
Two years later he asked: ‘And where is the Arab press? Isn’t
the murder of 300,000 or more Muslims almost as offensive as a Danish
cartoon?’ Six months later, Kristof pursued this line on NBC’s
Today Show. Elaborating on the ‘real blind spot’ in the
Muslim world, he said: ‘You are beginning to get some voices in
the Muslim world . . . saying it’s appalling that you have evangelical
Christians and American Jews leading an effort to protect Muslims in
Sudan and in Chad.’
If many of the leading lights
in the Darfur campaign are fired by moral indignation, this derives
from two events: the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. After
all, the seeds of the Save Darfur campaign lie in the tenth-anniversary
commemoration of what happened in Rwanda. Darfur is today a metaphor
for senseless violence in politics, as indeed Rwanda was a decade before.
Most writing on the Rwandan genocide in the US was also done by journalists.
In We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families,
the most widely read book on the genocide, Philip Gourevitch envisaged
Rwanda as a replay of the Holocaust, with Hutu cast as perpetrators
and Tutsi as victims. Again, the encounter between the two seemed to
take place outside any context, as part of an eternal encounter between
evil and innocence. Many of the journalists who write about Darfur have
Rwanda very much in the back of their minds. In December 2004, Kristof
recalled the lessons of Rwanda: ‘Early in his presidency, Mr Bush
read a report about Bill Clinton’s paralysis during the Rwandan
genocide and scrawled in the margin: “Not on my watch.”
But in fact the same thing is happening on his watch, and I find that
heartbreaking and baffling.’
With very few exceptions,
the Save Darfur campaign has drawn a single lesson from Rwanda: the
problem was the US failure to intervene to stop the genocide. Rwanda
is the guilt that America must expiate, and to do so it must be ready
to intervene, for good and against evil, even globally. That lesson
is inscribed at the heart of Samantha Power’s book, A Problem
from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. But it is the wrong lesson.
The Rwandan genocide was born of a civil war which intensified when
the settlement to contain it broke down. The settlement, reached at
the Arusha Conference, broke down because neither the Hutu Power tendency
nor the Tutsi-dominated Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) had any interest
in observing the power-sharing arrangement at the core of the settlement:
the former because it was excluded from the settlement and the latter
because it was unwilling to share power in any meaningful way.
What the humanitarian intervention
lobby fails to see is that the US did intervene in Rwanda, through a
proxy. That proxy was the RPF, backed up by entire units from the Uganda
Army. The green light was given to the RPF, whose commanding officer,
Paul Kagame, had recently returned from training in the US, just as
it was lately given to the Ethiopian army in Somalia. Instead of using
its resources and influence to bring about a political solution to the
civil war, and then strengthen it, the US signalled to one of the parties
that it could pursue victory with impunity. This unilateralism was part
of what led to the disaster, and that is the real lesson of Rwanda.
Applied to Darfur and Sudan, it is sobering. It means recognising that
Darfur is not yet another Rwanda. Nurturing hopes of an external military
intervention among those in the insurgency who aspire to victory and
reinforcing the fears of those in the counter-insurgency who see it
as a prelude to defeat are precisely the ways to ensure that it becomes
a Rwanda. Strengthening those on both sides who stand for a political
settlement to the civil war is the only realistic approach. Solidarity,
not intervention, is what will bring peace to Darfur.
The dynamic of civil war
in Sudan has fed on multiple sources: first, the post-independence monopoly
of power enjoyed by a tiny ‘Arabised’ elite from the riverine
north of Khartoum, a monopoly that has bred growing resistance among
the majority, marginalised populations in the south, east and west of
the country; second, the rebel movements which have in their turn bred
ambitious leaders unwilling to enter into power-sharing arrangements
as a prelude to peace; and, finally, external forces that continue to
encourage those who are interested in retaining or obtaining a monopoly
of power.
The dynamic of peace, by
contrast, has fed on a series of power-sharing arrangements, first in
the south and then in the east. This process has been intermittent in
Darfur. African Union-organised negotiations have been successful in
forging a power-sharing arrangement, but only for that arrangement to
fall apart time and again. A large part of the explanation, as I suggested
earlier, lies in the international context of the War on Terror, which
favours parties who are averse to taking risks for peace. To reinforce
the peace process must be the first commitment of all those interested
in Darfur.
The camp of peace needs to
come to a second realisation: that peace cannot be built on humanitarian
intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism
should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as
humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy
that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists
recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised – sati,
the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India,
or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting
that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling
of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext
for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have
a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing
barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with
the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning on this
score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention.
That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan,
unravelling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the
whole country into the global War on Terror.
Footnotes
* Contrast this with the
UN commission’s painstaking effort to make sense of the identities
‘Arab’ and ‘African’. The commission’s
report concentrated on three related points. First, the claim that the
Darfur conflict pitted ‘Arab’ against ‘African’
was facile. ‘In fact, the commission found that many Arabs in
Darfur are opposed to the Janjawiid, and some Arabs are fighting with
the rebels, such as certain Arab commanders and their men from the Misseriya
and Rizeigat tribes. At the same time, many non-Arabs are supporting
the government and serving in its army.’ Second, it has never
been easy to sort different tribes into the categories ‘Arab’
and ‘African’: ‘The various tribes that have been
the object of attacks and killings (chiefly the Fur, Massalit and Zeghawa
tribes) do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct from the ethnic
groups to which persons or militias that attack them belong. They speak
the same language (Arabic) and embrace the same religion (Muslim). In
addition, also due to the high measure of intermarriage, they can hardly
be distinguished in their outward physical appearance from the members
of tribes that allegedly attacked them. Apparently, the sedentary and
nomadic character of the groups constitutes one of the main distinctions
between them’ (emphasis mine). Finally, the commission put forward
the view that political developments are driving the rapidly growing
distinction between ‘Arab’ and ‘African’. On
the one hand, ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ seem to have
become political identities: ‘Those tribes in Darfur who support
rebels have increasingly come to be identified as “African”
and those supporting the government as the “Arabs”. A good
example to illustrate this is that of the Gimmer, a pro-government African
tribe that is seen by the African tribes opposed to the government as
having been “Arabised”.’ On the other hand, this development
was being promoted from the outside: ‘The Arab-African divide
has also been fanned by the growing insistence on such divide in some
circles and in the media.’
Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert
Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology at Columbia
University. His most recent book is Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America,
the Cold War and the Roots of Terror.
copyright © LRB Ltd, 1997-2007
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