A book called Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror by Mahmood Mamdani has got favorable attention from a couple of bloggers on the “anti-imperialist” Left.
Richard Seymour of Lenin’s Tomb writes:
It is a book of extraordinary power, not merely contesting the follies of the ‘Save Darfur’ bunch, but rectifying a whole distorted tradition of writing about Darfur from the colonial age to the present.
At Socialist Unity, Andy Newman writes:
Mahmood Mamdani’s new book “Saviors and Survivors” deserves to be very widely read, and indeed it is vitally important that the arguments that he takes up about Dafur are understood by the left, and the anti-war movement.
It contains a very rich and detailed discussion about Sudan and Dafur, that will be of interest to scholars and activists alike; and I found the discussion of how the modern nation state of Sudan was created extremely interesting; the experience of nation-building in post-colonial Africa challenges Euro-centric pre-conceptions about nations and nationality, and the detailed case study presented here is invaluable.
However, the most important part of the book, and one that is very accessible to the general reader, is Mamdani’s discussion of the alleged genocide in Darfur, and the politics of the “Save Darfur” movement.
According to Mamdani, the driving emotional force behind the “Save Darfur” movement, is the imperative to Act without understanding. He observes the paradox that at a time when the USA is fighting imperialist wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the political place in American society where a vibrant counter-hegemonic anti-war movement should be is instead filled by a pro-war movement, calling for American military intervention in Africa. It’s slogans include “Out of Iraq and into Sudan” and “Boots on the Ground”
Now Richard Just has written a piece for The New Republic challenging Mamdani’s version of events in Darfur, as well as his take on the Save Darfur movement.
It’s worth reading in full, but here are a few excerpts:
Mamdani’s book–which The New York Times called “learned” and “important”–is only ostensibly about Darfur. He has bigger and more ambitious themes. He wishes to show that Save Darfur activists–and, more broadly, “human rights fundamentalists,” as he scornfully calls them–are the intellectual descendants of European colonialists, and also the ideological cousins of Dick Cheney. They have, he writes, issued “a clarion call for the recolonization of ‘failed’ states in Africa.” For Mamdani, the Save Darfur movement is more or less indistinguishable from the great imperialist enterprise of our time, which is the war on terror. “The harsh truth,” he argues, “is that the War on Terror has provided the coordinates, the language, the images, and the sentiment for interpreting Darfur.”
Does it tell us something about Mamdani that he considers “human rights fundamentalists” a term of disdain?
Mamdani’s book nicely exemplifies one pole in the old and ongoing struggle between two sometimes contradictory impulses of liberal foreign policy: the opposition to imperialism and the devotion to human rights. If liberals view anti-imperialism as their primary philosophical commitment, then they will be reluctant to meddle in the affairs of other countries, even when they are ruled by authoritarian governments–as in Sudan–that abuse their own people. But if liberalism’s primary commitment is to human rights, then liberals will be willing to judge, to oppose, and even to undermine such governments.
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The problems with Mamdani’s book start on the very first page, where he describes genocide incorrectly as “killing with intent to eliminate an entire group.” The Genocide Convention, adopted in 1948, defines genocide as an attempt to eliminate a group “in whole or in part.” This is an important distinction. Did the Sudanese government and its Arab militia allies try to eliminate every last member of every Darfuri ethnic group that was linked to the rebels? Of course not. But there is abundant evidence that they did try to eliminate significant percentages of these groups–directly, by massacring vast numbers of civilians; and indirectly, by chasing millions off their land and forcing them into camps, where many slowly died from disease and malnutrition.The malicious intent behind these various strategies was not kept secret. In 2003, according to Human Rights Watch, the Sudanese government’s interior minister delivered a speech in Darfur to Janjaweed and soldiers. “He asked them to kill the Fur because the Fur had joined the rebellion,” one witness recounted. Another government official declared shortly thereafter: “Zaghawa, Fur, and Masalit have become rebels. We will burn everything down and only leave behind the trees.” And, in 2004, the Janjaweed leader Musa Hilal issued his infamous order: “Change the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes.” None of these quotations appear in Saviors and Survivors.
