Dueling Over Darfur

· It is worth noting that when renegade rebel–turned–government militia commander Minni Minnawi traveled to the U.S. to visit Bush last year, he met with a number of activist groups—including us—who were harshly critical of the abuses committed by his forces. Activist organizations have not portrayed the rebels as freedom fighters, but rather maintained a justified focus on the primary cause of the crisis: the actions of the regime and the impunity it still enjoys.

· Activists had little to do with the genocide declaration in 2004. There was not even what you could call "a campaign" at that time. Actually, the USG sent a team of researchers to Chad, interviewed 1,100 refugees, and based on the patterns of violence they discovered made a determination. Then, the disconnect between word and deed—genocide and "doing all we can"—helped to create the movement.

· You write: "When you are dealing with the U.S., you need to pay attention to what its leaders say." Perhaps, but I would argue that a regime as experienced and wily as the one in Khartoum pays a lot more attention to what the USG does, not what it says. You should know this…

· You write that the Khartoum regime "fears that the U.S. government will take sides against it in a future war for the secession of southern Sudan". Really? If that were the case, then wouldn't the USG be making much more of an effort to pressure the regime to implement the southern Sudan peace agreement? Or pumping arms into the south? Again, the regime is looking at actions, not words.

· In the Rwanda/Zaire paragraph, you are comparing activists calling upon their elected leaders to stop crimes against humanity to relief agencies who were knowingly feeding genocidaires in eastern Congo. That is a grotesque oversimplification—provocative and largely meaningless. You're comparing apples and oranges to make a cute rhetorical point, and it doesn't work. The comparison is at best disingenuous: you cannot say giving aid that gets diverted to genocidaires is analogous to pressuring the USG to take more concerted action in Darfur. Perhaps you're alluding to what you see as activists' oversimplification of the crisis and a focus on Darfur, but I think you would be hard-pressed to explain how that makes activists responsible for bad USG policy or demonstrates that they have done "harm."

· You are failing to look at your own actions with a critical eye, as a central participant in crafting the fatally flawed Darfur peace deal in 2006 that led to an intensification of conflict in Darfur. Activists were pushing for a comprehensive peace deal that would address root causes in Darfur, not a half-baked agreement between the regime and the most abusive rebel commander in Darfur who has now become a government militia thanks to your "peace deal."

· You write: "Could the focus on Darfur mean that the challenges of consolidating the North-South peace have been neglected?" Again, that suggests that the USG policy is solely dictated by activists, surely not something anyone could argue with a straight face about the Bush administration. Activists have certainly deemphasized the North-South deal, but that doesn't excuse the Bush administration from walking away from one of its only foreign policy successes of the past seven years. And would it have been OK to let Khartoum pursue a policy of mass murder in Darfur just to get the North-South deal implemented? Stove-piped USG policy is the problem, not activism. Why do you consistently let the USG off the hook and blame activists for bad policy? The USG should have had a comprehensive policy to deal with both the North-South deal and Darfur, but instead it has been unable to reconcile the two. Had there been no Darfur movement, it's highly likely that both crises would have been ignored. And right now advocacy groups across the country are taking the lead role in making it clear that the problems in Sudan need to be dealt with holistically, since USG policy still hasn't addressed it that way.

· You write: "Could the Darfur campaign have driven the Bush administration to adopt hard-line rhetoric that made Khartoum less cooperative, while at the same time encouraging the rebels to believe that they could win a military intervention if they held out long enough? Could it in fact have impeded the search for a compromise between government and rebels?" What compromise? When has the government of Sudan shown any willingness to compromise when they were not under intense international pressure? At the 2006 peace talks you were part of, the USG put more pressure on the rebels than it did on Khartoum, and ended up with a stillborn agreement. Is this the fault of rebel-coddling activists?