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Thursday, June 29, 2006

Getting to Syria


I've had my fair share of visa problems in the last year or two. I've had Libya, Sudan and now Syria all do their best to stop me from visiting. I've given up on the first two for the time being, but I'm still holding out for Syria.

So I'm in Beirut for the time being. It's difficult to work on my Arabic here, because classes are prohibitively expensive, and almost everyone speaks English or French much better than I speak Arabic. It seems like a little bubble here in Beirut. A bubble filled with beautiful women, bars and short skirts.

A few hours away, Israel has taken out several bridges, destroyed electricity transformers in Gaza, and detained a third of Hamas' cabinet and an unknown number of lawmakers. The Israelis have flown over Syrian President Assad's summer house on the coast and spoken of attacking the leader of Hamas' military wing, who lives in Damascus. On all sides of Lebanon, the tension can be felt, but here, we?re going out and drinking, watching the world cup and sipping coffee.

Brazil beat Ghana the other night; there were fireworks and dancing in the streets.

Sunday, June 25, 2006

General Principle


In his op-ed, A Threat That Belongs Behind Bars, professor Eric Posner informs us that the indefinite detention of "dangerous aliens," regardless of whether or not they have committed a crime, should not be opposed on general principle. While it is true that there are precedents of such action in the alien and sedition acts and the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, it is both disappointing and disconcerting that such black spots on American history are being held up as a defense of unconscionable behavior not befit of a civilized democracy. In these times, when the United States is committing torture, unlawful detentions and violent war crimes in the name of the war on terror, what our nation needs are more, not fewer, appeals to general principle.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Back in Beirut


I've just arrived in Beirut after a hectic few days of getting everything prepared for this trip. I'll be in the Middle East until September and will be trying to blog from here as much as possible - hopefully more than usual.

I never managed to get my visa for Syria, so I'll probably try my luck at the border in the next few days. Some friends want me to come to Jordan, but you have to go through Syria to get to Jordan from Lebanon, so I might not be able to make it, which would be a shame, because it would be nice to stay with a family in Amman and then maybe go visit Petra as well.

There is a certain sense of home that I feel here in Beirut. I felt it the first time I came, and I'm feeling it again, now that I'm back. There was the same sign of Ronald McDonald saying "Welcome to Lebanon" at the airport and I was able to direct the cab driver directly to my friend's place, no small feat considering how bad my sense of direction is.

I lucked out at the airport, because there was some sort of a problem with the visa stand, so they just let everyone have their visa for free. It's only $17, but it's a nice feeling all the same.

I'm going to try to post pictures from time to time also, because I think this blog needs some spicing up...

Sunday, June 18, 2006

American Taliban


Esquire magazing has an interesting piece on John Walker Lindh, the American guy who was fighting in the ranks of the Taliban against the Northern Alliance when the US invaded in 2001. Strangely, part of his sentence is that he's not allowed to speak Arabic in prison, which means he cannot pray out loud. Talking to a friend of mine last night about the article, he reacted to it by saying that if the sentence isn't cruel, it certainly is unusual.

The article is a little long and written with an odd tone of deference or piety that I'm not sure really works, but it is very interesting and worth a read nonetheless.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Guantanamo Bay: A European Perspective


An editorial in le Monde today takes the US to task for Guantanamo Bay (in French, translation mine):

Upon the discovery of the suicide of three detainees, two Saudis and one Yemeni, the reaction of the commander of the camp in Guantanamo illustrates the gulf that separates American authorities from the rest of the world on the sinister issue of the prison in Guantanamo. The collective suicide is "an act of asymmetric war waged against us," declared Rear Admiral Harry Harris on 10 June. Colleen Graffy, in charge of public diplomacy at the State Department, qualified the detainees' gesture as a "good PR move to draw attention."

Without falling into otherworldliness faced with the essential fight against international terrorism, how can we make the United States listen to reason about this black stain on the democratic world that the prison in Guantanamo has become? Because, when Admiral Harris evokes an act of war against America, he is forgetting that American blindness towards the treatment of the detainees suspected of belonging to Al-Qaida, in Guantanamo or in the secret prisons run by the CIA, exposes all western democracies to Islamic propaganda and radicalization. It is to our suburbs and our Muslim communities in Europe that the recruiters of Al-Qaida and other fundamentalist proselytizers come to fill their ranks, with arguments graciously given to them by the military leaders of the Pentagon and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

It hasn't been enough to say that Guantanamo Bay, opened in January 2002 and where 460 prisoners are still being held without trial, is legal nonsense; it hasn't been enough to say that it constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and human rights; it hasn't been enough to write that it is unworthy of a country universally admired for having established respect for the rule of law in its constitutional system; it hasn't been enough to show surprise that the Bush administration manifests, by its stubbornness, such disdain for its own Supreme Court, which told it in June 2004 to authorize the Guantanamo detainees to defend themselves before an American civil court, and for public opinion, which, after an initial indifference, has included a growing number of voices denouncing the conditions in the prison. Nor has it been enough to bring up relevant historical errors, from the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to Margaret Thatcher's vain stubbornness faced with IRA members on hunger strike in 1981.

The United States remains deaf to all these arguments. The least that European leaders can do from now on is to no longer hold high level meetings with Americans without demanding the closing of Guantanamo Bay. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has recently served as a good example. The French should follow suit.

Monday, June 05, 2006

On non-intervention in darfur


In addition to Kuperman's piece, David Rieff has also penned a case against intervention in Darfur in the New Republic, which Reeves hotly and thoroughly counters.

He sees the issue through the lense of Iraq in 2003 instead of, say, Rwanda in 1994 or Iraq during the genocidal al Anfal campaign to Arabize Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1908s. Rieff casts doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and says that those who call for intervention in Darfur are ignoring the politics of Darfur (which he seems to be less than well-versed in himself, the truth be told):

Were politics present in their thinking, pro-Darfuri intervention activists would not use the reductionist dichotomy of victims and abusers that has been the staple myth of humanitarian intervention. The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. So do the extended families of the Janjaweed themselves, who, lest we forget, are also Darfuris. To describe the former simply as victims deprives them of any agency. To describe the latter simply as killers precludes actually understanding the conflict as anything other than an eruption of human wickedness, rather like a volcano or an earthquake.

One debilitating defect of the liberal interventionism is that it ignores the political implications of what it calls for. ...

...[A]n intervention, however good it may be for the Darfuris, may be terrible for the rest of the world.
Reeves criticizes Rieff for mistakenly attributing secessionist ambitions to the Darfuri rebels, not discussion the spread of the genocide into Chad, irresponsibly casting doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and generally being ignorant on Darfuri politics.

In fact, we must wonder what "agency" a nine-year-old girl has when she is brutally gang-raped by the Janjaweed, or what "agency" a five-year-old boy has as he is thrown screaming into a bonfire along with his brothers, or indeed what "agency" a one-year-old boy has when the Janjaweed slice off his penis and he bleeds to death. "Political interests" here is an abstraction that can have meaning for very few besides David Rieff. There are real political issues in Darfur, including competition over natural resources and power in governance, as well as competing visions of equitable distribution of land and wealth. Rieff captures none of this in his account.

If the Abuja accord does fail, if violence then inevitably rapidly escalates in Darfur and Chad, it will be too late for hundreds of thousands of lives. We have simply waited too long, with too many sufficiently encouraged by specious arguments of the sort so abundant in Rieff's account. In this sense it is perhaps useful to have Rieff articulate his factitious "realism," to invoke so glibly the difficult "politics" of Darfur, to pretend that Iraq has somehow changed the imperative of responding to massive genocidal destruction.
Anne-Marie Slaughter writes in her TMPCafe piece, Rethinking Darfur that after reading Kuperman and Rieff, she's having second thoughts. She doesn't go into any specifics, but the gist of her piece is that maybe we shouldn't intervene, because the situation is complicated:

I want to help the victims of the Janjaweed as much as anyone. But the Europeans have been arguing for some time that the situation is far more complicated than a simple morality tale would make it out to be. And surely if Iraq has taught us anything, it is to think very hard about what happens AFTER we go in and stop the initial killing. It may well be that even if an AU solution is slower and less effective up front, it will be more effective over the long term, whereas if the U.S. or NATO go in, we will find ourselves again "in charge" of a situation we barely understand and cannot control, ultimately visiting yet more chaos and death on the very people we seek to help.
To my mind, this is similar to seeing a woman getting raped and murdered on the street and hesitating to do anything about it because the situation is likely to be complicated. What will other people in the neighbourhood think if I intervene? What did that woman do to make those men decide to rape and murder her?

Of course the situation is complicated, as are most conflicts. We don't live in a world of black and white, and we never have. Just because the sitauation surrounding a genocide is complex does not mean that there is any less of a moral imperative to stop it. The politics of Darfur are complex, as were the politics of Rwanda in 1994. What is not complex is that genocide is being committed, and either one believes that genocide carries the weight of a moral imperative or it doesn't. Finally, Slaughter seems more interested in wringing her hands and hoping against all odds for the best. Rieff at least calls a spade a spade when he asks brings up the idea that even if intervention is better for Darfuris, maybe it would be bad for the rest of the world.

This is an interesting question that smacks of utilitarianism. But before answering it, we should ask ourselves two questions: First, given the number of dead incurred during World War II, should the international community have given up Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria and the Jews in those countries in order to avoid the tens of millions of deaths that were a result of direct military confrontation between Axis and Allied powers? And second, are we sure that there will not be more death and conflict as a result of allowing a genocide to happen?

The first question is of a moral nature and can be difficult in some instances, if not in this one. The second one is about history and its consequences. Would the Congo be such a hellhole if we had not let the Rwandan genocide come to pass? In the case of Darfur, it is important to look at what this genocide means for Chad, and by consequence, the Central African Republic and Cameroon. If Khartoum is emboldened and allowed to topple Deby's (distasteful) regime in Chad, the bloody and ongoing history of the Congo might repeat itself.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Kuperman and "provoking genocide"


I would like to comment on Alan Kuperman's polemical piece in the New York Times yesterday (31 May), "Strategic Victimhood in Sudan." In this particular article, Kuperman tells us that the regime in Khartoum responded to Darfuri rebel insurgency with genocide, and that "[b]ecause of the Save Darfur movement ... the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure," which has in turn led the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) movement and Nur's part of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) to reject the recent peace treaty signed at Abuja.

Kuperman's analysis of events is not specific to his take on Sudanese politics; rather it is but further evidence of his larger hypothesis. Generally speaking, the crux of his argument can be found in the first sentence of an article he wrote on the Rwandan genocide, "Provoking genocide: A revised history of the Rwandan Patriotic Front": "In most cases of mass killing since World War II­­ -- unlike the Holocaust -- the victim group has triggered its own demise by violently challenging the authority of the state."

Although he emphasizes that his theory is "not intended to excuse of justify the genocide in any way, but merely to understand more fully its causes," Kuperman's argument seems to come dangerously close to blaming the victims. While he would surely protest that he is blaming rebel groups and not the victims of the genocide (a polemical claim in and of itself), this is not at all clear when he says, "the victim group has triggered its own demise." (To be fair, with the exception of the opening sentence, the article focuses mostly on the RPF, not Tutsis in general.)

But I'll save the more general moral debate about whether or not a genocidal regime's culpability can be shared with a rebel group that has purportedly "provoked" genocide for another time. What I would like to focus on here is the specifics of Darfur.

I don't pretend to be an expert on Sudanese or Darfuri politics, and I agree with Kuperman when he says that the situation in Darfur is complex. However, it seems strange that after stressing that the situation there is not the "simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations," he would himself make claims like these:

The region's blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago -- denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. ... [The rebels] took up arms not to stop genocide -- which erupted only after they rebelled -- but to gain tribal domination.
To paint the situation during the maja al-gatila (the famine that kills) in Darfur in 1984-5 as one in which "blacks ... were the oppressors" is terribly simplistic in more than one way. Without lingering on the complexities of ethnicity in Darfur and the difficulty in categorizing Darfuris as either "black" or "Arab," the facile claim that "blacks" were oppressing "Arabs" seems to overlook the fact that the nearly 100,000 deaths during the famine were largely due to apathy or incompetence on the part of Khartoum. According to Prunier,

Everyone knew that this catastrophe would have been perfectly preventable with a little bit of planning, money and, especially, political will. Everyone knew that the mass deaths [hécatombe] were the result of Khartoum's negligence. But the consequences happened to be unequally distributed [translation mine].
The drought and famine forced the nomads to prematurely go south in search of grazing areas, which just so happened to be the meager and not-yet-harvested fields of the farmers. Alex de Waal, who has studied the famine in depth, describes the delicate balance that was violently disturbed in 1985 as the "moral geography" of Darfur.

