Dueling Over Darfur

There's much more I could write—your scattergun approach leaves almost every sentence up for challenge.

JOHN PRENDERGAST: Thankfully, in this duel to the rhetorical death we were only given two bullets. I used up most of my nine lives in the last 25 years living and traveling in war zones, so I wouldn't want to spend any more of them on answering these extraordinary claims.
Activists need to know there are solutions out there, and that these solutions can be driven by activists. Some of your writings (and no, I haven't read all of them) tend to blame activists for things getting worse on the ground in Darfur, and for the failure of the Darfur Peace Agreemeent of 2006. At least that is what most activists perceive your intentions to be. And I understand that. It is hard to get published these days on Sudan, so an argument like that is very attractive to editors. The fact that it is not true is irrelevant, it appears.

Here's the Africa I know from my 25 years' working on the issues there: Afrca is a continent of extraordinary transformation. It is not a place of gloom and doom, of fatalism and hopelessness. Having seen the extraordinary turnarounds in Mozambique, Rwanda, South Africa, southern Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Burundi and elsewhere, I am an unabashed Afro-optimist. I believe Sudan is at one of its low points, just as these other countries were at various times over the last 25 years. And I believe with a little help, particularly driven by activists, Darfur can turn itself around as well.

Any social movement here in the U.S. has to go through growing pains and massive learning curves. There is in formation a growing antigenocide movement in the U.S. today, one that understandably contains many people who are just learning about international relations and what is really going on in places like Sudan, half a world away. Most of them, regrettably, have not yet read your London Review of Books article. So they are learning. I stopped writing for academic journals a few years ago to concentrate on building the capacity of these activists, because I learned when I was working for President Clinton that without a permanent constituency supporting actions against genocide and other mass atrocities, even those people in policymaking positions who wanted to do something were hard-pressed to do so. Though in a perfect world politics wouldn't have to drive policy, in the real world we inhabit political will is the holy grail, and the only way to increase it is through building a movement in an inclusive, bipartisan, encouraging way.

Your conclusion that activists didn't drive the U.S. position on the deployment of the African Union force or the U.S. stepping aside to allow the referral of the case of Darfur to the International Criminal Court demonstrates a lack of understanding of how policy gets made here in the U.S. by American constituencies. Here most of the major incremental steps that have been taken by the U.S.—either unilaterally or multilaterally—have come because of this growing movement of activists that hail from all kinds of backgrounds.

You seem obsessed with the idea that activists have only been pressing for the deployment of force. Some of the [Save Darfur] ads from 2005 and 2006 certainly focused on that issue, but advocacy in the U.S. has been much more comprehensive than you give it credit for, even though we have not fully succeeded in changing U.S. policy. We have focused on what we call the Three P's of Crisis Response: Peace-making, Protection and Punishment. We believe those three elements are part and parcel of every successful external effort to support an end to conflicts or crises in Africa in recent history. We think that a more effective peace process, a rapid deployment of the UN/AU force with a focus on protecting civilians, and clear penalties for obstructing the first two (peace and protection) would do much to helping to bring an end to the crisis in Darfur. And we believe an equal effort must be made to implement the North-South peace deal, as the fates of Darfur and the South are deeply intertwined. Not every activist understands this, but we all can contribute to educating them to make a difference, a real difference.

And you are right, activists are not the most even-handed commentators when it comes to responding to Darfur. However, you interpret that as having taken sides with the rebels. Not so. Activists realize that the responsibility for the vast preponderance of atrocities committed since early 2003 lies at the feet of the ruling party in Khartoum, the NCP. Please understand the difference when you are constructing your critiques of the activists and their efforts.

Whatever your intent, those activists that have read anything you have written of late are trying to understand why you are saying that activists are more part of the problem than of the solution. Certainly there is room for improvement in our advocacy efforts. For example, you perpetuate the erroneous notion that activists are advocating for military action against Sudan. That just doesn't square with the reality. Many of the key activist groups have gone through a period of reflection and have issued public statements about the potential for negative consequences outweighing positive results in use-of-force scenarios, such as no-fly zones or targeted airstrikes. There is certainly disagreement out there. But it is simply erroneous for you to assert that activists promote the use of force and that hardens rebel positions. The rebels are a lot smarter than you are giving them credit for. They have their own views and agendas and use others to justify those views. Again, blaming activists or even pointing out their ignorance may sell (a few) magazines, but it isn't an accurate reflection of real cause and effect.