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Following his errant definition of genocide, Mamdani’s next major conceptual error is his mischaracterization of the Save Darfur movement. He lumps Save Darfur activists together with the neoconservatives of the Bush administration: “One needs to keep in mind the central political thrust of the Save Darfur movement…. Its raison d’etre is to be sought in the War on Terror.” He seems oblivious to the highly inconvenient fact that the roots of Save Darfur were very much on the left. At the movement’s signature event–a rally in Washington in 2006 that drew thousands–the speakers included Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and that infamous neoconservative Al Sharpton. Mamdani does not even attempt to explain why, if Save Darfur’s message and prescriptions were so consistent with the Bush administration’s ideological outlook, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and company didn’t just invade Sudan. After all, they kindled to the use of American force.In reality, instead of viewing themselves as allies of Bush, the Save Darfur activists by and large came to despise the administration for dragging its feet on the issue. What’s more, Mamdani never explains how Western intervention in Darfur could have plausibly provided any benefit in the war on terror. Had he bothered to think through the logic of his assertion, he would have realized that he had things exactly backward. Far from drawing the United States closer to an intervention in Darfur, the war on terror was likely one of the prime brakes upon American action against the genocide. By 2003, when it unleashed its destruction on Darfur, the Sudanese government was cooperating closely with Washington by providing intelligence on Al Qaeda. One of the reasons the administration may have hesitated to put more pressure on Khartoum to stop the killing was because it feared cutting off this intelligence pipeline.
Just makes the point that the worst of the mass murder and displacement in Darfur occurred in 2003 and 2004– during the Bush administration– and that an intervention in those years could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But he’s rightly critical of Barack Obama for his inaction since taking office– especially considering the statements by him (along with Hillary Clinton and John McCain) during the presidential campaign.
For Mamdani, colonialism seems to be just a matter of one continent involving itself too heavily in the affairs of another continent–a jurisdictional abuse. But what was it that made colonialism so vile, so repugnant? Surely the essence of colonialism was the denial of freedom. The provenance matters less than the crime. If you read accounts of the savageries that attended European ventures into Africa, and then read accounts of what has taken place these past few years in Darfur, you will be struck by the similarities between them. It is no coincidence that the historian M.W. Daly has described postindependence governments in Khartoum as governing Darfur by “internal colonialism.” And this phenomenon is not unique to Sudan. Today many African tyrants treat their people with the same contempt Europeans once did. Is it a consolation for the victims that their oppression does not come from the West?
To side with Mamdani’s notion of anti-imperialism is to side with these tyrants. And to side with tyrants is to side with something that very much resembles colonialism. This is the contradiction within Mamdani’s worldview. It is also, in the end, the reason that the left’s great disputation between anti-imperialism and human rights presents a false choice. There is no need to pick sides. To be for human rights always and everywhere is to be against the ugliness of colonialism. And Mamdani’s anti-colonialism? It is, paradoxically, an apology for the closest thing our world now has to the colonialism of old.
Finally, Just notes that Mamdani was dumbfounded when he encountered demands for United Nations or even US intervention in Darfur– not at an American campus rally, but at a gathering of activists and politicians in El Fasher, a city in Darfur.
Confronted with such views, Mamdani turns patronizing. “Hard as I found it to believe this, I could not deny the evidence of my own eyes and ears,” he writes. “The external intervention had produced an internal agency: IDPs [internally displaced persons] demanding to be rescued. Desperately believing in another world, they remained innocent of the politics of this world.” These people, innocents? Surely they are some of the most disabused people who ever lived. But Mamdani believes he knows better than the people of Darfur about what should or should not be done to help them. Does such condescension and indifference not itself come with a whiff of colonialism?