Kuperman's other claim, that the rebels "picked up arms ... to gain tribal dominance," also seems to be woefully ill-informed. According to Julie Flint and de Waal, the roots of JEM go back to 1993, when the original aim was to reform the National Islamic Front (NIF) from within. Dissidents like Nur compiled evidence illustrating the economic and political marginalization of Darfur into a document they called "The Black Book." JEM purports to combat Darfur's status as an outlying periphery dominated by the center of Sudanese economic and political life. Nur explains the situation in Darfur thusly:

There was too much suffering. I travelled 60 kilometers to go to primary school, in Kornoi, when I was 7; 350 kilometers to go to intermediate school, in Geneina; 400 kilometers to go to secondary school, in Fasher; and 1,000 kilometers to go to university, in Khartoum. It was forbidden to speak the Zaghawa language in school. In primary school, the teacher gave us a blue ticket to pass to any boy who spoke Zaghawa. At the end of the day, anyone who had the ticket was whipped. The whole of Kutun province, with a population of more than 551,000, had one general doctor and no specialists. Women walked more than eight hours daily to get less than 60 liters of water. We were excluded from all key posts and had no way of communicating with the international community to ask for help.
JEM's five-point manifesto calls for a national solution to the Sudan's problems. It calls for a unified country, justice and equality rather than political repression, "radical and comprehensive constitutional reform," basic services for all Sudanese and human development in all the regions of Sudan.

The SLM/A, on the other hand, has its roots in Darfuri irregular militias that were created in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s when conflict was already rife in the region. In 1999 already, over 100,000 Masalit had fled to Chad.

The fact of the matter is that the events leading up to the genocide in Darfur are many and varied, involving the famine, the political situation in Chad, Libyan involvement and sometimes de facto ruling of Darfur, Islamic movements (both domestic and imported from Tripoli or Cairo) and a politics of systematic neglect of the periphery by the center in Khartoum. To say that the rebels provoked genocide by vying for tribal domination is either disingenuous or uninformed.

This is not to say that the Darfuri rebel movements are saints; we know that they are not. But that's not the point. Whether the rebel movements have "provoked" Khartoum is neither here nor there in the long run. The rebels, despite their claims to represent all of Darfur, are not the ethnic groups as a whole, just as the RPF is not synonymous with the Tutsis in Rwanda.

De Waal sums up the situation quite succinctly in his piece in the London Review of Books, "Counter-insurgency on the cheap":

The atrocities carried out by the Janjawiid are aimed at speakers of Fur, Tunjur, Masalit and Zaghawa. They are systematic and sustained; the effect, if not the aim, is grossly disproportionate to the military threat of the rebellion. The mass rape and branding of victims speaks of the deliberate destruction of a community. In Darfur, cutting down fruit trees or destroying irrigation ditches is a way of eradicating farmers' claims to the land and ruining livelihoods. But this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.
And this brings me to Kuperman's advice not to intervene: ...we should let Sudan's army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes." It's hard to believe that such a naïve statement could be penned by anyone who has read much about the regime in Khartoum. We're talking about "routine cruelty" and "genocide by force of habit." What Kuperman doesn't see is that the Sudanese regime is "handling" the rebels in the same way it dealt with the South and the Nuba Mountains.

To lay the blame for such acts at the feet of the rebels (rather than at the feet of the regime committing genocide), or even worse, the "victim group," is morally irresponsible. The Fur and Zaghawa and other "black" tribes in Darfur are no more responsible for the organized campaign to destroy them than the Armenians were for their forced march into the sands of Syria.

If Alan Kuperman is content to take Khartoum at its word and trust that it will "eschew" the "war crimes" that it denies committing in the first place, allowing the regime to "handle" the rebels and "defend its sovereignty" in the meantime, I, for one, am not.

Kuperman advises the United States to announce a policy of non-intervention. This is confusing to me, because after all, isn't that the policy that Samantha Powers describes so well in her book, "A Problem from Hell"? Isn't that the policy that has been silently announced throughout the twentieth century to Armenians, Rwandans, Iraqi Kurds, Cambodians and now the Sudanese?

Thursday, June 29, 2006

Getting to Syria


I've had my fair share of visa problems in the last year or two. I've had Libya, Sudan and now Syria all do their best to stop me from visiting. I've given up on the first two for the time being, but I'm still holding out for Syria.

So I'm in Beirut for the time being. It's difficult to work on my Arabic here, because classes are prohibitively expensive, and almost everyone speaks English or French much better than I speak Arabic. It seems like a little bubble here in Beirut. A bubble filled with beautiful women, bars and short skirts.

A few hours away, Israel has taken out several bridges, destroyed electricity transformers in Gaza, and detained a third of Hamas' cabinet and an unknown number of lawmakers. The Israelis have flown over Syrian President Assad's summer house on the coast and spoken of attacking the leader of Hamas' military wing, who lives in Damascus. On all sides of Lebanon, the tension can be felt, but here, we?re going out and drinking, watching the world cup and sipping coffee.

Brazil beat Ghana the other night; there were fireworks and dancing in the streets.

Sunday, June 25, 2006

General Principle


In his op-ed, A Threat That Belongs Behind Bars, professor Eric Posner informs us that the indefinite detention of "dangerous aliens," regardless of whether or not they have committed a crime, should not be opposed on general principle. While it is true that there are precedents of such action in the alien and sedition acts and the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, it is both disappointing and disconcerting that such black spots on American history are being held up as a defense of unconscionable behavior not befit of a civilized democracy. In these times, when the United States is committing torture, unlawful detentions and violent war crimes in the name of the war on terror, what our nation needs are more, not fewer, appeals to general principle.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Back in Beirut


I've just arrived in Beirut after a hectic few days of getting everything prepared for this trip. I'll be in the Middle East until September and will be trying to blog from here as much as possible - hopefully more than usual.

I never managed to get my visa for Syria, so I'll probably try my luck at the border in the next few days. Some friends want me to come to Jordan, but you have to go through Syria to get to Jordan from Lebanon, so I might not be able to make it, which would be a shame, because it would be nice to stay with a family in Amman and then maybe go visit Petra as well.

There is a certain sense of home that I feel here in Beirut. I felt it the first time I came, and I'm feeling it again, now that I'm back. There was the same sign of Ronald McDonald saying "Welcome to Lebanon" at the airport and I was able to direct the cab driver directly to my friend's place, no small feat considering how bad my sense of direction is.

I lucked out at the airport, because there was some sort of a problem with the visa stand, so they just let everyone have their visa for free. It's only $17, but it's a nice feeling all the same.

I'm going to try to post pictures from time to time also, because I think this blog needs some spicing up...

Sunday, June 18, 2006

American Taliban


Esquire magazing has an interesting piece on John Walker Lindh, the American guy who was fighting in the ranks of the Taliban against the Northern Alliance when the US invaded in 2001. Strangely, part of his sentence is that he's not allowed to speak Arabic in prison, which means he cannot pray out loud. Talking to a friend of mine last night about the article, he reacted to it by saying that if the sentence isn't cruel, it certainly is unusual.

The article is a little long and written with an odd tone of deference or piety that I'm not sure really works, but it is very interesting and worth a read nonetheless.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Guantanamo Bay: A European Perspective


An editorial in le Monde today takes the US to task for Guantanamo Bay (in French, translation mine):

Upon the discovery of the suicide of three detainees, two Saudis and one Yemeni, the reaction of the commander of the camp in Guantanamo illustrates the gulf that separates American authorities from the rest of the world on the sinister issue of the prison in Guantanamo. The collective suicide is "an act of asymmetric war waged against us," declared Rear Admiral Harry Harris on 10 June. Colleen Graffy, in charge of public diplomacy at the State Department, qualified the detainees' gesture as a "good PR move to draw attention."

Without falling into otherworldliness faced with the essential fight against international terrorism, how can we make the United States listen to reason about this black stain on the democratic world that the prison in Guantanamo has become? Because, when Admiral Harris evokes an act of war against America, he is forgetting that American blindness towards the treatment of the detainees suspected of belonging to Al-Qaida, in Guantanamo or in the secret prisons run by the CIA, exposes all western democracies to Islamic propaganda and radicalization. It is to our suburbs and our Muslim communities in Europe that the recruiters of Al-Qaida and other fundamentalist proselytizers come to fill their ranks, with arguments graciously given to them by the military leaders of the Pentagon and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

It hasn't been enough to say that Guantanamo Bay, opened in January 2002 and where 460 prisoners are still being held without trial, is legal nonsense; it hasn't been enough to say that it constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and human rights; it hasn't been enough to write that it is unworthy of a country universally admired for having established respect for the rule of law in its constitutional system; it hasn't been enough to show surprise that the Bush administration manifests, by its stubbornness, such disdain for its own Supreme Court, which told it in June 2004 to authorize the Guantanamo detainees to defend themselves before an American civil court, and for public opinion, which, after an initial indifference, has included a growing number of voices denouncing the conditions in the prison. Nor has it been enough to bring up relevant historical errors, from the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to Margaret Thatcher's vain stubbornness faced with IRA members on hunger strike in 1981.

The United States remains deaf to all these arguments. The least that European leaders can do from now on is to no longer hold high level meetings with Americans without demanding the closing of Guantanamo Bay. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has recently served as a good example. The French should follow suit.

Monday, June 05, 2006

On non-intervention in darfur


In addition to Kuperman's piece, David Rieff has also penned a case against intervention in Darfur in the New Republic, which Reeves hotly and thoroughly counters.

He sees the issue through the lense of Iraq in 2003 instead of, say, Rwanda in 1994 or Iraq during the genocidal al Anfal campaign to Arabize Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1908s. Rieff casts doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and says that those who call for intervention in Darfur are ignoring the politics of Darfur (which he seems to be less than well-versed in himself, the truth be told):

Were politics present in their thinking, pro-Darfuri intervention activists would not use the reductionist dichotomy of victims and abusers that has been the staple myth of humanitarian intervention. The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. So do the extended families of the Janjaweed themselves, who, lest we forget, are also Darfuris. To describe the former simply as victims deprives them of any agency. To describe the latter simply as killers precludes actually understanding the conflict as anything other than an eruption of human wickedness, rather like a volcano or an earthquake.

One debilitating defect of the liberal interventionism is that it ignores the political implications of what it calls for. ...

...[A]n intervention, however good it may be for the Darfuris, may be terrible for the rest of the world.
Reeves criticizes Rieff for mistakenly attributing secessionist ambitions to the Darfuri rebels, not discussion the spread of the genocide into Chad, irresponsibly casting doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and generally being ignorant on Darfuri politics.

In fact, we must wonder what "agency" a nine-year-old girl has when she is brutally gang-raped by the Janjaweed, or what "agency" a five-year-old boy has as he is thrown screaming into a bonfire along with his brothers, or indeed what "agency" a one-year-old boy has when the Janjaweed slice off his penis and he bleeds to death. "Political interests" here is an abstraction that can have meaning for very few besides David Rieff. There are real political issues in Darfur, including competition over natural resources and power in governance, as well as competing visions of equitable distribution of land and wealth. Rieff captures none of this in his account.

If the Abuja accord does fail, if violence then inevitably rapidly escalates in Darfur and Chad, it will be too late for hundreds of thousands of lives. We have simply waited too long, with too many sufficiently encouraged by specious arguments of the sort so abundant in Rieff's account. In this sense it is perhaps useful to have Rieff articulate his factitious "realism," to invoke so glibly the difficult "politics" of Darfur, to pretend that Iraq has somehow changed the imperative of responding to massive genocidal destruction.
Anne-Marie Slaughter writes in her TMPCafe piece, Rethinking Darfur that after reading Kuperman and Rieff, she's having second thoughts. She doesn't go into any specifics, but the gist of her piece is that maybe we shouldn't intervene, because the situation is complicated:

I want to help the victims of the Janjaweed as much as anyone. But the Europeans have been arguing for some time that the situation is far more complicated than a simple morality tale would make it out to be. And surely if Iraq has taught us anything, it is to think very hard about what happens AFTER we go in and stop the initial killing. It may well be that even if an AU solution is slower and less effective up front, it will be more effective over the long term, whereas if the U.S. or NATO go in, we will find ourselves again "in charge" of a situation we barely understand and cannot control, ultimately visiting yet more chaos and death on the very people we seek to help.
To my mind, this is similar to seeing a woman getting raped and murdered on the street and hesitating to do anything about it because the situation is likely to be complicated. What will other people in the neighbourhood think if I intervene? What did that woman do to make those men decide to rape and murder her?

