I refer to the letter by David Rubenstein (“Genocide the right word”, April 5), executive director of the Save Darfur Coalition, on how to name and end the horrific and deplorable violence against civilians in Darfur. In my piece (“Darfur: the politics of naming”, March 16), I contrasted two naming strategies, one by the coalition, the other by the United Nations Commission on Darfur. They differ on how to identify and label the perpetrators and their crime.
The UN Commission submitted 51 names of leading persons, comprising a longer list from the government-sponsored counter-insurgency and a shorter one from the insurgency and allied mercenaries, and recommended that all be tried individually by the International Criminal Court.
In contrast, the coalition has been silent about the shooting war in Darfur and highlights only the crimes of the government-sponsored counter-insurgency.
The coalition is guilty of a number of silences. Globally, it is silent about naming contexts (Iraq, Congo) where political violence has been unleashed on a scale equal to or larger than Darfur. My critique of the coalition is part of a larger critique of the logic of United States politics, one that the coalition feeds into and reproduces. Regionally, a UN commission on climate change has just warned of civil conflicts likely to be triggered by global warming in the coming decade, and cited Darfur as its most prominent example yet, but the coalition has been silent about climate change underlying the resource-driven conflict between communities in Darfur.
Finally, the coalition is silent about the “war crimes” of the insurgency in Darfur. Why? Could it be because the coalition’s concern is limited, as Rubenstein indicates, to “the role of a sovereign government in sponsoring violence against its own citizens based on their ethnicity”, and not to violence unleashed by non-government militias and allied mercenaries in Darfur (or foreign occupying forces as in Iraq)?
Rather than gloss over the role of the “sovereign government” in sponsoring violence against its own citizens, the UN commission called for a fuller understanding of the situation, one that would identify all major perpetrators of the violence.
Indeed, Rubenstein gives that same reason — violence by a sovereign government against an ethnic group among its own citizens — for identifying the violence in Darfur as genocide. The UN Commission disagrees because “the crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing”: indeed, entire groups have been targeted, but without the intention to eliminate them as groups. Instead, the UN Commission finds the government-supported counter-insurgency responsible for “crimes against humanity” and insurgent groups for “war crimes”.
Does it make a difference whether or not we characterise the violence as genocidal? The key difference is legal: the finding of genocide commits “the international community” to an external military intervention. In the absence of such a finding, any intervention would require the consent of all parties to the conflict.
To arrive at a finding of genocide, Rubenstein and the coalition water down the meaning of genocide from violence that intends to eliminate a group to any violence directed against such a group. With this new definition, just about every “ethnic” conflict and counter-insurgency in Africa will be considered genocidal. The result will be nothing less than an open invitation to “the international community” — a euphemism for “a coalition of the willing” led by the single hegemonic power, the US — to pick and choose conflicts in which to intervene militarily for “humanitarian” reasons.
But Rubenstein disavows any such intent. He claims the coalition believes that “progress in the negotiations between the government of Sudan and the various rebel movements” is the only way to achieve “a sustainable peace for the people of Darfur”. If this is indeed so, then the next step should be for the coalition to rethink a labelling strategy designed to trigger a foreign intervention in Sudan.
Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman professor of government and a professor of anthropology at Columbia University