[wvns] Mahmood Mamdani: Genocide, Civil War, or Insurgency?

Mahmood Mamdani on Darfur:
"The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War,Insurgency"
June 4, 2007
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/04/1334230

As President Bush orders news sanctions to be placed on the Sudanese
government, Columbia Professor Mahmood Mamdani discusses how the media
and the Save Darfur Coalition has been misrepresenting the situation
in Darfur.

President Bush has ordered new sanctions to be placed on the Sudanese
government for its role in the violence in Darfur.
Last week's announcement blocks thirty-one companies tied to the
Sudanese government from using the U.S. banking system.

The sanctions were seen as a victory for the Save Darfur Coalition, a
U.S. group leading a vocal campaign pressuring the White House to take
action. But the New York Times reported Saturday some of Save Darfur's
public efforts have angered aid groups working on the ground in Sudan.
The aid groups say Save Darfur's call for imposing a no-flight zone
could lead to a halt in aid flights and put their workers at risk.

Aid groups have also criticized Save Darfur for not spending its
multi-million dollar budget on aid to Darfur's refugees.

Mahmood Mamdani, one of the world's most prominent Africa scholars.
Earlier this year he wrote a major piece for the London Review of
Books titled "The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War,
Insurgency." He was born in Uganda, and now splits his time between
Uganda and New York, where he teaches at Columbia University. He is
the author of many books including, "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America,
the Cold War and the Roots of Terror."

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AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Darfur. President Bush has ordered new
sanctions to be placed on the Sudanese government for its role in the
violence in Darfur. Last week's announcement blocks thirty-one
companies tied to the Sudanese government from using the US banking
system.

The sanctions were seen as a victory for the Save Darfur Coalition, a
US group leading a vocal campaign pressuring the White House to take
action. But the New York Times reported Saturday some of Save Darfur's
public efforts have angered aid groups working on the ground in Sudan.
The aid groups say Save Darfur's call for imposing a no-flight zone
could lead to a halt in aid flights and put their workers at risk. Aid
groups have also criticized Save Darfur for not spending its
multi-million dollar budget on aid to Darfur's refugees.

Mahmood Mamdani is one of the world's most prominent Africa scholars.
Earlier this year, he wrote a major piece for the London Review of
Books called "The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War,
Insurgency." He was born in Uganda and now splits his time between
Uganda and New York, where he is a professor at Columbia University.
Mahmood Mamdani stopped by our firehouse studio Friday. I began by
asking him about the name of his article, "The Politics of Naming."

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: I think the larger question is the names -- genocide,
in particular -- come into being against a background of the twentieth
century and mass slaughter of the twentieth century, and particularly
the Holocaust. And against that background, Lemkin convinced the
international community, and particularly states in the international
community, have an obligation to intervene when there is genocide.
He's successful in getting the international community to adopt a
resolution on this.

Then follows the politics around genocide. And the politics around
genocide is, when is the slaughter of civilians a genocide or not?
Which particular slaughter is going to be named genocide, and which
one is not going to be named genocide? So if you look at the last ten
years and take some examples of mass slaughter -- for example, the
mass slaughter in Iraq, which is -- in terms of numbers, at least --
no less than what is going on in Sudan; or the mass slaughter in
Congo, which, in terms of numbers, is probably ten times what
happened, what has been happening in Darfur. But none of these have
been named as genocide. Only the slaughter in Darfur has been named as
genocide. So there is obviously a politics around this naming, and
that's the politics that I was interested in.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think this politics is?

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, I think that what's happening is that genocide
is being instrumentalized by the biggest power on the earth today,
which is the United States. It is being instrumentalized in a way that
mass slaughters which implicate its adversaries are being named as
genocide and those which implicate its friends or its proxies are not
being named as genocide. And that is not what Lemkin had in mind.