Of course the situation is complicated, as are most conflicts. We don't live in a world of black and white, and we never have. Just because the sitauation surrounding a genocide is complex does not mean that there is any less of a moral imperative to stop it. The politics of Darfur are complex, as were the politics of Rwanda in 1994. What is not complex is that genocide is being committed, and either one believes that genocide carries the weight of a moral imperative or it doesn't. Finally, Slaughter seems more interested in wringing her hands and hoping against all odds for the best. Rieff at least calls a spade a spade when he asks brings up the idea that even if intervention is better for Darfuris, maybe it would be bad for the rest of the world.

This is an interesting question that smacks of utilitarianism. But before answering it, we should ask ourselves two questions: First, given the number of dead incurred during World War II, should the international community have given up Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria and the Jews in those countries in order to avoid the tens of millions of deaths that were a result of direct military confrontation between Axis and Allied powers? And second, are we sure that there will not be more death and conflict as a result of allowing a genocide to happen?

The first question is of a moral nature and can be difficult in some instances, if not in this one. The second one is about history and its consequences. Would the Congo be such a hellhole if we had not let the Rwandan genocide come to pass? In the case of Darfur, it is important to look at what this genocide means for Chad, and by consequence, the Central African Republic and Cameroon. If Khartoum is emboldened and allowed to topple Deby's (distasteful) regime in Chad, the bloody and ongoing history of the Congo might repeat itself.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Kuperman and "provoking genocide"


I would like to comment on Alan Kuperman's polemical piece in the New York Times yesterday (31 May), "Strategic Victimhood in Sudan." In this particular article, Kuperman tells us that the regime in Khartoum responded to Darfuri rebel insurgency with genocide, and that "[b]ecause of the Save Darfur movement ... the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure," which has in turn led the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) movement and Nur's part of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) to reject the recent peace treaty signed at Abuja.

Kuperman's analysis of events is not specific to his take on Sudanese politics; rather it is but further evidence of his larger hypothesis. Generally speaking, the crux of his argument can be found in the first sentence of an article he wrote on the Rwandan genocide, "Provoking genocide: A revised history of the Rwandan Patriotic Front": "In most cases of mass killing since World War II­­ -- unlike the Holocaust -- the victim group has triggered its own demise by violently challenging the authority of the state."

Although he emphasizes that his theory is "not intended to excuse of justify the genocide in any way, but merely to understand more fully its causes," Kuperman's argument seems to come dangerously close to blaming the victims. While he would surely protest that he is blaming rebel groups and not the victims of the genocide (a polemical claim in and of itself), this is not at all clear when he says, "the victim group has triggered its own demise." (To be fair, with the exception of the opening sentence, the article focuses mostly on the RPF, not Tutsis in general.)

But I'll save the more general moral debate about whether or not a genocidal regime's culpability can be shared with a rebel group that has purportedly "provoked" genocide for another time. What I would like to focus on here is the specifics of Darfur.

I don't pretend to be an expert on Sudanese or Darfuri politics, and I agree with Kuperman when he says that the situation in Darfur is complex. However, it seems strange that after stressing that the situation there is not the "simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations," he would himself make claims like these:

The region's blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago -- denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. ... [The rebels] took up arms not to stop genocide -- which erupted only after they rebelled -- but to gain tribal domination.
To paint the situation during the maja al-gatila (the famine that kills) in Darfur in 1984-5 as one in which "blacks ... were the oppressors" is terribly simplistic in more than one way. Without lingering on the complexities of ethnicity in Darfur and the difficulty in categorizing Darfuris as either "black" or "Arab," the facile claim that "blacks" were oppressing "Arabs" seems to overlook the fact that the nearly 100,000 deaths during the famine were largely due to apathy or incompetence on the part of Khartoum. According to Prunier,

Everyone knew that this catastrophe would have been perfectly preventable with a little bit of planning, money and, especially, political will. Everyone knew that the mass deaths [hécatombe] were the result of Khartoum's negligence. But the consequences happened to be unequally distributed [translation mine].
The drought and famine forced the nomads to prematurely go south in search of grazing areas, which just so happened to be the meager and not-yet-harvested fields of the farmers. Alex de Waal, who has studied the famine in depth, describes the delicate balance that was violently disturbed in 1985 as the "moral geography" of Darfur.

Kuperman's other claim, that the rebels "picked up arms ... to gain tribal dominance," also seems to be woefully ill-informed. According to Julie Flint and de Waal, the roots of JEM go back to 1993, when the original aim was to reform the National Islamic Front (NIF) from within. Dissidents like Nur compiled evidence illustrating the economic and political marginalization of Darfur into a document they called "The Black Book." JEM purports to combat Darfur's status as an outlying periphery dominated by the center of Sudanese economic and political life. Nur explains the situation in Darfur thusly:

There was too much suffering. I travelled 60 kilometers to go to primary school, in Kornoi, when I was 7; 350 kilometers to go to intermediate school, in Geneina; 400 kilometers to go to secondary school, in Fasher; and 1,000 kilometers to go to university, in Khartoum. It was forbidden to speak the Zaghawa language in school. In primary school, the teacher gave us a blue ticket to pass to any boy who spoke Zaghawa. At the end of the day, anyone who had the ticket was whipped. The whole of Kutun province, with a population of more than 551,000, had one general doctor and no specialists. Women walked more than eight hours daily to get less than 60 liters of water. We were excluded from all key posts and had no way of communicating with the international community to ask for help.
JEM's five-point manifesto calls for a national solution to the Sudan's problems. It calls for a unified country, justice and equality rather than political repression, "radical and comprehensive constitutional reform," basic services for all Sudanese and human development in all the regions of Sudan.

The SLM/A, on the other hand, has its roots in Darfuri irregular militias that were created in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s when conflict was already rife in the region. In 1999 already, over 100,000 Masalit had fled to Chad.

The fact of the matter is that the events leading up to the genocide in Darfur are many and varied, involving the famine, the political situation in Chad, Libyan involvement and sometimes de facto ruling of Darfur, Islamic movements (both domestic and imported from Tripoli or Cairo) and a politics of systematic neglect of the periphery by the center in Khartoum. To say that the rebels provoked genocide by vying for tribal domination is either disingenuous or uninformed.

This is not to say that the Darfuri rebel movements are saints; we know that they are not. But that's not the point. Whether the rebel movements have "provoked" Khartoum is neither here nor there in the long run. The rebels, despite their claims to represent all of Darfur, are not the ethnic groups as a whole, just as the RPF is not synonymous with the Tutsis in Rwanda.

De Waal sums up the situation quite succinctly in his piece in the London Review of Books, "Counter-insurgency on the cheap":

The atrocities carried out by the Janjawiid are aimed at speakers of Fur, Tunjur, Masalit and Zaghawa. They are systematic and sustained; the effect, if not the aim, is grossly disproportionate to the military threat of the rebellion. The mass rape and branding of victims speaks of the deliberate destruction of a community. In Darfur, cutting down fruit trees or destroying irrigation ditches is a way of eradicating farmers' claims to the land and ruining livelihoods. But this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.
And this brings me to Kuperman's advice not to intervene: ...we should let Sudan's army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes." It's hard to believe that such a naïve statement could be penned by anyone who has read much about the regime in Khartoum. We're talking about "routine cruelty" and "genocide by force of habit." What Kuperman doesn't see is that the Sudanese regime is "handling" the rebels in the same way it dealt with the South and the Nuba Mountains.

To lay the blame for such acts at the feet of the rebels (rather than at the feet of the regime committing genocide), or even worse, the "victim group," is morally irresponsible. The Fur and Zaghawa and other "black" tribes in Darfur are no more responsible for the organized campaign to destroy them than the Armenians were for their forced march into the sands of Syria.

If Alan Kuperman is content to take Khartoum at its word and trust that it will "eschew" the "war crimes" that it denies committing in the first place, allowing the regime to "handle" the rebels and "defend its sovereignty" in the meantime, I, for one, am not.

Kuperman advises the United States to announce a policy of non-intervention. This is confusing to me, because after all, isn't that the policy that Samantha Powers describes so well in her book, "A Problem from Hell"? Isn't that the policy that has been silently announced throughout the twentieth century to Armenians, Rwandans, Iraqi Kurds, Cambodians and now the Sudanese?

Thursday, June 29, 2006

Getting to Syria


I've had my fair share of visa problems in the last year or two. I've had Libya, Sudan and now Syria all do their best to stop me from visiting. I've given up on the first two for the time being, but I'm still holding out for Syria.

So I'm in Beirut for the time being. It's difficult to work on my Arabic here, because classes are prohibitively expensive, and almost everyone speaks English or French much better than I speak Arabic. It seems like a little bubble here in Beirut. A bubble filled with beautiful women, bars and short skirts.

A few hours away, Israel has taken out several bridges, destroyed electricity transformers in Gaza, and detained a third of Hamas' cabinet and an unknown number of lawmakers. The Israelis have flown over Syrian President Assad's summer house on the coast and spoken of attacking the leader of Hamas' military wing, who lives in Damascus. On all sides of Lebanon, the tension can be felt, but here, we?re going out and drinking, watching the world cup and sipping coffee.

Brazil beat Ghana the other night; there were fireworks and dancing in the streets.

Sunday, June 25, 2006

General Principle


In his op-ed, A Threat That Belongs Behind Bars, professor Eric Posner informs us that the indefinite detention of "dangerous aliens," regardless of whether or not they have committed a crime, should not be opposed on general principle. While it is true that there are precedents of such action in the alien and sedition acts and the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, it is both disappointing and disconcerting that such black spots on American history are being held up as a defense of unconscionable behavior not befit of a civilized democracy. In these times, when the United States is committing torture, unlawful detentions and violent war crimes in the name of the war on terror, what our nation needs are more, not fewer, appeals to general principle.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Back in Beirut


I've just arrived in Beirut after a hectic few days of getting everything prepared for this trip. I'll be in the Middle East until September and will be trying to blog from here as much as possible - hopefully more than usual.

I never managed to get my visa for Syria, so I'll probably try my luck at the border in the next few days. Some friends want me to come to Jordan, but you have to go through Syria to get to Jordan from Lebanon, so I might not be able to make it, which would be a shame, because it would be nice to stay with a family in Amman and then maybe go visit Petra as well.

There is a certain sense of home that I feel here in Beirut. I felt it the first time I came, and I'm feeling it again, now that I'm back. There was the same sign of Ronald McDonald saying "Welcome to Lebanon" at the airport and I was able to direct the cab driver directly to my friend's place, no small feat considering how bad my sense of direction is.

I lucked out at the airport, because there was some sort of a problem with the visa stand, so they just let everyone have their visa for free. It's only $17, but it's a nice feeling all the same.

I'm going to try to post pictures from time to time also, because I think this blog needs some spicing up...

Sunday, June 18, 2006

American Taliban


Esquire magazing has an interesting piece on John Walker Lindh, the American guy who was fighting in the ranks of the Taliban against the Northern Alliance when the US invaded in 2001. Strangely, part of his sentence is that he's not allowed to speak Arabic in prison, which means he cannot pray out loud. Talking to a friend of mine last night about the article, he reacted to it by saying that if the sentence isn't cruel, it certainly is unusual.

The article is a little long and written with an odd tone of deference or piety that I'm not sure really works, but it is very interesting and worth a read nonetheless.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Guantanamo Bay: A European Perspective


An editorial in le Monde today takes the US to task for Guantanamo Bay (in French, translation mine):

Upon the discovery of the suicide of three detainees, two Saudis and one Yemeni, the reaction of the commander of the camp in Guantanamo illustrates the gulf that separates American authorities from the rest of the world on the sinister issue of the prison in Guantanamo. The collective suicide is "an act of asymmetric war waged against us," declared Rear Admiral Harry Harris on 10 June. Colleen Graffy, in charge of public diplomacy at the State Department, qualified the detainees' gesture as a "good PR move to draw attention."

