Raising awareness, that prized hobbyhorse of the student organization, is this week in full gallop. It’s Genocide Awareness Week, brought to you by the organizers of Mighty Mic, a concert to raise cash for human rights groups.
The organizers are certainly to be admired for their work. The horrifying histories of mass rape and murder left by Hitler’s Germany and Pol Pot’s Cambodia need to be studied and remembered, if only for what they teach us about humanity’s awful capacity to destroy itself.
Yet, as the organizers apply the name “genocide” to today’s conflict in Darfur, they should be wary of what the act of naming entails. The decision of activists to attach the term to the conflict when it may not be, in fact, quite accurate, may have done more harm than good. Ironically, the word itself may have prolonged the violence that activists wish to end.
Genocide is a tortuous term: Depending on the interpretation, it can encompass few or many acts of violence. The 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention defines the crime as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Harvard human rights scholar Alex de Waal wrote recently in Newsweek magazine that if we took literally the letter of the convention, we would recognize nearly a dozen genocides in Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1980.
One can interpret the convention more restrictively, applying it only to large, systematic projects of annihilation, such as the Holocaust. The United Nation’s International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have all adopted this interpretation and found that Darfur is not a genocide. Rather, they argue, it is civil war in which both sides, rebel and government, have shown a reckless disregard for civilian life in their attacks. Many have died, but there is no systematic plan to destroy specific ethnic groups.
So, why have the Mighty Mic organizers chosen to highlight Darfur with the term “genocide,” though not refer to the Shiite killings of Sunnis in Iraq or the Hema-Lendu strife in Congo in the same way? Surely all are equally awful.
Columbia University Africanist Mahmood Mamdani wrote in the London Review of Books recently that “genocide has become a label to be stuck on your worst enemy.”
The term, he argues, serves a purpose for activist groups. In our imagination, the word glosses over Sudan’s complex history and sketches a simplistic morality play in which the perpetrator of the crime ““ the government of Sudan ““ is unambiguously evil, and those who oppose it ““ the rebels and the activists ““ are unambiguously righteous. If activists feel they are up against evil akin to Hitler, they will be motivated to act.
Unfortunately though, such reductionism obscures the truth. Activist “awareness-raising” materials, such as the film “Darfur Now,” which will be shown next week, ignore the fact that the government makes political calculations and can be reasoned with. Instead, the films venerate rebel groups that are themselves responsible for rape and murder.
The assumption that the government is unreasonable has led activists to advocate armed intervention. De Waal and Mamdani argue, however, that this threat has raised the stakes in the negotiations, making peace even harder to obtain. Rebel groups, for instance, now have the impression that if they hold out long enough, an intervention will come, and so they continue to fight indefinitely. According to de Waal, in the final round of negotiations leading to the failed Darfur Peace Agreement, rebel leader Abdel Wahid refused to sign unless the international community could guarantee him an intervention. It could not, and so he refused to sign. The agreement fell apart, activists made no headway, and the war continues.
In order to actually move forward, de Waal argues, negotiators now take intervention off the table so rebel groups will accept an agreement with fewer demands.
An intervention, in any case, would be catastrophic for the region. Surely, any unauthorized military intervention into Sudan by forces even remotely associated with the United States would become a lightning rod for Islamist militants across North Africa and the Middle East. Darfur would become Iraq ““ just a whole lot bigger.
While it pains us to see Darfur’s people continue to die, the “boots on the ground” strategy has yet to work. If Mighty Mic really wishes to move students to help end the conflict, perhaps it should suggest they try something new. Dropping the romance and simplicity of the word “genocide” and helping students understand Darfur as a complex civil war would be a grand first step.
E-mail Reed at treed@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.