My Thoughts, Exactly.

categories: Darfur & Sudan, Peace & Justice

Published March 09, 2009 @ 07:05PM PT

My original plan for tonight was to respond to Kleinman's response to me (because never-ending blog wars are....well, never ending), but Kevin at Opinio Juris beat me to it.

I wholly agree with Kevin's argument, particularly on this point:

"In the short term, of course, deferring the warrant would be better for a significant number of Darfuris. No one, not even the most fervent defender of the ICC, denies that there are immediate costs - very real, very human costs - to the arrest warrant. But what about in the long-term? As one of the contributors to Alex de Waal's blog Making Sense of Darfur pointed out yesterday, the massive amount of humanitarian aid poured into Darfur over the past three decades may have alleviated suffering, but it has done nothing to eliminate that suffering's root causes:

‘The first impulse of the media and international community has been to focus on the urgent need for aid to continue. But I think many people should consider why aid needs to continue so desperately, despite years of work and billions of dollars invested. How can it be that after 28 years of being there (as one organisation proudly states), 2.2 million people are dependent on international aid agencies for basic needs? For me, this is the real tragedy.'

We know, of course, what has caused the suffering of millions of Darfuris for the past 20 years: Bashir's murderous government. Bashir has never seriously negotiated peace - not even when he knew that an arrest warrant was a very real possibility."

The only thing I would add, in favor of the need to look behind short-term interventions towards the long term, to move beyond managing consequences and dig out root causes: We cannot sustain the world's largest humanitarian operation forever.

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Michelle - thanks much, and just posted a response:

http://humanitarianrelief.change.org/blog/view/the_real_world_darfur

Michael

Posted by Michael Bear on 03/10/2009 @ 12:06PM PT
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Author

Michelle became involved in the anti-genocide cause at a young age, and has been involved in various activist endeavors, including the Teach Against Genocide pilot campaigns, ever since.