Without falling into otherworldliness faced with the essential fight against international terrorism, how can we make the United States listen to reason about this black stain on the democratic world that the prison in Guantanamo has become? Because, when Admiral Harris evokes an act of war against America, he is forgetting that American blindness towards the treatment of the detainees suspected of belonging to Al-Qaida, in Guantanamo or in the secret prisons run by the CIA, exposes all western democracies to Islamic propaganda and radicalization. It is to our suburbs and our Muslim communities in Europe that the recruiters of Al-Qaida and other fundamentalist proselytizers come to fill their ranks, with arguments graciously given to them by the military leaders of the Pentagon and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

It hasn't been enough to say that Guantanamo Bay, opened in January 2002 and where 460 prisoners are still being held without trial, is legal nonsense; it hasn't been enough to say that it constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and human rights; it hasn't been enough to write that it is unworthy of a country universally admired for having established respect for the rule of law in its constitutional system; it hasn't been enough to show surprise that the Bush administration manifests, by its stubbornness, such disdain for its own Supreme Court, which told it in June 2004 to authorize the Guantanamo detainees to defend themselves before an American civil court, and for public opinion, which, after an initial indifference, has included a growing number of voices denouncing the conditions in the prison. Nor has it been enough to bring up relevant historical errors, from the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to Margaret Thatcher's vain stubbornness faced with IRA members on hunger strike in 1981.

The United States remains deaf to all these arguments. The least that European leaders can do from now on is to no longer hold high level meetings with Americans without demanding the closing of Guantanamo Bay. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has recently served as a good example. The French should follow suit.

Monday, June 05, 2006

On non-intervention in darfur


In addition to Kuperman's piece, David Rieff has also penned a case against intervention in Darfur in the New Republic, which Reeves hotly and thoroughly counters.

He sees the issue through the lense of Iraq in 2003 instead of, say, Rwanda in 1994 or Iraq during the genocidal al Anfal campaign to Arabize Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1908s. Rieff casts doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and says that those who call for intervention in Darfur are ignoring the politics of Darfur (which he seems to be less than well-versed in himself, the truth be told):

Were politics present in their thinking, pro-Darfuri intervention activists would not use the reductionist dichotomy of victims and abusers that has been the staple myth of humanitarian intervention. The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. So do the extended families of the Janjaweed themselves, who, lest we forget, are also Darfuris. To describe the former simply as victims deprives them of any agency. To describe the latter simply as killers precludes actually understanding the conflict as anything other than an eruption of human wickedness, rather like a volcano or an earthquake.

One debilitating defect of the liberal interventionism is that it ignores the political implications of what it calls for. ...

...[A]n intervention, however good it may be for the Darfuris, may be terrible for the rest of the world.
Reeves criticizes Rieff for mistakenly attributing secessionist ambitions to the Darfuri rebels, not discussion the spread of the genocide into Chad, irresponsibly casting doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and generally being ignorant on Darfuri politics.

In fact, we must wonder what "agency" a nine-year-old girl has when she is brutally gang-raped by the Janjaweed, or what "agency" a five-year-old boy has as he is thrown screaming into a bonfire along with his brothers, or indeed what "agency" a one-year-old boy has when the Janjaweed slice off his penis and he bleeds to death. "Political interests" here is an abstraction that can have meaning for very few besides David Rieff. There are real political issues in Darfur, including competition over natural resources and power in governance, as well as competing visions of equitable distribution of land and wealth. Rieff captures none of this in his account.

If the Abuja accord does fail, if violence then inevitably rapidly escalates in Darfur and Chad, it will be too late for hundreds of thousands of lives. We have simply waited too long, with too many sufficiently encouraged by specious arguments of the sort so abundant in Rieff's account. In this sense it is perhaps useful to have Rieff articulate his factitious "realism," to invoke so glibly the difficult "politics" of Darfur, to pretend that Iraq has somehow changed the imperative of responding to massive genocidal destruction.
Anne-Marie Slaughter writes in her TMPCafe piece, Rethinking Darfur that after reading Kuperman and Rieff, she's having second thoughts. She doesn't go into any specifics, but the gist of her piece is that maybe we shouldn't intervene, because the situation is complicated:

I want to help the victims of the Janjaweed as much as anyone. But the Europeans have been arguing for some time that the situation is far more complicated than a simple morality tale would make it out to be. And surely if Iraq has taught us anything, it is to think very hard about what happens AFTER we go in and stop the initial killing. It may well be that even if an AU solution is slower and less effective up front, it will be more effective over the long term, whereas if the U.S. or NATO go in, we will find ourselves again "in charge" of a situation we barely understand and cannot control, ultimately visiting yet more chaos and death on the very people we seek to help.
To my mind, this is similar to seeing a woman getting raped and murdered on the street and hesitating to do anything about it because the situation is likely to be complicated. What will other people in the neighbourhood think if I intervene? What did that woman do to make those men decide to rape and murder her?

Of course the situation is complicated, as are most conflicts. We don't live in a world of black and white, and we never have. Just because the sitauation surrounding a genocide is complex does not mean that there is any less of a moral imperative to stop it. The politics of Darfur are complex, as were the politics of Rwanda in 1994. What is not complex is that genocide is being committed, and either one believes that genocide carries the weight of a moral imperative or it doesn't. Finally, Slaughter seems more interested in wringing her hands and hoping against all odds for the best. Rieff at least calls a spade a spade when he asks brings up the idea that even if intervention is better for Darfuris, maybe it would be bad for the rest of the world.

This is an interesting question that smacks of utilitarianism. But before answering it, we should ask ourselves two questions: First, given the number of dead incurred during World War II, should the international community have given up Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria and the Jews in those countries in order to avoid the tens of millions of deaths that were a result of direct military confrontation between Axis and Allied powers? And second, are we sure that there will not be more death and conflict as a result of allowing a genocide to happen?

The first question is of a moral nature and can be difficult in some instances, if not in this one. The second one is about history and its consequences. Would the Congo be such a hellhole if we had not let the Rwandan genocide come to pass? In the case of Darfur, it is important to look at what this genocide means for Chad, and by consequence, the Central African Republic and Cameroon. If Khartoum is emboldened and allowed to topple Deby's (distasteful) regime in Chad, the bloody and ongoing history of the Congo might repeat itself.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Kuperman and "provoking genocide"


I would like to comment on Alan Kuperman's polemical piece in the New York Times yesterday (31 May), "Strategic Victimhood in Sudan." In this particular article, Kuperman tells us that the regime in Khartoum responded to Darfuri rebel insurgency with genocide, and that "[b]ecause of the Save Darfur movement ... the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure," which has in turn led the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) movement and Nur's part of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) to reject the recent peace treaty signed at Abuja.

Kuperman's analysis of events is not specific to his take on Sudanese politics; rather it is but further evidence of his larger hypothesis. Generally speaking, the crux of his argument can be found in the first sentence of an article he wrote on the Rwandan genocide, "Provoking genocide: A revised history of the Rwandan Patriotic Front": "In most cases of mass killing since World War II­­ -- unlike the Holocaust -- the victim group has triggered its own demise by violently challenging the authority of the state."

Although he emphasizes that his theory is "not intended to excuse of justify the genocide in any way, but merely to understand more fully its causes," Kuperman's argument seems to come dangerously close to blaming the victims. While he would surely protest that he is blaming rebel groups and not the victims of the genocide (a polemical claim in and of itself), this is not at all clear when he says, "the victim group has triggered its own demise." (To be fair, with the exception of the opening sentence, the article focuses mostly on the RPF, not Tutsis in general.)

But I'll save the more general moral debate about whether or not a genocidal regime's culpability can be shared with a rebel group that has purportedly "provoked" genocide for another time. What I would like to focus on here is the specifics of Darfur.

I don't pretend to be an expert on Sudanese or Darfuri politics, and I agree with Kuperman when he says that the situation in Darfur is complex. However, it seems strange that after stressing that the situation there is not the "simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations," he would himself make claims like these:

The region's blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago -- denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. ... [The rebels] took up arms not to stop genocide -- which erupted only after they rebelled -- but to gain tribal domination.
To paint the situation during the maja al-gatila (the famine that kills) in Darfur in 1984-5 as one in which "blacks ... were the oppressors" is terribly simplistic in more than one way. Without lingering on the complexities of ethnicity in Darfur and the difficulty in categorizing Darfuris as either "black" or "Arab," the facile claim that "blacks" were oppressing "Arabs" seems to overlook the fact that the nearly 100,000 deaths during the famine were largely due to apathy or incompetence on the part of Khartoum. According to Prunier,

Everyone knew that this catastrophe would have been perfectly preventable with a little bit of planning, money and, especially, political will. Everyone knew that the mass deaths [hécatombe] were the result of Khartoum's negligence. But the consequences happened to be unequally distributed [translation mine].
The drought and famine forced the nomads to prematurely go south in search of grazing areas, which just so happened to be the meager and not-yet-harvested fields of the farmers. Alex de Waal, who has studied the famine in depth, describes the delicate balance that was violently disturbed in 1985 as the "moral geography" of Darfur.

Kuperman's other claim, that the rebels "picked up arms ... to gain tribal dominance," also seems to be woefully ill-informed. According to Julie Flint and de Waal, the roots of JEM go back to 1993, when the original aim was to reform the National Islamic Front (NIF) from within. Dissidents like Nur compiled evidence illustrating the economic and political marginalization of Darfur into a document they called "The Black Book." JEM purports to combat Darfur's status as an outlying periphery dominated by the center of Sudanese economic and political life. Nur explains the situation in Darfur thusly:

There was too much suffering. I travelled 60 kilometers to go to primary school, in Kornoi, when I was 7; 350 kilometers to go to intermediate school, in Geneina; 400 kilometers to go to secondary school, in Fasher; and 1,000 kilometers to go to university, in Khartoum. It was forbidden to speak the Zaghawa language in school. In primary school, the teacher gave us a blue ticket to pass to any boy who spoke Zaghawa. At the end of the day, anyone who had the ticket was whipped. The whole of Kutun province, with a population of more than 551,000, had one general doctor and no specialists. Women walked more than eight hours daily to get less than 60 liters of water. We were excluded from all key posts and had no way of communicating with the international community to ask for help.
JEM's five-point manifesto calls for a national solution to the Sudan's problems. It calls for a unified country, justice and equality rather than political repression, "radical and comprehensive constitutional reform," basic services for all Sudanese and human development in all the regions of Sudan.

The SLM/A, on the other hand, has its roots in Darfuri irregular militias that were created in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s when conflict was already rife in the region. In 1999 already, over 100,000 Masalit had fled to Chad.

The fact of the matter is that the events leading up to the genocide in Darfur are many and varied, involving the famine, the political situation in Chad, Libyan involvement and sometimes de facto ruling of Darfur, Islamic movements (both domestic and imported from Tripoli or Cairo) and a politics of systematic neglect of the periphery by the center in Khartoum. To say that the rebels provoked genocide by vying for tribal domination is either disingenuous or uninformed.

This is not to say that the Darfuri rebel movements are saints; we know that they are not. But that's not the point. Whether the rebel movements have "provoked" Khartoum is neither here nor there in the long run. The rebels, despite their claims to represent all of Darfur, are not the ethnic groups as a whole, just as the RPF is not synonymous with the Tutsis in Rwanda.

De Waal sums up the situation quite succinctly in his piece in the London Review of Books, "Counter-insurgency on the cheap":

The atrocities carried out by the Janjawiid are aimed at speakers of Fur, Tunjur, Masalit and Zaghawa. They are systematic and sustained; the effect, if not the aim, is grossly disproportionate to the military threat of the rebellion. The mass rape and branding of victims speaks of the deliberate destruction of a community. In Darfur, cutting down fruit trees or destroying irrigation ditches is a way of eradicating farmers' claims to the land and ruining livelihoods. But this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.
And this brings me to Kuperman's advice not to intervene: ...we should let Sudan's army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes." It's hard to believe that such a naïve statement could be penned by anyone who has read much about the regime in Khartoum. We're talking about "routine cruelty" and "genocide by force of habit." What Kuperman doesn't see is that the Sudanese regime is "handling" the rebels in the same way it dealt with the South and the Nuba Mountains.

To lay the blame for such acts at the feet of the rebels (rather than at the feet of the regime committing genocide), or even worse, the "victim group," is morally irresponsible. The Fur and Zaghawa and other "black" tribes in Darfur are no more responsible for the organized campaign to destroy them than the Armenians were for their forced march into the sands of Syria.

If Alan Kuperman is content to take Khartoum at its word and trust that it will "eschew" the "war crimes" that it denies committing in the first place, allowing the regime to "handle" the rebels and "defend its sovereignty" in the meantime, I, for one, am not.

Kuperman advises the United States to announce a policy of non-intervention. This is confusing to me, because after all, isn't that the policy that Samantha Powers describes so well in her book, "A Problem from Hell"? Isn't that the policy that has been silently announced throughout the twentieth century to Armenians, Rwandans, Iraqi Kurds, Cambodians and now the Sudanese?

