Insurgency, Decaffeinated

One of the major crises facing the U.S. occupation of Iraq is that of the insurgency, and even without being aware of the ideologico-political specifics of the insurgency itself, it is obvious to anyone who at least reads newspapers (or even more passively, catches a glimpse of network news whilst waiting for one’s plane to board) that the conflict is embroiled in an almost impossibly complicated paramilitary brawl—a civil war—, ranging from former Ba’athist loyalists to Marxist revolutionaries. Perhaps then it is interesting to note, as Mahmood Mamdani eloquently does in his The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency, the problematic differentiation between the civil war in Iraq and the civil war in Sudan, namely in the Darfur region.

In 2003, the Darfur Liberation Front (DLF) initiated the conflict (though I must qualify this statement—the conflict itself stems from decades of political, social and economic inequality within Sudan itself) when it claimed credit for attacking the town of Golo. The DLF insurgency was then met by a mostly poor, nomadic counter-insurgency—the Janjaweed—contracted by the Sudanese government as part of a three-fold plan to end factional resistance in the Darfur region, (1) being military intelligence, (2) the air force, and (3) the Janjaweed. Though most of the violence in the conflict has come from the Janjaweed, gross violations have come from both sides.

However, this did not prevent the U.S. from proclaiming a “genocide alert” with regard to the Darfur conflict. In response to claims of “ethnic cleansing” in Darfur and mounting pressure from the U.S., the U.N. launched its own commission to investigate these claims, which reached a far more ambiguous conclusion. In September 2004, the Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo and then-chair of the African Union was asked at a press conference to respond on whether or not he considered the violence in Darfur to be genocide:

Before you can say that this is genocide or ethnic cleansing, we will have to have a definite decision and plan and programme of a government to wipe out a particular group of people, then we will be talking about genocide, ethnic cleansing. What we know is not that. What we know is that there was an uprising, rebellion, and the government armed another group of people to stop that rebellion. That’s what we know. That does not amount to genocide from our own reckoning. It amounts to of course conflict. It amounts to violence.

Thus, right now the central symbolic gap resides in the current political classifications of the two conflicts: of Iraq as “civil war,” and Darfur as “genocide.” Why this split? The conflict in Darfur is, at its core, nearly identical to Iraq—an insurgency vs. a counter-insurgency, factions combatting one another for economic and political power; a highly unstable region due to the history of colonial exploitation, and so on. What perhaps makes Darfur so appetizing as a source of humanitarian interest is, in fact, its similarity to the Iraqi conflict, except of course for one thing: in our current occupation of Iraq, our very presence, our proximity to the conflict itself, has engendered a cynical attitude towards the confusing violence and chaos, a dismal outlook towards an unsolvable ethico-political conundrum mired in the obfuscated mess of a history that we are now fully aware of and thus, at the level of decisiveness on any sort of resolution, properly disengaged. Thus, Darfur is a kind of half-hearted and silly replacement for the confusing Real found in Iraq. Our distance from the Darfur conflict allows us to ignore the complex historical, political, social and economic problems it contains. “Save Darfur!” thus must mean “Forget Iraq!” No wonder both conservatives and fake liberals are both supporting ending “genocide” in Darfur! For paleoconservatives it is an opportunity to distance themselves from the vilified neocons and for pseudo-Leftist Habermasians, an attempt to rectify what remains of the misguided humanitarian calling.

To go back to this idea of a conflict deprived of its history, of all of the ethico-political and ideological complications that engender the necessity to weigh all options or look at all sides of a phenomenon, let us consider Darfur once more. What makes Darfur the “easy” conflict is not that it is some great humanitarian disaster that no one with a heart could ignore, but the very fact that it is a conflict deprived of its malignant properties: it is, in essence, decaffeinated coffee. This is of course not true in reality, but instead found in the emerging discourse on the conflict, which attempts to cast itself as that of choosing to intervene and end “genocide” (in which case the moral and ethical choices become immediately apparent) or ignore it and go about our daily lives, watching TV and so on and let the people be killed.

There is also a racial-ethnic subtext to Darfur, one that is usually not enunciated, but instead must be read between the lines, a kind of “wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more.” The blame for simplifying the Darfur conflict into the classification of the violence as ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ must rest on the shoulders of the woefully misguided Save Darfur campaign. Not only is this characterization summarily wrong, as it presents the violence as one-sided, etc., but it attempts to depoliticize the conflict by naturalizing it. Here we should be suspect: what purpose does this racial-ethnic naturalization really serve? While there is one side to this which is certainly true, namely Western/’white’ guilt towards African(-American)s (slavery, Hurricane Katrina, Rwanda, just to name a few), there is the other, (perhaps) more obvious ideological aspect: to demonize ‘Arabs.’

Could this be why Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times op-ed columnist who devotes most of his time to harping on Darfur, has enframed the conflict as one between the primordial forces of good and evil? Does this rhetorical device not simply force us to draw the rather disturbing parallel between ‘Arab’ and ‘evil’ itself? Perhaps this is why Darfur gets far more public attention (across both political spectrums, as a reminder) than the actual, legitimate genocide that has been going on in the Congo since 1998, of which millions, rather than thousands (as in Darfur), have lost their lives (the highest death count since World War II!). It is not in fact, as some would claim, an apolitical and purely moral humanitarian campaign—it is instead, like Iraq, part of the continuing global War on Terror which seeks to vilify Arabs as the Big Other, the great opposition to Western Enlightenment. As Mamdani caustically writes, “It seems that genocide has become a label to be stuck on your worst enemy, a perverse version of the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical arsenal that helps you vilify your adversaries while ensuring impunity for your allies.” Here, of course, ‘allies’ refers to our African Allies, Rwanda and Uganda, who have been training child soldiers to fight in the Congo civil war. The seemingly objective, depoliticized stance that many groups have taken thus serves rather quintessentially Machiavellian political intentions: to further the obvious agenda of the war on terror.

In deciding on a course of action, it is perhaps useful to evoke Lacan’s subject of enunciated and subject of enunciation (for instance, even though I am saying things, there are reasons why I choose to say not just what I say, but when and how). It is crucial to understand this aspect in acknowledging both the cruel political intentions of past colonialism (found in the quote below) as well as our current/future political intentions (depoliticized humanitarian relief functioning as a mask for anti-Arab fantasies):

…Peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised – sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan, unravelling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror.