The Grey Zone Between Victims and Perpetrators

by Michael Bear

category: Darfur & Sudan

Published October 20, 2009 @ 04:18PM PT

Stories about conflicts are often framed as stories about perpetrators and victims. Rhetorically, morally, these distinctions often make sense.

Yet these distinctions are also brutal simplifications. Perpetrators act, whereas victims are denied any equivalent agency. They are simply people to whom things are done, or people to whom help must be given.

Reality is never quite so straight-forward.  There's a grey zone between victim and perpetrator; individuals in positions of power, individuals who bear some responsibility for the suffering they bring on themselves and others.

This grey zone exists in all conflicts, including Darfur.

The conflict erupted in 2003, when rebel groups drawn primarily from the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa tribes attacked Sudanese military bases in the region.  In response, the Sudanese military began a brutal counter-insurgency campaign, including the use of Janjaweed militias.

The Janjaweed - drawn primarily from nomadic tribes - were unleashed against the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa, hundreds of thousands of whom were killed, millions of whom were displaced. Many of the displaced person camps, in turn, became highly politicized.

What responsibility do individual Fur, Masalit or Zaghawa leaders who originally supported the rebel groups bear for what happened afterwards? What risk calculations did they make when they decided to support the SLA or JEM?

And, when we talk about the importance of community participation in any Darfur peace process, are we empowering those same leaders to once again speak for their communities?

I know, I know - this could easily shade into a morally reprehensible, blame-the-victim sort of justification for atrocities.  But unless we understand these dynamics, and how these dynamics impact the calculations of other actors like the Sudanese Government, our analysis - and the solutions we propose - will be fatally limited, no matter how strong our rhetoric.

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Sudan Policy Review Released

by Martha Heinemann Bixby

category: Darfur & Sudan

Published October 19, 2009 @ 08:02AM PT

This morning, the Obama Administration released their policy for Sudan at a press conference at the State Department.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and Sudan Special Envoy Scott Gration discussed the policy and answered questions from the press.

The State Department released a paper, "Sudan: A Critical Moment, A Comprehensive Approach," and a statement that outline the strategy.  The paper states:

The United States has a clear obligation to the Sudanese people -- both in our role as witness to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, and as the first country that unequivocally identified events in Darfur as genocide – to help lead an international effort.

The White House also released a statement, saying in part:

Our conscience and our interests in peace and security call upon the United States and the international community to act with a sense of urgency and purpose. First, we must seek a definitive end to conflict, gross human rights abuses and genocide in Darfur. Second, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the North and South in Sudan must be implemented to create the possibility of long-term peace. These two goals must both be pursued simultaneously with urgency. Achieving them requires the commitment of the United States, as well as the active participation of international partners. Concurrently, we will work aggressively to ensure that Sudan does not provide a safe-haven for international terrorists.

Initial reaction has been coming in from activists and concerned citizens via Twitter, on the Save Darfur Coalition's blog, and on the Enough Project's blog.

Genocide + The Internet: The Good, The Bad, The Questionable

by Martha Heinemann Bixby

category: AntiSemitism & Holocaust Denial

Published October 18, 2009 @ 09:25AM PT

The internet.  One of the best things about it is that anyone with a connection and a computer can use it to spread ideas, learn and connect with other people.  One of the scariest things?  Anyone with a connection and a computer can use it to spread ideas, learn and connect with other people.

Michelle recently highlighted some of the innovative ways that people are harnassing the internet to map conflict to better study and prevent it.  (That's the good).

On the other end of the spectrum, the "Balloon Boy" national fascination late last week took a particularly odd and nasty turn when it revealed that instead of floating away with his father's experiment, the boy had instead been hiding in the attic.  Thousands upon thousands of Twitter users repeated a short "joke" turning the other recent national fascination, Kanye West's interruption of Taylor Swift, into variations on:

"Yo, Balloon Boy. I'm really happy for you and Imma let you finish, but Anne Frank had the best hiding place of ALL TIME!"

That one person wrote this -- let alone that so many people decided that something like this was worth repeating -- is clearly the bad.

And the questionable?  Last week the Polish authority that manages Auschwitz created a Facebook page for the memorial. A spokesman said:

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You Know You Aren't Democracy's Poster-Child When...

by Michelle

Published October 16, 2009 @ 04:53AM PT

For those of you taking notes on how to make it into this year's Hall of Shame, here are a few recent tips from the annals of my Google Reader:

• You arrest and beat pesky college students for such treasonous statements as, "[You are] the major outstanding issue that is stalling progress for the inclusive government."

• You arrest and beat pesky opposition figures for any reason you want, all the better if pulled out of thin air.

• You only attend conferences and dialogues than you call for/are in charge of, and boycott all others, if you can't outright shut them down.

• You roll out the welcome mat for wanted war criminals, and your government proposes the most repressive anti-gay legislation in the history of the world, ever.

• If you're a rebel leader, you thwart peace negotiations with rival factions by, um, detaining them.

• And, if you're really a pro, you refuse to fund your own National Healing Conference set up to fake the appearance of caring about all of the havoc you've wrecked over the past 20+ years.