Thursday, June 29, 2006

Getting to Syria


I've had my fair share of visa problems in the last year or two. I've had Libya, Sudan and now Syria all do their best to stop me from visiting. I've given up on the first two for the time being, but I'm still holding out for Syria.

So I'm in Beirut for the time being. It's difficult to work on my Arabic here, because classes are prohibitively expensive, and almost everyone speaks English or French much better than I speak Arabic. It seems like a little bubble here in Beirut. A bubble filled with beautiful women, bars and short skirts.

A few hours away, Israel has taken out several bridges, destroyed electricity transformers in Gaza, and detained a third of Hamas' cabinet and an unknown number of lawmakers. The Israelis have flown over Syrian President Assad's summer house on the coast and spoken of attacking the leader of Hamas' military wing, who lives in Damascus. On all sides of Lebanon, the tension can be felt, but here, we?re going out and drinking, watching the world cup and sipping coffee.

Brazil beat Ghana the other night; there were fireworks and dancing in the streets.

Sunday, June 25, 2006

General Principle


In his op-ed, A Threat That Belongs Behind Bars, professor Eric Posner informs us that the indefinite detention of "dangerous aliens," regardless of whether or not they have committed a crime, should not be opposed on general principle. While it is true that there are precedents of such action in the alien and sedition acts and the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, it is both disappointing and disconcerting that such black spots on American history are being held up as a defense of unconscionable behavior not befit of a civilized democracy. In these times, when the United States is committing torture, unlawful detentions and violent war crimes in the name of the war on terror, what our nation needs are more, not fewer, appeals to general principle.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Back in Beirut


I've just arrived in Beirut after a hectic few days of getting everything prepared for this trip. I'll be in the Middle East until September and will be trying to blog from here as much as possible - hopefully more than usual.

I never managed to get my visa for Syria, so I'll probably try my luck at the border in the next few days. Some friends want me to come to Jordan, but you have to go through Syria to get to Jordan from Lebanon, so I might not be able to make it, which would be a shame, because it would be nice to stay with a family in Amman and then maybe go visit Petra as well.

There is a certain sense of home that I feel here in Beirut. I felt it the first time I came, and I'm feeling it again, now that I'm back. There was the same sign of Ronald McDonald saying "Welcome to Lebanon" at the airport and I was able to direct the cab driver directly to my friend's place, no small feat considering how bad my sense of direction is.

I lucked out at the airport, because there was some sort of a problem with the visa stand, so they just let everyone have their visa for free. It's only $17, but it's a nice feeling all the same.

I'm going to try to post pictures from time to time also, because I think this blog needs some spicing up...

Sunday, June 18, 2006

American Taliban


Esquire magazing has an interesting piece on John Walker Lindh, the American guy who was fighting in the ranks of the Taliban against the Northern Alliance when the US invaded in 2001. Strangely, part of his sentence is that he's not allowed to speak Arabic in prison, which means he cannot pray out loud. Talking to a friend of mine last night about the article, he reacted to it by saying that if the sentence isn't cruel, it certainly is unusual.

The article is a little long and written with an odd tone of deference or piety that I'm not sure really works, but it is very interesting and worth a read nonetheless.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Guantanamo Bay: A European Perspective


An editorial in le Monde today takes the US to task for Guantanamo Bay (in French, translation mine):

Upon the discovery of the suicide of three detainees, two Saudis and one Yemeni, the reaction of the commander of the camp in Guantanamo illustrates the gulf that separates American authorities from the rest of the world on the sinister issue of the prison in Guantanamo. The collective suicide is "an act of asymmetric war waged against us," declared Rear Admiral Harry Harris on 10 June. Colleen Graffy, in charge of public diplomacy at the State Department, qualified the detainees' gesture as a "good PR move to draw attention."

Without falling into otherworldliness faced with the essential fight against international terrorism, how can we make the United States listen to reason about this black stain on the democratic world that the prison in Guantanamo has become? Because, when Admiral Harris evokes an act of war against America, he is forgetting that American blindness towards the treatment of the detainees suspected of belonging to Al-Qaida, in Guantanamo or in the secret prisons run by the CIA, exposes all western democracies to Islamic propaganda and radicalization. It is to our suburbs and our Muslim communities in Europe that the recruiters of Al-Qaida and other fundamentalist proselytizers come to fill their ranks, with arguments graciously given to them by the military leaders of the Pentagon and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

It hasn't been enough to say that Guantanamo Bay, opened in January 2002 and where 460 prisoners are still being held without trial, is legal nonsense; it hasn't been enough to say that it constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and human rights; it hasn't been enough to write that it is unworthy of a country universally admired for having established respect for the rule of law in its constitutional system; it hasn't been enough to show surprise that the Bush administration manifests, by its stubbornness, such disdain for its own Supreme Court, which told it in June 2004 to authorize the Guantanamo detainees to defend themselves before an American civil court, and for public opinion, which, after an initial indifference, has included a growing number of voices denouncing the conditions in the prison. Nor has it been enough to bring up relevant historical errors, from the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to Margaret Thatcher's vain stubbornness faced with IRA members on hunger strike in 1981.

The United States remains deaf to all these arguments. The least that European leaders can do from now on is to no longer hold high level meetings with Americans without demanding the closing of Guantanamo Bay. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has recently served as a good example. The French should follow suit.

Monday, June 05, 2006

On non-intervention in darfur


In addition to Kuperman's piece, David Rieff has also penned a case against intervention in Darfur in the New Republic, which Reeves hotly and thoroughly counters.

He sees the issue through the lense of Iraq in 2003 instead of, say, Rwanda in 1994 or Iraq during the genocidal al Anfal campaign to Arabize Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1908s. Rieff casts doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and says that those who call for intervention in Darfur are ignoring the politics of Darfur (which he seems to be less than well-versed in himself, the truth be told):

Were politics present in their thinking, pro-Darfuri intervention activists would not use the reductionist dichotomy of victims and abusers that has been the staple myth of humanitarian intervention. The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. So do the extended families of the Janjaweed themselves, who, lest we forget, are also Darfuris. To describe the former simply as victims deprives them of any agency. To describe the latter simply as killers precludes actually understanding the conflict as anything other than an eruption of human wickedness, rather like a volcano or an earthquake.

One debilitating defect of the liberal interventionism is that it ignores the political implications of what it calls for. ...

...[A]n intervention, however good it may be for the Darfuris, may be terrible for the rest of the world.
Reeves criticizes Rieff for mistakenly attributing secessionist ambitions to the Darfuri rebels, not discussion the spread of the genocide into Chad, irresponsibly casting doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and generally being ignorant on Darfuri politics.

In fact, we must wonder what "agency" a nine-year-old girl has when she is brutally gang-raped by the Janjaweed, or what "agency" a five-year-old boy has as he is thrown screaming into a bonfire along with his brothers, or indeed what "agency" a one-year-old boy has when the Janjaweed slice off his penis and he bleeds to death. "Political interests" here is an abstraction that can have meaning for very few besides David Rieff. There are real political issues in Darfur, including competition over natural resources and power in governance, as well as competing visions of equitable distribution of land and wealth. Rieff captures none of this in his account.

If the Abuja accord does fail, if violence then inevitably rapidly escalates in Darfur and Chad, it will be too late for hundreds of thousands of lives. We have simply waited too long, with too many sufficiently encouraged by specious arguments of the sort so abundant in Rieff's account. In this sense it is perhaps useful to have Rieff articulate his factitious "realism," to invoke so glibly the difficult "politics" of Darfur, to pretend that Iraq has somehow changed the imperative of responding to massive genocidal destruction.
Anne-Marie Slaughter writes in her TMPCafe piece, Rethinking Darfur that after reading Kuperman and Rieff, she's having second thoughts. She doesn't go into any specifics, but the gist of her piece is that maybe we shouldn't intervene, because the situation is complicated:

I want to help the victims of the Janjaweed as much as anyone. But the Europeans have been arguing for some time that the situation is far more complicated than a simple morality tale would make it out to be. And surely if Iraq has taught us anything, it is to think very hard about what happens AFTER we go in and stop the initial killing. It may well be that even if an AU solution is slower and less effective up front, it will be more effective over the long term, whereas if the U.S. or NATO go in, we will find ourselves again "in charge" of a situation we barely understand and cannot control, ultimately visiting yet more chaos and death on the very people we seek to help.
To my mind, this is similar to seeing a woman getting raped and murdered on the street and hesitating to do anything about it because the situation is likely to be complicated. What will other people in the neighbourhood think if I intervene? What did that woman do to make those men decide to rape and murder her?

Of course the situation is complicated, as are most conflicts. We don't live in a world of black and white, and we never have. Just because the sitauation surrounding a genocide is complex does not mean that there is any less of a moral imperative to stop it. The politics of Darfur are complex, as were the politics of Rwanda in 1994. What is not complex is that genocide is being committed, and either one believes that genocide carries the weight of a moral imperative or it doesn't. Finally, Slaughter seems more interested in wringing her hands and hoping against all odds for the best. Rieff at least calls a spade a spade when he asks brings up the idea that even if intervention is better for Darfuris, maybe it would be bad for the rest of the world.

This is an interesting question that smacks of utilitarianism. But before answering it, we should ask ourselves two questions: First, given the number of dead incurred during World War II, should the international community have given up Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria and the Jews in those countries in order to avoid the tens of millions of deaths that were a result of direct military confrontation between Axis and Allied powers? And second, are we sure that there will not be more death and conflict as a result of allowing a genocide to happen?

The first question is of a moral nature and can be difficult in some instances, if not in this one. The second one is about history and its consequences. Would the Congo be such a hellhole if we had not let the Rwandan genocide come to pass? In the case of Darfur, it is important to look at what this genocide means for Chad, and by consequence, the Central African Republic and Cameroon. If Khartoum is emboldened and allowed to topple Deby's (distasteful) regime in Chad, the bloody and ongoing history of the Congo might repeat itself.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Kuperman and "provoking genocide"


I would like to comment on Alan Kuperman's polemical piece in the New York Times yesterday (31 May), "Strategic Victimhood in Sudan." In this particular article, Kuperman tells us that the regime in Khartoum responded to Darfuri rebel insurgency with genocide, and that "[b]ecause of the Save Darfur movement ... the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure," which has in turn led the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) movement and Nur's part of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) to reject the recent peace treaty signed at Abuja.

Kuperman's analysis of events is not specific to his take on Sudanese politics; rather it is but further evidence of his larger hypothesis. Generally speaking, the crux of his argument can be found in the first sentence of an article he wrote on the Rwandan genocide, "Provoking genocide: A revised history of the Rwandan Patriotic Front": "In most cases of mass killing since World War II­­ -- unlike the Holocaust -- the victim group has triggered its own demise by violently challenging the authority of the state."

Although he emphasizes that his theory is "not intended to excuse of justify the genocide in any way, but merely to understand more fully its causes," Kuperman's argument seems to come dangerously close to blaming the victims. While he would surely protest that he is blaming rebel groups and not the victims of the genocide (a polemical claim in and of itself), this is not at all clear when he says, "the victim group has triggered its own demise." (To be fair, with the exception of the opening sentence, the article focuses mostly on the RPF, not Tutsis in general.)

But I'll save the more general moral debate about whether or not a genocidal regime's culpability can be shared with a rebel group that has purportedly "provoked" genocide for another time. What I would like to focus on here is the specifics of Darfur.

I don't pretend to be an expert on Sudanese or Darfuri politics, and I agree with Kuperman when he says that the situation in Darfur is complex. However, it seems strange that after stressing that the situation there is not the "simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations," he would himself make claims like these:

The region's blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago -- denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. ... [The rebels] took up arms not to stop genocide -- which erupted only after they rebelled -- but to gain tribal domination.
To paint the situation during the maja al-gatila (the famine that kills) in Darfur in 1984-5 as one in which "blacks ... were the oppressors" is terribly simplistic in more than one way. Without lingering on the complexities of ethnicity in Darfur and the difficulty in categorizing Darfuris as either "black" or "Arab," the facile claim that "blacks" were oppressing "Arabs" seems to overlook the fact that the nearly 100,000 deaths during the famine were largely due to apathy or incompetence on the part of Khartoum. According to Prunier,

Everyone knew that this catastrophe would have been perfectly preventable with a little bit of planning, money and, especially, political will. Everyone knew that the mass deaths [hécatombe] were the result of Khartoum's negligence. But the consequences happened to be unequally distributed [translation mine].
The drought and famine forced the nomads to prematurely go south in search of grazing areas, which just so happened to be the meager and not-yet-harvested fields of the farmers. Alex de Waal, who has studied the famine in depth, describes the delicate balance that was violently disturbed in 1985 as the "moral geography" of Darfur.

