The Darfur conundrum French and other European intellectuals are mobilizing
for intervention in Darfur. Who are they really writing about, asks KA Dilday
for openDemocracy.
Image: Wikipedia
By K A Dilday for openDemocracy (05/04/07)
On 31 March 2007, five African Union peacekeepers in Darfur were killed in
the most fatal attack on them since the force arrived in the western province
of Sudan in 2004. At the time of writing, the spokesman for the African Union
(AU) has been unable to say who was responsible for the attack. This is the
conundrum in Darfur: The killers could have belonged to any of the several
armed groups there, though most reports suggest that one of the rebel forces
was likely responsible.
It was this same conundrum - whom to blame, and whom to support, in Darfur -
which has, for the past two weeks, been distracting French intellectuals from
the imminent presidential election. A battle raged in the opinion pages of
France's main newspapers between France's intellectuals: It was a debate that
at times, seemed to have a less noble subtext than the surface concern for
dying Darfurians. It also raised the question that nags at all levels of global
action: much more of the western world is aware of and concerned with the lives
of others, yet the quality of action is not keeping pace with the quantity.
A French controversy The debate began on 20 March when the group Urgence
Darfour, comprised of more than 100 individual associations, organized a
meeting at the Mutualité, a grand hall on the left bank of Paris. There, the
most prominent of the twelve presidential candidates agreed - either personally
or through their representatives - that if elected, they would use their
position to try to stop the killings in Darfur. Even President Jacques Chirac
sent a letter of support. The meeting was led by Bernard Kouchner, one of the
founders of Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), who has long since broken with the
group and now stands (unofficially and officially) for various national and
international offices; Jacky Mamadou, former president of Médecins du Monde,
the group Kouchner founded after leaving MSF; and the journalist and
philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, who had just written a long article in Le Monde
about his recent journey to refugee camps in Sudan and Chad.
Urgence Darfour called for the United Nations and the European Union to
immediately send an international force to Darfur to protect the civilians;
create safe zones where aid workers can serve the population; and bring those
responsible for killings before the international court.
Three days later, on 23 March, Paris's main leftist daily newspaper
Libération published a polemic written by two representatives of Médecins sans
Frontières. The authors responded strongly to what they perceived as the
ignorant posturing of Urgence Darfour and invoked MSF's experience through
two-decades of presence in Sudan to make a case for a different approach. The
worst massacres in Darfur, wrote Jean-Hervé Bradol (president of the MSF's
French chapter) and Fabrice Weissman (director of research for the MSF), were
in 2003-04. True, there has been a recent resurgence of violence after a period
of remission, but the civilian casualties are at present not as numerous, in
part because much of the civilian population has already abandoned the
war-zones.
The Libé article appeared to break from the MSF's traditional role of not
advocating political strategies, albeit while couching political
recommendations in the rhetoric of protecting civilians. Bradol and Weissman
warned that a small United Nations force would not be able to control an area
as large as Sudan and that it would be resisted by the Sudanese government,
resulting probably in more civilian deaths. A better option was to work with
all of the armed factions to reach an accord. They ended by saying that MSF was
disappointed in both Urgence Darfour and the presidential candidates: Urgence
Darfour for using its prominence to demand an ill-advised and unlikely
intervention, and the presidential candidates for showily and blindly signing
onto it.
The next day, 24 March, a letter addressed to European Union leaders on the
eve of its fiftieth anniversary summit in Berlin and signed by a group of
prominent writers was published in newspapers in the EU's twenty-seven
member-states. The group, which had been assembled by Bob Geldof, excoriated
the EU for celebrating its birthday while the atrocities continued in Darfur.
Many of Europe's most renowned intellectuals were among the signatories; they
included Umberto Eco, Dario Fo, Gűnter Grass, Jűrgen Habermas, Vaclav
Havel, Seamus Heaney, Harold Pinter, Franca Rame, Tom Stoppard and
Bernard-Henri Levy.
Libération published the writers' appeal on 27 March on the same page as an
article by Richard Rossin, a former secretary-general of Médecins sans
Frontières. He responded in turn to his former colleagues' criticism of Urgence
Darfour. Rossin accused the current MSF leadership of hiding behind statistics,
of advocating positions that would only help those Sudanese already relatively
safe in aid camps, and attempting to placate the Sudanese government for fear
of angering it. He argued that Bradol and Weissman's
"pox-on-all-of-their-houses" position that both pro-government and rebel sides
were responsible for attacks on aid workers wasn't fair because in fact, the
rebel forces wanted to make peace with the government and wanted a unified
Sudan. It's the Sudanese government, argued Rossin, that expelled Kofi Annan's
representative; that arrests, harasses, kidnap and sometimes kills aid workers;
and that refuses journalists entry. "The butchers have been identified," Rossin
wrote. "And we do nothing."
