This is an excerpt from a (brilliant) article Africa scholar and envoy to the Darfur peace negotiations, Alex de Waal wrote about identity formation in Darfur, called “Who Are the Darfurians?”. Throughout the article, he argues for the historical cohesiveness of the Darfurian identity, and describes the way contemporary politics has fractured it:
“From the point of view of the SLA leadership, including the leadership of the communities most seriously affected by atrocity and forced displacement, the term “African” has served them well. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the depiction of “Arabs” killing “Africans” in Darfur conjures up, in the mind of a non-Sudanese (including many people in Sub-Saharan Africa), a picture of bands of light-skinned Arabs marauding among villages of peaceable black-skinned people, of indeterminate religion. In the current context in which “Arabs” are idenfitied, in the popular Western and Sub-Saharan African press, with the instigators of terrorism, it readily identifies Darfur’s non-Arabs as victims.
"From the point of view of the government in Khartoum, the labels are also tactically useful. While insisting that the conflict is tribal and local, it turns the moral loading of the term ‘Arab’ to its advantage, by appealing to fellow members of the Arab League, that Darfur represents another attempt by the west (and in particular the U.S.) to demonize the Arab world. In turn this unlocks a regional alliance, for which Darfur stands as proxy for Iraq and Palestine. Looking more widely than Darfur, the term “Arab” implies global victimhood.
"The U.S. determination that Darfur counts as “genocide” has played further into this polarizing scenario. It is easy for self-identified Arab intellectuals in Khartoum (and elsewhere) to see this finding as (yet another) selective and unfair denigration of Arabs. If, in the confrontation between the Arabs and the Israelis and the Americans, Arabs are cast as “terrorists,” warranting preemptive military action and a range of other restrictions on their rights, in the context of Africa, they are cast as ‘genocidaires’ and similarly cast beyond the moral pale and rendered subject to military intervention and criminal tribunals. Arab editorialists are thus driven both to deny genocide and to accuse the U.S. of double standards, asking why the killings in (for example) the Congo are not similarly labeled.”
De Waal goes on to detail the process by which State Department lawyers reluctantly concluded that genocide was taking place in Darfur.
“The broader interpretation of the Geneva Convention, while legally correct, is one that diplomats have been avoiding for decades, precisely because it creates a vast and indeterminate grey area of atrocity in which intervention is licensed. A tacit consensus had developed to set the bar higher; now the U.S. has lowered it and the Arab critics are correct; if Darfur is genocide, then so is Congo, Burundi, Uganda, Nigeria and a host of others. The neocons do indeed have another weapon in their armory of unilateral intervention. Arguably, they didn’t need it, already having sufficient reason to intervene on the basis of the September 2002 National Security doctrine.”
I’m someone who, after reading good analysis, aches for something normative to hold onto. The more nuanced and subtle and dead-on seeming something written about Africa is, the most lost it leaves me when trying to scramble for a hypothetical prescription. I first discovered this in Tim Burke’s classes at Swarthmore, where I walked out feeling like my head was exploding with both my new understanding and my confusion as to how to convert it into policy.
The De Waal piece is no exception. He’s slyly normative: Do we really want to broaden the definition of genocide? Do we really want to give the neocons another tool? To the first question, I can respond with something like “yes we just need to make sure there are legal structures that compel multilateral action in the presence of atrocity so the term doesn’t become hollow” but given the current lack of faith in international bodies, my use of ‘just’ is wildly inappropriate. As for the second—I worry that flavors of this question are cropping up all over the place in the wake of the insurgency in Iraq. The strongest emergent response to neoconservatism seems to be: get out, stay home, be more like Europe, you don’t get it.
This frustration is my own fault, for finishing reading a piece about identity formation in Darfur with the hope it will tell me how America should behave in the next fifty years. I think De Waal’s true normative message is: don’t tell a simple story. Although an attachment for simple narratives seems to lie at the base of American misadventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Colombia, for starters, I still want something with a little more normative force.
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