Kuperman's other claim, that the rebels "picked up arms ... to gain tribal dominance," also seems to be woefully ill-informed. According to Julie Flint and de Waal, the roots of JEM go back to 1993, when the original aim was to reform the National Islamic Front (NIF) from within. Dissidents like Nur compiled evidence illustrating the economic and political marginalization of Darfur into a document they called "The Black Book." JEM purports to combat Darfur's status as an outlying periphery dominated by the center of Sudanese economic and political life. Nur explains the situation in Darfur thusly:

There was too much suffering. I travelled 60 kilometers to go to primary school, in Kornoi, when I was 7; 350 kilometers to go to intermediate school, in Geneina; 400 kilometers to go to secondary school, in Fasher; and 1,000 kilometers to go to university, in Khartoum. It was forbidden to speak the Zaghawa language in school. In primary school, the teacher gave us a blue ticket to pass to any boy who spoke Zaghawa. At the end of the day, anyone who had the ticket was whipped. The whole of Kutun province, with a population of more than 551,000, had one general doctor and no specialists. Women walked more than eight hours daily to get less than 60 liters of water. We were excluded from all key posts and had no way of communicating with the international community to ask for help.
JEM's five-point manifesto calls for a national solution to the Sudan's problems. It calls for a unified country, justice and equality rather than political repression, "radical and comprehensive constitutional reform," basic services for all Sudanese and human development in all the regions of Sudan.

The SLM/A, on the other hand, has its roots in Darfuri irregular militias that were created in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s when conflict was already rife in the region. In 1999 already, over 100,000 Masalit had fled to Chad.

The fact of the matter is that the events leading up to the genocide in Darfur are many and varied, involving the famine, the political situation in Chad, Libyan involvement and sometimes de facto ruling of Darfur, Islamic movements (both domestic and imported from Tripoli or Cairo) and a politics of systematic neglect of the periphery by the center in Khartoum. To say that the rebels provoked genocide by vying for tribal domination is either disingenuous or uninformed.

This is not to say that the Darfuri rebel movements are saints; we know that they are not. But that's not the point. Whether the rebel movements have "provoked" Khartoum is neither here nor there in the long run. The rebels, despite their claims to represent all of Darfur, are not the ethnic groups as a whole, just as the RPF is not synonymous with the Tutsis in Rwanda.

De Waal sums up the situation quite succinctly in his piece in the London Review of Books, "Counter-insurgency on the cheap":

The atrocities carried out by the Janjawiid are aimed at speakers of Fur, Tunjur, Masalit and Zaghawa. They are systematic and sustained; the effect, if not the aim, is grossly disproportionate to the military threat of the rebellion. The mass rape and branding of victims speaks of the deliberate destruction of a community. In Darfur, cutting down fruit trees or destroying irrigation ditches is a way of eradicating farmers' claims to the land and ruining livelihoods. But this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.
And this brings me to Kuperman's advice not to intervene: ...we should let Sudan's army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes." It's hard to believe that such a naïve statement could be penned by anyone who has read much about the regime in Khartoum. We're talking about "routine cruelty" and "genocide by force of habit." What Kuperman doesn't see is that the Sudanese regime is "handling" the rebels in the same way it dealt with the South and the Nuba Mountains.

To lay the blame for such acts at the feet of the rebels (rather than at the feet of the regime committing genocide), or even worse, the "victim group," is morally irresponsible. The Fur and Zaghawa and other "black" tribes in Darfur are no more responsible for the organized campaign to destroy them than the Armenians were for their forced march into the sands of Syria.

If Alan Kuperman is content to take Khartoum at its word and trust that it will "eschew" the "war crimes" that it denies committing in the first place, allowing the regime to "handle" the rebels and "defend its sovereignty" in the meantime, I, for one, am not.

Kuperman advises the United States to announce a policy of non-intervention. This is confusing to me, because after all, isn't that the policy that Samantha Powers describes so well in her book, "A Problem from Hell"? Isn't that the policy that has been silently announced throughout the twentieth century to Armenians, Rwandans, Iraqi Kurds, Cambodians and now the Sudanese?

Thursday, June 29, 2006

Getting to Syria


I've had my fair share of visa problems in the last year or two. I've had Libya, Sudan and now Syria all do their best to stop me from visiting. I've given up on the first two for the time being, but I'm still holding out for Syria.

So I'm in Beirut for the time being. It's difficult to work on my Arabic here, because classes are prohibitively expensive, and almost everyone speaks English or French much better than I speak Arabic. It seems like a little bubble here in Beirut. A bubble filled with beautiful women, bars and short skirts.

A few hours away, Israel has taken out several bridges, destroyed electricity transformers in Gaza, and detained a third of Hamas' cabinet and an unknown number of lawmakers. The Israelis have flown over Syrian President Assad's summer house on the coast and spoken of attacking the leader of Hamas' military wing, who lives in Damascus. On all sides of Lebanon, the tension can be felt, but here, we?re going out and drinking, watching the world cup and sipping coffee.

Brazil beat Ghana the other night; there were fireworks and dancing in the streets.

Sunday, June 25, 2006

General Principle


In his op-ed, A Threat That Belongs Behind Bars, professor Eric Posner informs us that the indefinite detention of "dangerous aliens," regardless of whether or not they have committed a crime, should not be opposed on general principle. While it is true that there are precedents of such action in the alien and sedition acts and the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, it is both disappointing and disconcerting that such black spots on American history are being held up as a defense of unconscionable behavior not befit of a civilized democracy. In these times, when the United States is committing torture, unlawful detentions and violent war crimes in the name of the war on terror, what our nation needs are more, not fewer, appeals to general principle.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Back in Beirut


I've just arrived in Beirut after a hectic few days of getting everything prepared for this trip. I'll be in the Middle East until September and will be trying to blog from here as much as possible - hopefully more than usual.

I never managed to get my visa for Syria, so I'll probably try my luck at the border in the next few days. Some friends want me to come to Jordan, but you have to go through Syria to get to Jordan from Lebanon, so I might not be able to make it, which would be a shame, because it would be nice to stay with a family in Amman and then maybe go visit Petra as well.

There is a certain sense of home that I feel here in Beirut. I felt it the first time I came, and I'm feeling it again, now that I'm back. There was the same sign of Ronald McDonald saying "Welcome to Lebanon" at the airport and I was able to direct the cab driver directly to my friend's place, no small feat considering how bad my sense of direction is.

I lucked out at the airport, because there was some sort of a problem with the visa stand, so they just let everyone have their visa for free. It's only $17, but it's a nice feeling all the same.

I'm going to try to post pictures from time to time also, because I think this blog needs some spicing up...

Sunday, June 18, 2006

American Taliban


Esquire magazing has an interesting piece on John Walker Lindh, the American guy who was fighting in the ranks of the Taliban against the Northern Alliance when the US invaded in 2001. Strangely, part of his sentence is that he's not allowed to speak Arabic in prison, which means he cannot pray out loud. Talking to a friend of mine last night about the article, he reacted to it by saying that if the sentence isn't cruel, it certainly is unusual.

The article is a little long and written with an odd tone of deference or piety that I'm not sure really works, but it is very interesting and worth a read nonetheless.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Guantanamo Bay: A European Perspective


An editorial in le Monde today takes the US to task for Guantanamo Bay (in French, translation mine):

Upon the discovery of the suicide of three detainees, two Saudis and one Yemeni, the reaction of the commander of the camp in Guantanamo illustrates the gulf that separates American authorities from the rest of the world on the sinister issue of the prison in Guantanamo. The collective suicide is "an act of asymmetric war waged against us," declared Rear Admiral Harry Harris on 10 June. Colleen Graffy, in charge of public diplomacy at the State Department, qualified the detainees' gesture as a "good PR move to draw attention."

Without falling into otherworldliness faced with the essential fight against international terrorism, how can we make the United States listen to reason about this black stain on the democratic world that the prison in Guantanamo has become? Because, when Admiral Harris evokes an act of war against America, he is forgetting that American blindness towards the treatment of the detainees suspected of belonging to Al-Qaida, in Guantanamo or in the secret prisons run by the CIA, exposes all western democracies to Islamic propaganda and radicalization. It is to our suburbs and our Muslim communities in Europe that the recruiters of Al-Qaida and other fundamentalist proselytizers come to fill their ranks, with arguments graciously given to them by the military leaders of the Pentagon and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

It hasn't been enough to say that Guantanamo Bay, opened in January 2002 and where 460 prisoners are still being held without trial, is legal nonsense; it hasn't been enough to say that it constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and human rights; it hasn't been enough to write that it is unworthy of a country universally admired for having established respect for the rule of law in its constitutional system; it hasn't been enough to show surprise that the Bush administration manifests, by its stubbornness, such disdain for its own Supreme Court, which told it in June 2004 to authorize the Guantanamo detainees to defend themselves before an American civil court, and for public opinion, which, after an initial indifference, has included a growing number of voices denouncing the conditions in the prison. Nor has it been enough to bring up relevant historical errors, from the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to Margaret Thatcher's vain stubbornness faced with IRA members on hunger strike in 1981.

The United States remains deaf to all these arguments. The least that European leaders can do from now on is to no longer hold high level meetings with Americans without demanding the closing of Guantanamo Bay. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has recently served as a good example. The French should follow suit.

Monday, June 05, 2006

On non-intervention in darfur


In addition to Kuperman's piece, David Rieff has also penned a case against intervention in Darfur in the New Republic, which Reeves hotly and thoroughly counters.

He sees the issue through the lense of Iraq in 2003 instead of, say, Rwanda in 1994 or Iraq during the genocidal al Anfal campaign to Arabize Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1908s. Rieff casts doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and says that those who call for intervention in Darfur are ignoring the politics of Darfur (which he seems to be less than well-versed in himself, the truth be told):

Were politics present in their thinking, pro-Darfuri intervention activists would not use the reductionist dichotomy of victims and abusers that has been the staple myth of humanitarian intervention. The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. So do the extended families of the Janjaweed themselves, who, lest we forget, are also Darfuris. To describe the former simply as victims deprives them of any agency. To describe the latter simply as killers precludes actually understanding the conflict as anything other than an eruption of human wickedness, rather like a volcano or an earthquake.

One debilitating defect of the liberal interventionism is that it ignores the political implications of what it calls for. ...

...[A]n intervention, however good it may be for the Darfuris, may be terrible for the rest of the world.
Reeves criticizes Rieff for mistakenly attributing secessionist ambitions to the Darfuri rebels, not discussion the spread of the genocide into Chad, irresponsibly casting doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and generally being ignorant on Darfuri politics.

In fact, we must wonder what "agency" a nine-year-old girl has when she is brutally gang-raped by the Janjaweed, or what "agency" a five-year-old boy has as he is thrown screaming into a bonfire along with his brothers, or indeed what "agency" a one-year-old boy has when the Janjaweed slice off his penis and he bleeds to death. "Political interests" here is an abstraction that can have meaning for very few besides David Rieff. There are real political issues in Darfur, including competition over natural resources and power in governance, as well as competing visions of equitable distribution of land and wealth. Rieff captures none of this in his account.

If the Abuja accord does fail, if violence then inevitably rapidly escalates in Darfur and Chad, it will be too late for hundreds of thousands of lives. We have simply waited too long, with too many sufficiently encouraged by specious arguments of the sort so abundant in Rieff's account. In this sense it is perhaps useful to have Rieff articulate his factitious "realism," to invoke so glibly the difficult "politics" of Darfur, to pretend that Iraq has somehow changed the imperative of responding to massive genocidal destruction.
Anne-Marie Slaughter writes in her TMPCafe piece, Rethinking Darfur that after reading Kuperman and Rieff, she's having second thoughts. She doesn't go into any specifics, but the gist of her piece is that maybe we shouldn't intervene, because the situation is complicated:

I want to help the victims of the Janjaweed as much as anyone. But the Europeans have been arguing for some time that the situation is far more complicated than a simple morality tale would make it out to be. And surely if Iraq has taught us anything, it is to think very hard about what happens AFTER we go in and stop the initial killing. It may well be that even if an AU solution is slower and less effective up front, it will be more effective over the long term, whereas if the U.S. or NATO go in, we will find ourselves again "in charge" of a situation we barely understand and cannot control, ultimately visiting yet more chaos and death on the very people we seek to help.
To my mind, this is similar to seeing a woman getting raped and murdered on the street and hesitating to do anything about it because the situation is likely to be complicated. What will other people in the neighbourhood think if I intervene? What did that woman do to make those men decide to rape and murder her?