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Conflict in the Age of Climate Change

by Michelle

categories: Activism & Advocacy, Darfur & Sudan, Refugees and IDPs

Published October 15, 2009 @ 04:52AM PT

Access to vital resources is a driver of conflict -- not the only driver, of course, but people will certainly go to great lengths to secure the necessary means to survival. The impact of climate change is already felt in some of the world's most troubled regions, fueling fears that the necessary ingredients for sustainable peace may be further out of our grasp than we realize.

When a group of high-ranking, retired military officers concludes that "climate change acts as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world" and "projected climate change will add to tensions even in stable regions of the world," we have reason to be worried.

Conflict mitigation in the age of climate change is not, however, purely a matter for environmental activism. Conflict over scarce resources often erupts when tyrannical governments play favorites -- when access to resources is unequal, at the expense of a marginalized segment of the population. Transitions towards transparent, democratic governance with respect for human rights and equal access might mitigate the risk of violence due to climate change, but the realities of increasingly arid climates like Chad and Sudan make such moves seem increasingly like pipe dreams.

Agencies serving Darfuri refugees in eastern Chad are already grappling with the very real prospect that water might simply run out -- the rainy season in the region is short, and has been lighter than usual the past two years, leaving some wells running dry up to five months earlier than normal. Resources are already stretched to the limit, as the influx of refugees and the displacement of Chadian nationals dramatically increased the population in the region. What happens if the wells really do run dry?

A recent study by International Alert identified 46 countries at risk of violent conflict due to climate change, many of which can already be characterized as war-torn. A combination of environmental and human rights activism is needed if we have any chance of averting even further disaster -- if it isn't already too late.

[Photo by the author (all rights reserved): Darfuri refugees at a water point in a refugee camp in eastern Chad.]

Darfuri Activists Send Letter to Obama

by Mohamed E. Suleiman

category: Darfuri Perspectives

Published October 14, 2009 @ 04:18AM PT

October 13, 2009

The Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20500

cc: Vice President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Ambassador Susan Rice, Senator John S. Kerry, Senator Richard G. Lugar

Dear President Obama,

We, Darfuris in the United States of America, write to you with grave alarm and concern about the latest news coming from our native land, Darfur.  The Government of Sudan is brutally taking advantage of the fact that the world is turning numb to the news of atrocities occurring in Darfur and is now wreaking havoc in North and West Darfur.

At the end of last month, the Government of Sudan mounted fresh attacks on our people in the areas of Korma, Ain Siero, Jabal Marra, and Miliet. The news we get from our people is that the Government used the now familiar tactics: Antonov aerial bombings, Janjaweed attacks on civilians, burning, looting, raping, and savage killings. The news is chillingly so familiar that it escaped the attention of the news media and the international community. This familiar method of executing genocide in Darfur in a fresh wave of violence is an evil, clever way for the Government of Sudan to hide its crimes in the open.

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Goldhagen Solves Genocide in Twelve Pages

by Michelle

categories: R2P & Genocide Prevention, The Holocaust

Published October 13, 2009 @ 04:54AM PT

In the world of academic smack-downs, the backlash against the positions of Holocaust scholar Daniel Goldhagen is one for the books. Goldhagen became widely-discredited in many circles for the monocausal thesis of his book on German participation in Nazi crimes.

The King of Over-Simplification is back, with an article in The New Republic written with the same arrogance of tomes-past, as if bringing the shining beacon of enlightenment to the ignorant masses. Which might be nice, if Goldhagen had offered anything other than a regurgitation of basic genocide scholarship.

His premise that genocide is "poorly understood" blatantly disregards an entire economy of academic and policy-oriented research on the subject; modern genocides from Armenia to Darfur have been repeatedly scrutinized by a diverse field that grew out of Holocaust studies after World War II. What Goldhagen offers for our education -- genocide is not an unusual event but political tool of modern states, that it seeks to eliminate groups of people as a means to consolidate power, etc etc -- is nothing that wasn't covered in my Genocide 101 class in junior high school.

His solutions -- "prevention, intervention, and punishment" -- follow in the same suit, and, frankly, seem stolen straight from the Enough Project, though with a few trades in jargon to feign the appearance of originality. Not only are his recommendations for "creating conditions" that make genocidal policies unattractive to potential mass murder nothing new, they fail to dig deeper than the level of broad platitudes to the complicated challenges of implementing an international anti-genocide regime -- challenges which Goldhagen's fellow scholars and policy wonks have been debating for years, but with far greater nuance.

The failure of genocide prevention is not due to any lack of problem identification, but to a combination of weak political will and the fact that any sort international intervention does not occur in isolation. Military intervention in Darfur, for instance, could have ripple effects that would damage any number of sensitive political concerns in Africa and the Arab World, including Israel and Palestine. Lives are at stake there, too. The United States cannot simply lead the Western powers in an international force for good, as Goldhagen suggests, as if there would be no other consequences besides triumph over mass murder.

And, good luck getting the US to "guarantee" to bomb anyone who commits or threatens to commit genocide. It might be a nice thought, but it's not always a realistic one. Assuming that putting bounties on the heads of indicted war criminals and threatening military intervention against violent regimes will solve the world's nastiest problem undercuts Goldhagen's own presumption that he understands the nature of genocide better than anyone else. Nothing is that uncomplicated.

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