Is There a Crisis in Darfur?

[bcholmes]

This is a serious question. I don't know.

I wrote, recently, about seeing the film, Darfur Now and attending the Q&A event afterward. I didn't talk much about the areas in which the film made me profoundly uncomfortable.

First, the film talked at great length about the role that the UN was playing in bringing war crimes charges against Ahmed Haroun. There are also a lot of abstract statements in the film about how people need to do something. For me, these two things together lead me to think about the UN's Responsibility to Protect doctrine, a doctrine which I'm extremely suspicious of. Some countries get to decide that other countries are screwed up, and therefore they have a responsibility to prevent, react, and rebuild (ooo, rebuilding contracts!).

And I can see how that feels good when we remember the accepted narrative of Rwanda. If only we'd really embraced our responsibility to protect, we wouldn't have just stood by and let the Rwandan genocide take place. (Let's just not talk about UN and French involvement in Rwanda from 1990 to 1994 -- that gets in the way of the official narrative that we western countries failed to notice what was going on).

Haiti is a classic case of how the responsibility to protect can be abused. A few weeks before Aristide was kidnapped from Haiti in February 2004, Canadian Ambassador Kenneth Cook sent a confidential memo to the Canadian privy council explicitly invoking the Responsibility to Protect w.r.t. Aristide:

President Aristide is clearly a serious aggravating factor in the current crisis and unless he gives dramatic early signs that he is implementing the CARICOM road map then the OAS, CARICOM and possibly UN will have to consider the options including whether a case can be made for the duty to protect.

And I can see how North American media representations of what was going on in Haiti in 2004 really supported an interventionist doctrine. That creeps me out.

So, I hear about what's going on in Darfur. From those same North American media outlets. And it looks like an interventionist doctrine might be a good thing, there. How skeptical should I be?

There were other points that came up during Darfur Now. There's a brief mention that one of the thorny aspects of "dealing with" Darfur is that Sudan has a relationship with China. Sudan has oil deposits, and because they lack the ability to process the oil, they sell drilling rights to China. Since access to cheap energy (i.e. oil) is essential to economic growth, China doesn't want change in Sudan. This stuff came up during Q&A's. But nobody asked the follow-on question: isn't it a bit worrisome that there's a big discussion about how fine, upstanding western countries like the United States need to Do Something in a country with oil resources? Who's going to watch the watchmen in this scenario? Or is it all really all right: the US has learned its lesson from Iraq. No more invasions for oil. (But we still gotta get the nukes out of Iran).

One of the lines of argument used by a Sudanese government official working at the UN was that the genocide is being exaggerated, and that the only country making these claims of genocide is the United States. One reading of the situation is to say, "well of course the Sudanese government is going to downplay the genocide". But what if what he's saying is true? Could the Darfurian crisis be another WMD shell game, but one that exploits those lingering Rwanda guilt feelings? And has this ventured into the realm of nutbar conspiracy theory? (Insert Theresa Nielsen-Hayden quotation, here).

When Darfur Now shows interviews with average Darfurians, traumatized at the effects of genocide, I don't doubt that they're talking about something real. People are being killed. I'm just not sure that I'm sold on the official narrative of who is responsible.

So. Who should I believe? I don't know. And I'm asking. What's going on in Darfur? Help.