Of course the situation is complicated, as are most conflicts. We don't live in a world of black and white, and we never have. Just because the sitauation surrounding a genocide is complex does not mean that there is any less of a moral imperative to stop it. The politics of Darfur are complex, as were the politics of Rwanda in 1994. What is not complex is that genocide is being committed, and either one believes that genocide carries the weight of a moral imperative or it doesn't. Finally, Slaughter seems more interested in wringing her hands and hoping against all odds for the best. Rieff at least calls a spade a spade when he asks brings up the idea that even if intervention is better for Darfuris, maybe it would be bad for the rest of the world.

This is an interesting question that smacks of utilitarianism. But before answering it, we should ask ourselves two questions: First, given the number of dead incurred during World War II, should the international community have given up Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria and the Jews in those countries in order to avoid the tens of millions of deaths that were a result of direct military confrontation between Axis and Allied powers? And second, are we sure that there will not be more death and conflict as a result of allowing a genocide to happen?

The first question is of a moral nature and can be difficult in some instances, if not in this one. The second one is about history and its consequences. Would the Congo be such a hellhole if we had not let the Rwandan genocide come to pass? In the case of Darfur, it is important to look at what this genocide means for Chad, and by consequence, the Central African Republic and Cameroon. If Khartoum is emboldened and allowed to topple Deby's (distasteful) regime in Chad, the bloody and ongoing history of the Congo might repeat itself.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Kuperman and "provoking genocide"


I would like to comment on Alan Kuperman's polemical piece in the New York Times yesterday (31 May), "Strategic Victimhood in Sudan." In this particular article, Kuperman tells us that the regime in Khartoum responded to Darfuri rebel insurgency with genocide, and that "[b]ecause of the Save Darfur movement ... the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure," which has in turn led the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) movement and Nur's part of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) to reject the recent peace treaty signed at Abuja.

Kuperman's analysis of events is not specific to his take on Sudanese politics; rather it is but further evidence of his larger hypothesis. Generally speaking, the crux of his argument can be found in the first sentence of an article he wrote on the Rwandan genocide, "Provoking genocide: A revised history of the Rwandan Patriotic Front": "In most cases of mass killing since World War II­­ -- unlike the Holocaust -- the victim group has triggered its own demise by violently challenging the authority of the state."

Although he emphasizes that his theory is "not intended to excuse of justify the genocide in any way, but merely to understand more fully its causes," Kuperman's argument seems to come dangerously close to blaming the victims. While he would surely protest that he is blaming rebel groups and not the victims of the genocide (a polemical claim in and of itself), this is not at all clear when he says, "the victim group has triggered its own demise." (To be fair, with the exception of the opening sentence, the article focuses mostly on the RPF, not Tutsis in general.)

But I'll save the more general moral debate about whether or not a genocidal regime's culpability can be shared with a rebel group that has purportedly "provoked" genocide for another time. What I would like to focus on here is the specifics of Darfur.

I don't pretend to be an expert on Sudanese or Darfuri politics, and I agree with Kuperman when he says that the situation in Darfur is complex. However, it seems strange that after stressing that the situation there is not the "simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations," he would himself make claims like these:

The region's blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago -- denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. ... [The rebels] took up arms not to stop genocide -- which erupted only after they rebelled -- but to gain tribal domination.
To paint the situation during the maja al-gatila (the famine that kills) in Darfur in 1984-5 as one in which "blacks ... were the oppressors" is terribly simplistic in more than one way. Without lingering on the complexities of ethnicity in Darfur and the difficulty in categorizing Darfuris as either "black" or "Arab," the facile claim that "blacks" were oppressing "Arabs" seems to overlook the fact that the nearly 100,000 deaths during the famine were largely due to apathy or incompetence on the part of Khartoum. According to Prunier,

Everyone knew that this catastrophe would have been perfectly preventable with a little bit of planning, money and, especially, political will. Everyone knew that the mass deaths [hécatombe] were the result of Khartoum's negligence. But the consequences happened to be unequally distributed [translation mine].
The drought and famine forced the nomads to prematurely go south in search of grazing areas, which just so happened to be the meager and not-yet-harvested fields of the farmers. Alex de Waal, who has studied the famine in depth, describes the delicate balance that was violently disturbed in 1985 as the "moral geography" of Darfur.

Kuperman's other claim, that the rebels "picked up arms ... to gain tribal dominance," also seems to be woefully ill-informed. According to Julie Flint and de Waal, the roots of JEM go back to 1993, when the original aim was to reform the National Islamic Front (NIF) from within. Dissidents like Nur compiled evidence illustrating the economic and political marginalization of Darfur into a document they called "The Black Book." JEM purports to combat Darfur's status as an outlying periphery dominated by the center of Sudanese economic and political life. Nur explains the situation in Darfur thusly:

There was too much suffering. I travelled 60 kilometers to go to primary school, in Kornoi, when I was 7; 350 kilometers to go to intermediate school, in Geneina; 400 kilometers to go to secondary school, in Fasher; and 1,000 kilometers to go to university, in Khartoum. It was forbidden to speak the Zaghawa language in school. In primary school, the teacher gave us a blue ticket to pass to any boy who spoke Zaghawa. At the end of the day, anyone who had the ticket was whipped. The whole of Kutun province, with a population of more than 551,000, had one general doctor and no specialists. Women walked more than eight hours daily to get less than 60 liters of water. We were excluded from all key posts and had no way of communicating with the international community to ask for help.
JEM's five-point manifesto calls for a national solution to the Sudan's problems. It calls for a unified country, justice and equality rather than political repression, "radical and comprehensive constitutional reform," basic services for all Sudanese and human development in all the regions of Sudan.

The SLM/A, on the other hand, has its roots in Darfuri irregular militias that were created in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s when conflict was already rife in the region. In 1999 already, over 100,000 Masalit had fled to Chad.

The fact of the matter is that the events leading up to the genocide in Darfur are many and varied, involving the famine, the political situation in Chad, Libyan involvement and sometimes de facto ruling of Darfur, Islamic movements (both domestic and imported from Tripoli or Cairo) and a politics of systematic neglect of the periphery by the center in Khartoum. To say that the rebels provoked genocide by vying for tribal domination is either disingenuous or uninformed.

This is not to say that the Darfuri rebel movements are saints; we know that they are not. But that's not the point. Whether the rebel movements have "provoked" Khartoum is neither here nor there in the long run. The rebels, despite their claims to represent all of Darfur, are not the ethnic groups as a whole, just as the RPF is not synonymous with the Tutsis in Rwanda.

De Waal sums up the situation quite succinctly in his piece in the London Review of Books, "Counter-insurgency on the cheap":

The atrocities carried out by the Janjawiid are aimed at speakers of Fur, Tunjur, Masalit and Zaghawa. They are systematic and sustained; the effect, if not the aim, is grossly disproportionate to the military threat of the rebellion. The mass rape and branding of victims speaks of the deliberate destruction of a community. In Darfur, cutting down fruit trees or destroying irrigation ditches is a way of eradicating farmers' claims to the land and ruining livelihoods. But this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.
And this brings me to Kuperman's advice not to intervene: ...we should let Sudan's army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes." It's hard to believe that such a naïve statement could be penned by anyone who has read much about the regime in Khartoum. We're talking about "routine cruelty" and "genocide by force of habit." What Kuperman doesn't see is that the Sudanese regime is "handling" the rebels in the same way it dealt with the South and the Nuba Mountains.

To lay the blame for such acts at the feet of the rebels (rather than at the feet of the regime committing genocide), or even worse, the "victim group," is morally irresponsible. The Fur and Zaghawa and other "black" tribes in Darfur are no more responsible for the organized campaign to destroy them than the Armenians were for their forced march into the sands of Syria.

If Alan Kuperman is content to take Khartoum at its word and trust that it will "eschew" the "war crimes" that it denies committing in the first place, allowing the regime to "handle" the rebels and "defend its sovereignty" in the meantime, I, for one, am not.

Kuperman advises the United States to announce a policy of non-intervention. This is confusing to me, because after all, isn't that the policy that Samantha Powers describes so well in her book, "A Problem from Hell"? Isn't that the policy that has been silently announced throughout the twentieth century to Armenians, Rwandans, Iraqi Kurds, Cambodians and now the Sudanese?

Thursday, June 29, 2006

Getting to Syria


I've had my fair share of visa problems in the last year or two. I've had Libya, Sudan and now Syria all do their best to stop me from visiting. I've given up on the first two for the time being, but I'm still holding out for Syria.

So I'm in Beirut for the time being. It's difficult to work on my Arabic here, because classes are prohibitively expensive, and almost everyone speaks English or French much better than I speak Arabic. It seems like a little bubble here in Beirut. A bubble filled with beautiful women, bars and short skirts.

A few hours away, Israel has taken out several bridges, destroyed electricity transformers in Gaza, and detained a third of Hamas' cabinet and an unknown number of lawmakers. The Israelis have flown over Syrian President Assad's summer house on the coast and spoken of attacking the leader of Hamas' military wing, who lives in Damascus. On all sides of Lebanon, the tension can be felt, but here, we?re going out and drinking, watching the world cup and sipping coffee.

Brazil beat Ghana the other night; there were fireworks and dancing in the streets.

Sunday, June 25, 2006

General Principle


In his op-ed, A Threat That Belongs Behind Bars, professor Eric Posner informs us that the indefinite detention of "dangerous aliens," regardless of whether or not they have committed a crime, should not be opposed on general principle. While it is true that there are precedents of such action in the alien and sedition acts and the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, it is both disappointing and disconcerting that such black spots on American history are being held up as a defense of unconscionable behavior not befit of a civilized democracy. In these times, when the United States is committing torture, unlawful detentions and violent war crimes in the name of the war on terror, what our nation needs are more, not fewer, appeals to general principle.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Back in Beirut


I've just arrived in Beirut after a hectic few days of getting everything prepared for this trip. I'll be in the Middle East until September and will be trying to blog from here as much as possible - hopefully more than usual.

I never managed to get my visa for Syria, so I'll probably try my luck at the border in the next few days. Some friends want me to come to Jordan, but you have to go through Syria to get to Jordan from Lebanon, so I might not be able to make it, which would be a shame, because it would be nice to stay with a family in Amman and then maybe go visit Petra as well.

There is a certain sense of home that I feel here in Beirut. I felt it the first time I came, and I'm feeling it again, now that I'm back. There was the same sign of Ronald McDonald saying "Welcome to Lebanon" at the airport and I was able to direct the cab driver directly to my friend's place, no small feat considering how bad my sense of direction is.

I lucked out at the airport, because there was some sort of a problem with the visa stand, so they just let everyone have their visa for free. It's only $17, but it's a nice feeling all the same.

I'm going to try to post pictures from time to time also, because I think this blog needs some spicing up...

Sunday, June 18, 2006

American Taliban


Esquire magazing has an interesting piece on John Walker Lindh, the American guy who was fighting in the ranks of the Taliban against the Northern Alliance when the US invaded in 2001. Strangely, part of his sentence is that he's not allowed to speak Arabic in prison, which means he cannot pray out loud. Talking to a friend of mine last night about the article, he reacted to it by saying that if the sentence isn't cruel, it certainly is unusual.

The article is a little long and written with an odd tone of deference or piety that I'm not sure really works, but it is very interesting and worth a read nonetheless.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Guantanamo Bay: A European Perspective


An editorial in le Monde today takes the US to task for Guantanamo Bay (in French, translation mine):

Upon the discovery of the suicide of three detainees, two Saudis and one Yemeni, the reaction of the commander of the camp in Guantanamo illustrates the gulf that separates American authorities from the rest of the world on the sinister issue of the prison in Guantanamo. The collective suicide is "an act of asymmetric war waged against us," declared Rear Admiral Harry Harris on 10 June. Colleen Graffy, in charge of public diplomacy at the State Department, qualified the detainees' gesture as a "good PR move to draw attention."

