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<p class="breadcrumbs"><a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/index.php">LRB</a> | <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n05/contents.html">
Vol. 29 No. 5 dated
8 March 2007 </a> |
<a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/contribhome.php?get=mamd01">Mahmood Mamdani</a>
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<h1>The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency</h1>
<h2>Mahmood Mamdani </h2> </div>
The
similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of
the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly
similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the
official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The
victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather
than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is
named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and
counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the
difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference
does it make?<BR>
The most powerful mobilisation in New York City is
in relation to Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect the reverse, for no
other reason than that most New Yorkers are American citizens and so
should feel directly responsible for the violence in occupied Iraq. But
Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy
politics. Americans worry about what their government should do in
Iraq. Should it withdraw? What would happen if it did? In contrast,
there is nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without history and
without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable
as ‘Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable as ‘Africans’.<BR>
A full-page advertisement has appeared several times a week in the <em>New York Times</em>
calling for intervention in Darfur now. It wants the intervening forces
to be placed under ‘a chain of command allowing necessary and timely
military action without approval from distant political or civilian
personnel’. That intervention in Darfur should not be subject to
‘political or civilian’ considerations and that the intervening forces
should have the right to shoot – to kill – without permission from
distant places: these are said to be ‘humanitarian’ demands. In the
same vein, a <em>New Republic</em> editorial on Darfur has called for
‘force as a first-resort response’. What makes the situation even more
puzzling is that some of those who are calling for an end to
intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur; as the
slogan goes, ‘Out of Iraq and into Darfur.’<BR>
What would happen if
we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and
politics – a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? Why
should an intervention in Darfur not turn out to be a trigger that
escalates rather than reduces the level of violence as intervention in
Iraq has done? Why might it not create the actual possibility of
genocide, not just rhetorically but in reality? Morally, there is no
doubt about the horrific nature of the violence against civilians in
Darfur. The ambiguity lies in the politics of the violence, whose
sources include both a state-connected counter-insurgency and an
organised insurgency, very much like the violence in Iraq.<BR>
The
insurgency and counter-insurgency in Darfur began in 2003. Both were
driven by an intermeshing of domestic tensions in the context of a
peace-averse international environment defined by the War on Terror. On
the one hand, there was a struggle for power within the political class
in Sudan, with more marginal interests in the west (following those in
the south and in the east) calling for reform at the centre. On the
other, there was a community-level split inside Darfur, between nomads
and settled farmers, who had earlier forged a way of sharing the use of
semi-arid land in the dry season. With the drought that set in towards
the late 1970s, co-operation turned into an intense struggle over
diminishing resources.<BR>(snip)<br><div class="footnotes"><a name="footnotes"><b>Footnotes</b></a><BR>*
Contrast this with the UN commission’s painstaking effort to make sense
of the identities ‘Arab’ and ‘African’. The commission’s report
concentrated on three related points. First, the claim that the Darfur
conflict pitted ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ was facile. ‘In fact, the
commission found that many Arabs in Darfur are opposed to the
Janjawiid, and some Arabs are fighting with the rebels, such as certain
Arab commanders and their men from the Misseriya and Rizeigat tribes.
At the same time, many non-Arabs are supporting the government and
serving in its army.’ Second, it has never been easy to sort different
tribes into the categories ‘Arab’ and ‘African’: ‘The various tribes
that have been the object of attacks and killings (chiefly the Fur,
Massalit and Zeghawa tribes) do not appear to make up ethnic groups
distinct from the ethnic groups to which persons or militias that
attack them belong. They speak the same language (Arabic) and embrace
the same religion (Muslim). In addition, also due to the high measure
of intermarriage, they can hardly be distinguished in their outward
physical appearance from the members of tribes that allegedly attacked
them. <em>Apparently, the sedentary and nomadic character of the groups constitutes one of the main distinctions between them’</em>
(emphasis mine). Finally, the commission put forward the view that
political developments are driving the rapidly growing distinction
between ‘Arab’ and ‘African’. On the one hand, ‘Arab’ and ‘African’
seem to have become political identities: ‘Those tribes in Darfur who
support rebels have increasingly come to be identified as “African” and
those supporting the government as the “Arabs”. A good example to
illustrate this is that of the Gimmer, a pro-government African tribe
that is seen by the African tribes opposed to the government as having
been “Arabised”.’ On the other hand, this development was being
promoted from the outside: ‘The Arab-African divide has also been
fanned by the growing insistence on such divide in some circles and in
the media.’<BR></div>
<div class="contrib"><a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/contribhome.php?get=mamd01" class="noshow"><b>Mahmood Mamdani</b></a> is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology at Columbia University. His most recent book is <em>Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror</em>.<BR><br>
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