POLITICS-SUDAN: 'Darfur Was Just A Place Where Evil Lived'

Kristin Palitza interviews MAHMOOD MAMDANI, professor of anthropology and political science
CAPE TOWN, Jun 19 (IPS) – Analysing the colonial and historical roots of the violence in Darfur, Mahmood Mamdani concludes that the crisis in Darfur is not genocide, but a fight for land, triggered by drought, which has been racialised by outside powers.
Mamdani, a third-generation Ugandan of Indian descent is Hebert Lehman Professor of Government and director of the Institute of African Studies, at New York’s Columbia University. He launched his book, ‘Saviours and Survivors. Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror’ at the 2009 Cape Town Book Fair on Jun. 16.
IPS: Why did you decide to write a book about Darfur and not another humanitarian crisis?
Mahmood Mamdani: I went to Sudan in 2003 for a few weeks to meet Sudanese intellectuals to get their sense of their society, the year the insurgency in Darfur began. A year later, Darfur was big news, very different from any [other conflict] on the continent. Even Rwanda hadn’t been that big news until the genocide was over. The answer was very simple: Darfur was the focus of a domestic movement in the United States, the Save Darfur movement.
In 2006, I began to get the backdrop when the GAO [United States Government Accountability Office] found that the mortality estimates of the Save Darfur movement of 400,000 deaths were the least reliable, because it took figures from an unrepresentative sample, while the most reliable figure came from the World Health Organisation, which said about 112,000 people had died.
When reading the reports, I realised that those who died had not necessarily been killed. The major cause of death was drought and desertification, which killed between 70,000 and 80,000 people, mainly children, while only about 35,000 people did of violence. There was a gap between what was made public and what was happening on the ground. The Save Darfur publicity was simply about violence. Nothing told you why the violence was happening.
I realised that the violence had begun in 1987-89 with the drought. And then the big powers got involved in the mid-80s. When [former president Ronald] Reagan came to power in the United States, he declared Libya a terrorist state, and the Cold War began to focus on Chad. The US, France and Israel supported one side in the Chad, while Libya and the Soviet Union supported the other side. The [US-led] opposition was armed and trained in Darfur. So when the drought happened in Darfur in the mid-80s, the place was awash with guns.
IPS: The main premise of your book is that the context of the crisis in Darfur cannot be called genocide. How did you come to this conclusion?
MM: I’m saying several things. We, the human rights movement, ignore issues and just focus on identifying violations, the perpetrator, the victim. We specialise in naming and shaming the perpetrator, and we demand criminal justice. In all this, what’s lost is a sense of the issues that are driving the violence.
Violence has a history. In Darfur, it was driven in the context of a drought and a land settlement, which was as old as the colonial period when the British had created tribal lands. There was no land given to Nomadic tribes. So when the drought came, they had no fallback. So [the crisis] was land- driven.
It wasn’t about race, but it began to get racialised. When the external agencies came in, they just assumed this was a conflict between Arab tribes and non-Arab tribes, and in this context the Arabs were the perpetrators and the non-Arabs were the victims. But the issue of land remained unaddressed.
IPS: You say the West’s humanitarian intervention is a cover for military invasion. What facts do you base this assumption on?
MM: Initially, I thought Save Darfur was another classic peace movement in the US. But I realised that Save Darfur was a war mobilisation. It’s slogans were ‘Out of Iraq into Darfur’, ‘Boots on the Ground’, ‘No Fly Zone’. Its emphasis was to never focus on the issues that were driving the violence. The entire focus was to demonise the perpetrator.
This emphasis was very much like the War on Terror, which said that any attempt to talk about issues was an apology for the perpetrator. Darfur was just a place where evil lived. They think if you do away with the perpetrator, the violence will stop. Yet the violence will go on, because the issues remain. If you understand the history of war, you understand victims and perpetrators are on the same side, and sometimes victims and perpetrators are the same people.
IPS: What is the post-Cold War international order and how does it related to the crisis in Darfur?
MM: If you think of the African conflicts that have found some kind of a solution, you realise that in all these cases, you had to move away from criminalising the opposition to seeing this as a political conflict driven by certain issues. The best example to me was the solution to apartheid in [South Africa].
This had also worked in Mozambique and in south Sudan. There had not been court trials, but political reform. We have to accept the possibility that both sides may have committed crimes, and if we agree on political reforms, we [let go of] the crimes so that we can have a fresh beginning and a rule of law whereby everybody can be held accountable. That’s the way to go.
IPS: Is there a hidden agenda to re-colonise Africa?
MM: We know there is greater attention on Africa today than there was ten years ago. We know the US is not the single global power. There are new powers on the horizon, like China. The contest between the US and China globally is focused on Africa. And in Africa, it’s focused on particular countries, and Sudan is one of them. It’s about natural resources, without a doubt.
The US is neck-deep in Chad, for oil and uranium, and China is neck-deep in Sudan for the same reasons. The contention of the two of them is unavoidable. But hopefully, with the Obama administration, there is a more sober assessment of American power and therefore a more sober realisation that the US has to learn to co-exist in the world. It can’t just call the shots. And I think we’ll be seeing this in terms of a new global attitude inside Africa.
IPS: Is Africa’s independence at stake? What should be the African Union’s response?
MM: The level of death and killing went down dramatically in Darfur after September 2004, to less than 200 a month. The main credit goes to the African Union (AU) because it figured out that the way to end the fighting was to put in place a political process, which would make negotiations and discussions possible.
But the AU was sabotaged consistently. The West, which is the Europeans, the Canadians, the Americans, agreed to fit the bill for the AU soldiers, and Africa agreed to provide the bodies on the ground, but [the West] never footed the bill.
Still, the AU has come out with some credibility. They have done much better than the UN. It was scepticism about the AU and the suggested political settlement, and huge scepticism about Africa being able to find its own solutions. Those who agreed to the AU coming in did it full of scepticism, as a temporary measure, simply because the West was not willing or ready to come in.
Therefore they never provided the resources they said they were going to provide and never honoured the conditions they said they were going to honour. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy. But still, the AU has done the most credible job of anybody in Sudan in that short space of time.
IPS: Your book ends with a proposal for a triple solution: regionally negotiated peace, combined with power reform in Sudan and land and governance reform in Darfur. Why do you think this would work?
MM: There are several lessons here. One, you can’t get big powers to come and solve your problems. If you need external involvement to solve a conflict, it is best if that involvement comes from your neighbours through an organised arrangement, either regional or continental. They will have a real interest in making peace in that country, because they will always be neighbours.
Second, Sudan needs power reforms like most countries becoming newly independent. You cannot expect a full-blown democracy being delivered in the womb of a colony. It’s absurd. Creating representative power takes internal struggles.
The most intractable will be the land question. Partly because it’s embedded in the tribal settlement of land that came out of the colonial period and then in the notions of absolute ownership of land.
(END/2009)