AMY GOODMAN: The simplifying of the conflict by the US media, you
write extensively about this, who the sides are.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, I was struck by the fact -- because I live nine
months in New York and three months in Kampala, and every morning I
open the New York Times, and I read about sort of violence against
civilians, atrocities against civilians, and there are two places that
I read about -- one is Iraq, and the other is Darfur -- sort of
constantly, day after day, and week after week. And I'm struck by the
fact that the largest political movement against mass violence on US
campuses is on Darfur and not on Iraq. And it puzzles me, because most
of these students, almost all of these students, are American
citizens, and I had always thought that they should have greater
responsibility, they should feel responsibility, for mass violence
which is the result of their own government's policies. And I ask
myself, "Why not?" I ask myself, "How do they discuss mass violence in
Iraq and options in Iraq?" And they discuss it by asking -- agonizing
over what would happen if American troops withdrew from Iraq. Would
there be more violence? Less violence? But there is no such agonizing
over Darfur, because Darfur is a place without history, Darfur is a
place without politics. Darfur is simply a dot on the map. It is
simply a place, a site, where perpetrator confronts victim. And the
perpetrator's name is Arab, and the victim's name is African. And it
is easy to demonize. It is easy to hold a moral position which is
emptied of its political content. This bothered me, and so I wrote
about it.

AMY GOODMAN: Columbia University Professor Mahmood Mamdani. We'll be
back with him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to our conversation with Columbia University
Professor Mahmood Mamdani, one of the world's most prominent Africa
scholars, speaking about Darfur in relation to other conflicts around
the world.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, let's begin with the numbers of the dead, OK?
The only group in a position to estimate how many people have died in
Darfur is UNICEF, because UNICEF is the only one that did a
comprehensive survey in 2005 in Darfur. Everybody else only knows the
piece of ground on which they work and will then extrapolate from it,
like any other NGO, like Oxfam or Medecins Sans Frontieres or World
Food Program. The WFP estimate was 200,000. Out of these 200,000, the
WPF report tells you that roughly about 20% died of actually being
killed, of violence, and 80% died mainly from starvation and from
diseases. And normally in our understanding of genocide, we put both
those together and look at them as a result of the violence, because
the violence prevents the medicine going in, etc., except in the case
of Darfur, it's not a single-cause situation.

Darfur is also the place which has been hit hard by global warming.
The UN commission which sat on global warming very recently spoke of
Darfur as the first major crisis of global warming. In other words,
from the late 1970s you have had a significant desertification, and
you've been having in the north of Darfur basically a situation where
people's simply entire livelihoods are destroyed, and which has been
one of the elements, because it has driven the nomadic population in
the north down into the south. So how many people are dying from
desertification? How many people are dying from the violence that has
been unleashed through this civil war in Darfur?

Second element in this is that there's a civil war going on in Darfur.
There are two rebel movements, and both rebel movements were born in
the aftermath of the peace in the south. And those who were unwilling
to accept the peace in the south, who thought the peace in the south
should have included a resolution for all of Sudan, particularly for
Darfur and not simply for the south, they were the inspiration behind
the two movements that developed. One movement, the Sudan Liberation
Army, was a movement strongly connected with the SPLA in the south,
especially with those sections of the SPLA who were not happy with the
partial nature of the settlement in the south.

And the other movement --

AMY GOODMAN: The SPLA is…?

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: The SPLA, sorry, is the Sudan People's Liberation
Army, which had organized and led the guerrilla war in the south for
several decades under John Garang.

The second movement was the Justice and Equality Movement. The Justice
and Equality Movement, unlike the SLA, which is a secular movement,
Justice and Equality is an Islamist movement. And it was a break-off
from the regime in the Sudan. It was a break-off between two sections
of the regime, the military and the civilian section, and particularly
the section led by the chief ideologue, Hassan al-Turabi, who split
from the military wing and was the inspiration behind the formation of
the Justice and Equality Movement. So you have, in a way, a very
strong Islamist rebel movement and you have a strong secular rebel
movement, and these two began their operations in 2003.