The debate spread to Le Monde, the most widely read general national
newspaper in France, where two more observers - journalist Stephen Smith, an
Africa specialist, and Robert Menard, the head of Reporters sans Frontières -
threw another salvo. They argued that Urgence Darfour's prescriptions for
stopping the violence in Darfur were half-baked and a naïve, manichean
simplification of a complex situation. Merely crying "stop the genocide" was
useless, they wrote. They further alleged that the information disseminated in
the west about Darfur was limited, as the press and the advocates knew only the
camps - to make an assessment based only on those would be like making an
assessment of France after visiting its hospitals.
"Sudan has a government, rebels, a civil society. It's not only a
slaughterhouse," Menard and Smith wrote. Those calling for the intervention of
the UN's "blue helmets" from the global south should, if they believe so
strongly that an external military force is needed, march in themselves like
the international brigades in Spain's civil war. "What right" they ask, "(do)
these journalists have to ask United Nations forces from the third world to die
in their place?"
The discourse of others The sum of the arguments in this series of articles
was this: The situation in Sudan is intolerable; there are no purely good
forces, but there are ones that are worse than others; and there are neither
easy solutions nor ones unlikely to endanger civilians. But reading the debate
one comes to a cynical but seeming true inference: Darfur has become a trendy
cause. As one of the articles pointed out, for the past three years the
Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, has had an exhibition of striking photos of
the victims in Sudan. Their tragedy is art even as it continues.
Yet when situations like the long deadly war in the Democratic Republic of
Congo rage almost ignored, (which even now is a more vicious and deadly crisis
according to those with first-hand experience of both), one wonders why so many
people like actors and college students lift themselves from blissful reverie
to focus on Darfur? Perhaps a place like the DR Congo is ignored because in
Darfur it's easier to paint the situation as genocide - although people who've
experienced and studied the situation warn that it is far more complex even as
the paradigm of dark-skinned Africans being slaughtered by Arabs does have some
relevance and historical basis. It's difficult not to believe that the
lighter-skinned Muslims versus darker-skinned Christians, conveniently adds
another moral dimension to the global focus on the transgressions of Muslims.
As Gérard Prunier wrote in openDemocracy, the truth is that stopping the
killings is not simply a matter of the west committing to Darfur: "In the real
world, the options are grim. It is possible to let things run their course and
see the ethnic cleansing result in several thousand casualties more. This is
still the most likely probability, given the incapacity of the international
community to think beyond a ritualistic wail for a UN force to be deployed
(which, even were it to be deployed, is unlikely to be effective)" (see:
"Darfur's Sudan problem," 15 September 2006).
Without getting into name-calling, since, as one of the participants in the
French intellectuals debate told me, "after all we all want things to get
better for the Darfurians," there is something slightly condescending in the
idea that a conflict in a country that has been riven by war for decades, can
be ended immediately by a little of the west's firepower and paternal presence.
What to do is a question that bedevils even the most dedicated and
knowledgeable analysts, as our traditional forms of aid have often failed
miserably. A friend who has spent more than ten years on the ground as a
medical aid worker in Sudan, DR Congo and other parts of Africa, once mentioned
a book he often thought of writing: "The title is 'Peace, Development and
Coordination, the Hidden Killers,'" he wrote me as he left for Liberia as it
disintegrated at the end of 2005: "Maybe I should write it; it is close to my
heart."
France's intellectuals are notoriously competitive and combative with one
another. The debate about Darfur in some ways felt like another act in a very
long performance. This is not to say that there is not real concern, dedication
and passion other than dislike of one another. MSF's people, for example, spend
their lives risking their lives in the worst places in the world. But while the
subject-matter is serious, the argument has still had the whiff of narcissism,
as the crème of the French leftist intelligentsia took potshots at each other
in the name of Darfurian victims.
In January I wrote that this year would bring new ways of seeing and that we
would no longer be able to claim ignorance of tragedy. What is hard to stomach
is that even as we embrace the modernity that compels us to bear witness, we
still often are casting in the wind for solutions. This was particularly
difficult for the French intellectuals to accept as they publicly played out
old rivalries using Darfur as cover.
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.cfm?id=17454
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