Without falling into otherworldliness faced with the essential fight against international terrorism, how can we make the United States listen to reason about this black stain on the democratic world that the prison in Guantanamo has become? Because, when Admiral Harris evokes an act of war against America, he is forgetting that American blindness towards the treatment of the detainees suspected of belonging to Al-Qaida, in Guantanamo or in the secret prisons run by the CIA, exposes all western democracies to Islamic propaganda and radicalization. It is to our suburbs and our Muslim communities in Europe that the recruiters of Al-Qaida and other fundamentalist proselytizers come to fill their ranks, with arguments graciously given to them by the military leaders of the Pentagon and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

It hasn't been enough to say that Guantanamo Bay, opened in January 2002 and where 460 prisoners are still being held without trial, is legal nonsense; it hasn't been enough to say that it constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and human rights; it hasn't been enough to write that it is unworthy of a country universally admired for having established respect for the rule of law in its constitutional system; it hasn't been enough to show surprise that the Bush administration manifests, by its stubbornness, such disdain for its own Supreme Court, which told it in June 2004 to authorize the Guantanamo detainees to defend themselves before an American civil court, and for public opinion, which, after an initial indifference, has included a growing number of voices denouncing the conditions in the prison. Nor has it been enough to bring up relevant historical errors, from the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to Margaret Thatcher's vain stubbornness faced with IRA members on hunger strike in 1981.

The United States remains deaf to all these arguments. The least that European leaders can do from now on is to no longer hold high level meetings with Americans without demanding the closing of Guantanamo Bay. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has recently served as a good example. The French should follow suit.

Monday, June 05, 2006

On non-intervention in darfur


In addition to Kuperman's piece, David Rieff has also penned a case against intervention in Darfur in the New Republic, which Reeves hotly and thoroughly counters.

He sees the issue through the lense of Iraq in 2003 instead of, say, Rwanda in 1994 or Iraq during the genocidal al Anfal campaign to Arabize Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1908s. Rieff casts doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and says that those who call for intervention in Darfur are ignoring the politics of Darfur (which he seems to be less than well-versed in himself, the truth be told):

Were politics present in their thinking, pro-Darfuri intervention activists would not use the reductionist dichotomy of victims and abusers that has been the staple myth of humanitarian intervention. The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. So do the extended families of the Janjaweed themselves, who, lest we forget, are also Darfuris. To describe the former simply as victims deprives them of any agency. To describe the latter simply as killers precludes actually understanding the conflict as anything other than an eruption of human wickedness, rather like a volcano or an earthquake.

One debilitating defect of the liberal interventionism is that it ignores the political implications of what it calls for. ...

...[A]n intervention, however good it may be for the Darfuris, may be terrible for the rest of the world.
Reeves criticizes Rieff for mistakenly attributing secessionist ambitions to the Darfuri rebels, not discussion the spread of the genocide into Chad, irresponsibly casting doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and generally being ignorant on Darfuri politics.

In fact, we must wonder what "agency" a nine-year-old girl has when she is brutally gang-raped by the Janjaweed, or what "agency" a five-year-old boy has as he is thrown screaming into a bonfire along with his brothers, or indeed what "agency" a one-year-old boy has when the Janjaweed slice off his penis and he bleeds to death. "Political interests" here is an abstraction that can have meaning for very few besides David Rieff. There are real political issues in Darfur, including competition over natural resources and power in governance, as well as competing visions of equitable distribution of land and wealth. Rieff captures none of this in his account.

If the Abuja accord does fail, if violence then inevitably rapidly escalates in Darfur and Chad, it will be too late for hundreds of thousands of lives. We have simply waited too long, with too many sufficiently encouraged by specious arguments of the sort so abundant in Rieff's account. In this sense it is perhaps useful to have Rieff articulate his factitious "realism," to invoke so glibly the difficult "politics" of Darfur, to pretend that Iraq has somehow changed the imperative of responding to massive genocidal destruction.
Anne-Marie Slaughter writes in her TMPCafe piece, Rethinking Darfur that after reading Kuperman and Rieff, she's having second thoughts. She doesn't go into any specifics, but the gist of her piece is that maybe we shouldn't intervene, because the situation is complicated:

I want to help the victims of the Janjaweed as much as anyone. But the Europeans have been arguing for some time that the situation is far more complicated than a simple morality tale would make it out to be. And surely if Iraq has taught us anything, it is to think very hard about what happens AFTER we go in and stop the initial killing. It may well be that even if an AU solution is slower and less effective up front, it will be more effective over the long term, whereas if the U.S. or NATO go in, we will find ourselves again "in charge" of a situation we barely understand and cannot control, ultimately visiting yet more chaos and death on the very people we seek to help.
To my mind, this is similar to seeing a woman getting raped and murdered on the street and hesitating to do anything about it because the situation is likely to be complicated. What will other people in the neighbourhood think if I intervene? What did that woman do to make those men decide to rape and murder her?

Of course the situation is complicated, as are most conflicts. We don't live in a world of black and white, and we never have. Just because the sitauation surrounding a genocide is complex does not mean that there is any less of a moral imperative to stop it. The politics of Darfur are complex, as were the politics of Rwanda in 1994. What is not complex is that genocide is being committed, and either one believes that genocide carries the weight of a moral imperative or it doesn't. Finally, Slaughter seems more interested in wringing her hands and hoping against all odds for the best. Rieff at least calls a spade a spade when he asks brings up the idea that even if intervention is better for Darfuris, maybe it would be bad for the rest of the world.

This is an interesting question that smacks of utilitarianism. But before answering it, we should ask ourselves two questions: First, given the number of dead incurred during World War II, should the international community have given up Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria and the Jews in those countries in order to avoid the tens of millions of deaths that were a result of direct military confrontation between Axis and Allied powers? And second, are we sure that there will not be more death and conflict as a result of allowing a genocide to happen?

The first question is of a moral nature and can be difficult in some instances, if not in this one. The second one is about history and its consequences. Would the Congo be such a hellhole if we had not let the Rwandan genocide come to pass? In the case of Darfur, it is important to look at what this genocide means for Chad, and by consequence, the Central African Republic and Cameroon. If Khartoum is emboldened and allowed to topple Deby's (distasteful) regime in Chad, the bloody and ongoing history of the Congo might repeat itself.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Kuperman and "provoking genocide"


I would like to comment on Alan Kuperman's polemical piece in the New York Times yesterday (31 May), "Strategic Victimhood in Sudan." In this particular article, Kuperman tells us that the regime in Khartoum responded to Darfuri rebel insurgency with genocide, and that "[b]ecause of the Save Darfur movement ... the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure," which has in turn led the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) movement and Nur's part of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) to reject the recent peace treaty signed at Abuja.

Kuperman's analysis of events is not specific to his take on Sudanese politics; rather it is but further evidence of his larger hypothesis. Generally speaking, the crux of his argument can be found in the first sentence of an article he wrote on the Rwandan genocide, "Provoking genocide: A revised history of the Rwandan Patriotic Front": "In most cases of mass killing since World War II­­ -- unlike the Holocaust -- the victim group has triggered its own demise by violently challenging the authority of the state."

Although he emphasizes that his theory is "not intended to excuse of justify the genocide in any way, but merely to understand more fully its causes," Kuperman's argument seems to come dangerously close to blaming the victims. While he would surely protest that he is blaming rebel groups and not the victims of the genocide (a polemical claim in and of itself), this is not at all clear when he says, "the victim group has triggered its own demise." (To be fair, with the exception of the opening sentence, the article focuses mostly on the RPF, not Tutsis in general.)

But I'll save the more general moral debate about whether or not a genocidal regime's culpability can be shared with a rebel group that has purportedly "provoked" genocide for another time. What I would like to focus on here is the specifics of Darfur.

I don't pretend to be an expert on Sudanese or Darfuri politics, and I agree with Kuperman when he says that the situation in Darfur is complex. However, it seems strange that after stressing that the situation there is not the "simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations," he would himself make claims like these:

The region's blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago -- denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. ... [The rebels] took up arms not to stop genocide -- which erupted only after they rebelled -- but to gain tribal domination.
To paint the situation during the maja al-gatila (the famine that kills) in Darfur in 1984-5 as one in which "blacks ... were the oppressors" is terribly simplistic in more than one way. Without lingering on the complexities of ethnicity in Darfur and the difficulty in categorizing Darfuris as either "black" or "Arab," the facile claim that "blacks" were oppressing "Arabs" seems to overlook the fact that the nearly 100,000 deaths during the famine were largely due to apathy or incompetence on the part of Khartoum. According to Prunier,

Everyone knew that this catastrophe would have been perfectly preventable with a little bit of planning, money and, especially, political will. Everyone knew that the mass deaths [hécatombe] were the result of Khartoum's negligence. But the consequences happened to be unequally distributed [translation mine].
The drought and famine forced the nomads to prematurely go south in search of grazing areas, which just so happened to be the meager and not-yet-harvested fields of the farmers. Alex de Waal, who has studied the famine in depth, describes the delicate balance that was violently disturbed in 1985 as the "moral geography" of Darfur.

Kuperman's other claim, that the rebels "picked up arms ... to gain tribal dominance," also seems to be woefully ill-informed. According to Julie Flint and de Waal, the roots of JEM go back to 1993, when the original aim was to reform the National Islamic Front (NIF) from within. Dissidents like Nur compiled evidence illustrating the economic and political marginalization of Darfur into a document they called "The Black Book." JEM purports to combat Darfur's status as an outlying periphery dominated by the center of Sudanese economic and political life. Nur explains the situation in Darfur thusly:

There was too much suffering. I travelled 60 kilometers to go to primary school, in Kornoi, when I was 7; 350 kilometers to go to intermediate school, in Geneina; 400 kilometers to go to secondary school, in Fasher; and 1,000 kilometers to go to university, in Khartoum. It was forbidden to speak the Zaghawa language in school. In primary school, the teacher gave us a blue ticket to pass to any boy who spoke Zaghawa. At the end of the day, anyone who had the ticket was whipped. The whole of Kutun province, with a population of more than 551,000, had one general doctor and no specialists. Women walked more than eight hours daily to get less than 60 liters of water. We were excluded from all key posts and had no way of communicating with the international community to ask for help.
JEM's five-point manifesto calls for a national solution to the Sudan's problems. It calls for a unified country, justice and equality rather than political repression, "radical and comprehensive constitutional reform," basic services for all Sudanese and human development in all the regions of Sudan.

The SLM/A, on the other hand, has its roots in Darfuri irregular militias that were created in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s when conflict was already rife in the region. In 1999 already, over 100,000 Masalit had fled to Chad.

The fact of the matter is that the events leading up to the genocide in Darfur are many and varied, involving the famine, the political situation in Chad, Libyan involvement and sometimes de facto ruling of Darfur, Islamic movements (both domestic and imported from Tripoli or Cairo) and a politics of systematic neglect of the periphery by the center in Khartoum. To say that the rebels provoked genocide by vying for tribal domination is either disingenuous or uninformed.

This is not to say that the Darfuri rebel movements are saints; we know that they are not. But that's not the point. Whether the rebel movements have "provoked" Khartoum is neither here nor there in the long run. The rebels, despite their claims to represent all of Darfur, are not the ethnic groups as a whole, just as the RPF is not synonymous with the Tutsis in Rwanda.

De Waal sums up the situation quite succinctly in his piece in the London Review of Books, "Counter-insurgency on the cheap":

The atrocities carried out by the Janjawiid are aimed at speakers of Fur, Tunjur, Masalit and Zaghawa. They are systematic and sustained; the effect, if not the aim, is grossly disproportionate to the military threat of the rebellion. The mass rape and branding of victims speaks of the deliberate destruction of a community. In Darfur, cutting down fruit trees or destroying irrigation ditches is a way of eradicating farmers' claims to the land and ruining livelihoods. But this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.
And this brings me to Kuperman's advice not to intervene: ...we should let Sudan's army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes." It's hard to believe that such a naïve statement could be penned by anyone who has read much about the regime in Khartoum. We're talking about "routine cruelty" and "genocide by force of habit." What Kuperman doesn't see is that the Sudanese regime is "handling" the rebels in the same way it dealt with the South and the Nuba Mountains.

To lay the blame for such acts at the feet of the rebels (rather than at the feet of the regime committing genocide), or even worse, the "victim group," is morally irresponsible. The Fur and Zaghawa and other "black" tribes in Darfur are no more responsible for the organized campaign to destroy them than the Armenians were for their forced march into the sands of Syria.

If Alan Kuperman is content to take Khartoum at its word and trust that it will "eschew" the "war crimes" that it denies committing in the first place, allowing the regime to "handle" the rebels and "defend its sovereignty" in the meantime, I, for one, am not.

Kuperman advises the United States to announce a policy of non-intervention. This is confusing to me, because after all, isn't that the policy that Samantha Powers describes so well in her book, "A Problem from Hell"? Isn't that the policy that has been silently announced throughout the twentieth century to Armenians, Rwandans, Iraqi Kurds, Cambodians and now the Sudanese?