The government's response -- and I saw the ambassador's response
there, which was as disingenuous as Bush's response, in a sense,
because he's claiming that it's just a civil war inside, the
government has nothing to do with it. It's not true. The government's
response was to pick a proxy and arm it. And the government was, in a
way, smart enough to pick those who were the worst victims of the
desertification and the drought. It picked the poorest of the nomads
from the north whose livelihoods had been entirely destroyed and who
had simply no survival strategy at hand and gave them weapons. And
these guys went down south, and their object was not to kill the
peasants in the south, but to drive them off their land.

The government's response was also to pick a second group, and that
second group are the nomads from Chad who have come into Darfur. And
to understand that, one has to look at the third dimension of the
conflict, which is that over the last twenty-five, thirty years there
has been a civil war going on in Chad. Chad, during the Cold War, was
a bone of contention, first and foremost between the US and France,
and both had their allies in the region. France allied with Libya. The
US allied with the military dictatorship in Sudan, with the Numeri
dictatorship in Sudan. And every oppositional movement in Chad had a
base in Darfur, and they armed themselves, organized themselves in
Darfur. So Darfur was awash with weapons for two decades, OK. And
those who ran away from the civil war in Chad came into Darfur. So the
other wing of those who were armed, whether by the government or
whether by this weaponry which was awash, were the Chad refugees in
Darfur. So what we call the Janjaweed are two groups. They are the
Chad refugees in Darfur, and they are the poorest of the northern
camel -- the pastoralists divide into two: the camel pastoralists and
the cattle pastoralists. And the camel pastoralists, because the camel
is the only game which will survive in the worst conditions where even
cattle will not survive, they are the poorest of the poor. So these
are what are called the Janjaweed.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play a clip for you from John Prendergast. He
is the senior adviser for the International Crisis Group, leader of
the Save Darfur Coalition, has argued that genocide is occurring in
Darfur, that the Sudanese government is trying to mask what's really
happening.

JOHN PRENDERGAST: This policy of divide and conquer, which has been in
place since the early part of this decade, had as its objective the
creation of anarchy in Darfur. So when people take a snapshot today
and see Darfur and go, "My god, all these groups are fighting against
each other. It seems like it's chaos," it's precisely what the
government intended.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: We need to keep in mind, and John Prendergast needs
to keep in mind, that the history of state-sponsored terrorism in that
part of Africa begins with the US providing a political umbrella to
South Africa to create a state-sponsored terrorist movement in
Mozambique: RENAMO. And it is after a full decade of that impunity
that others learn the experience, and Charles Taylor begins it in
Liberia, and the Sudanese government begins it in the south. But this
is the second thing, which builds on this history of political violence.

The third thing is that when the rebel movements begin in 2003 in
Darfur, the Khartoum government responds in the same way, which is it
looks at the scene, and it picks the weakest, the most vulnerable, the
ones that they can bring under their wing, it arms them and says, "Go
for it," and they go for the land.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Mamdani, you quote the saying, "Out of Iraq,
into Darfur." What about intervention?

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, look, the question in Darfur is really, how do
we stop the fighting, because if we want to stop the killing of
civilians, we have to stop the fighting. We have -- and the only way
to stop the fighting is a political resolution. In 2005, African Union
troops came into Darfur. I interviewed the Ghanaian general who was
deputy to Dallaire in Rwanda and who is the chief of the UN nucleus
force in Darfur. And he said to me that the African Union troops were
spectacularly successful in 2005. The killing came down dramatically.

And then, he said, two things happened. Both happened around the
question of finances, because African countries can provide troops but
they don't have finances to provide salaries or logistics. So the
first shift was around salaries. The salaries of African troops were
being paid by the European Union, which paid them from an emergency
fund, and it shifted the payment to quarterly payments, so they would
make payment every three months, and they would only make the next
three-month payment if the paperwork was done properly, if there was
accountability. So, as I speak now, African Union troops have not been
paid for four months, because the EU says there hasn't been proper
accountability.

Second is about logistics. The troops have to work with planes, and
the planes provided are not military planes. They are planes flown by
civilian pilots. And civilian pilots have the right to refuse to fly
in areas which they consider dangerous. Now, of course, all these
areas are dangerous. So you're operating with logistics that you don't
control. Civilian pilots will not. The Ghanaian general said to me --
I asked him, I said, "Why do you think these changes happened?" He
said, "I don't know. But the only thing I can think is that the reason
would only be political." I had the same response when I heard
President Bush's speech.

AMY GOODMAN: Meaning to make the African Union troops ineffective.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Ineffective, exactly, because --

AMY GOODMAN: Incapacitate them.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: -- the contention has been over who has political
control over the troops in Darfur. OK. The African Union troops are
under the political control of African Union. And there is a concerted
attempt being made to shift the political control of any intervention
force inside Darfur from inside Africa to outside Africa. The second
thing is that the African Union is convinced that they cannot go in
and fight. They can only go in with the agreement of both sides, so
they can only intervene consensually. And that is crucial and
important, because if they go in with the two sides not agreeing, the
fighting will simply increase and the slaughter of civilians will
increase.

President Bush's speech yesterday -- the response of the UN, the UN
Secretary General, was, "Look, we're just arriving at an agreement.
We've been working for the last four, five months, and the Sudan
government is agreeing." The South African response was the same. Why
sanctions now when we are about to arrive at an agreement? Any sane
thinking person would think that, intended or unintended, the
consequence of these imposition of sanctions is to torpedo that
process on the ground. And that process is the political process which
is absolutely vital to stopping the fighting.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned Congo. What about the comparison of the
conflicts and the attention given to each?

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, no two comparisons are exactly alike, of
course. We know that. But to the extent that numbers are being
highlighted, the numbers are huge in Congo. The Congo estimates are
four million-plus over several years. The Darfur estimates go from
200,000 to 400,000. So why no concern about Congo? Congo involves,
again, multiple causes, like Darfur. It's a huge place. But in Kivu
province, where I have been, the conflict has been very Darfur-like,
in the sense that you've had proxies being fed from the outside, the
Hema and the Lendu. You have the recruitment of child soldiers. You
have two states in the region arming these proxies: Uganda and Rwanda.
But both states are allies of the US in the region, so there's nothing
said about it.

The most recent example is Somalia. We can see that the civilian
suffering is going up dramatically in Somalia since the intervention,
Ethiopian intervention force. And we know that the Ethiopian
intervention force had at least the blessings of the US, if not more
than that -- I'm not privy to the information. And nothing is being
said about it. So one arrives back at the question: what is the
politics around it? And I'm struck by the innocence of those who are
part of the Save Darfur -- of the foot soldiers in the Save Darfur
Coalition, not the leadership, simply because this is not discussed.

Let me tell you, when I went to Sudan in Khartoum, I had interviews
with the UN humanitarian officer, the political officer, etc., and I
asked them, I said, "What assistance does the Save Darfur Coalition
give?" He said, "Nothing." I said, "Nothing?" He said, "No." And I
would like to know. The Save Darfur Coalition raises an enormous
amount of money in this country. Where does that money go? Does it go
to other organizations which are operative in Sudan, or does it go
simply to fund the advertising campaign?

AMY GOODMAN: To make people aware of what's going on in Darfur.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: To make people aware of what is going on, but people
who then, out of awareness, give money not to fuel a commercial
campaign, but expecting that this money will go to do something about
the pain and suffering of those who are the victims in Darfur, so how
much of that money is going to actually -- how much of it translates
into food or medicine or shelter? And how much of it is being recycled?

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think the UN process, if allowed to carry forward,
would be the answer right now?

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, the answer has to be a political process. The
African Union, if its hands are not tied -- if this money was
translated into salaries and logistics for the African Union force, it
would untie those hands. If the governments who claim to be speaking
and acting for the people of Darfur, if they actually directed the
money they intend to spend on intervention to paying salaries for the
African Union forces, to providing the logistics without these
constraints, the problem would be much closer to solving.

AMY GOODMAN: Columbia University Professor Mahmood Mamdani. His
article, "The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency"
appeared in the London Review of Books. He's the author of many books,
including Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots
of Terror.

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