Muddled thinking on Darfur Conor Foley April 16, 2007 11:00 AM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/conor_foley/2007/04/no_tony_blair_this_is_not_abou.html
There are two strange features in the debate about the humanitarian crisis in
Darfur. The first is the tendency of supporters of intervention to exaggerate
its scale and the second is the frequency with which Iraq and Israel pop up in
the discussion.
I had been puzzled by this until I read Adam LeBor's book Complicity with
Evil, the UN in the age of modern genocide.
The main focus of this is on the genocide in Srebrenica and how it could have
occurred in the middle of Europe in the 1990s. It is an interesting account,
but contains several rather curious omissions and points of interpretation.
Most notably, it argues that the UN's failure to demilitarise the town should
be considered "a victory" and fails to make the obvious connection between the
indictment of its Bosniac commander for war crimes and the fury with which the
victorious Serbs eventually fell upon its population.
The book draws numerous comparisons between the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and
the subsequent genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda. It also, tangentially - since it
is not related to the book's subject matter - attacks the UN for criticising
Israel's human rights violations. The central narrative is very clear:
persecuted people cannot rely on the international community to save themselves
from annihilation. The west will talk but not act, and its high-minded
criticisms of those who must fight against their neighbours for survival are
just hypocritical cant.
LeBor also claims that 400,000 people have died in Darfur, which is higher
than figures cited by most other observers. Last week I asked him where he had
got the figure from. He told me that he had taken the UN estimate from two
years previously and doubled it.
In fact this is not quite true. What he actually did was quote a now-defunct
US-based lobby group, the Coalition for International Justice, who published a
report in April 2005, which it based on interviews with refugees in Chad, and a
statistical extrapolation similar to the one used by the Lancet study which
concluded that around 650,000 people had died since the US invasion of Iraq.
The figure may well be accurate, but the politics of the discussion are
revealing. Darfur has become a major issue in US domestic politics mainly due
to the lobbying of a group of human rights and religious organisations. The
Coalition for International Justice had been instrumental in persuading the US
government to declare that the situation in Darfur amounted to genocide
although this was not supported by a UN Commission of Inquiry, which published
its own report in February 2005.
For LeBor, and others such as Peter Tatchell, Nick Cohen and Glenn Reynolds,
the UN's failure to pronounce that Darfur is a genocide is another example of
its failure to uphold human rights. LeBor implies the commission was leaned on.
Tatchell says it was just down to racism. "One cannot help wonder whether the
global indifference to the slaughter in Darfur has anything to do with the fact
that the victims are black," he says.
What everyone agrees is that the majority of deaths have been from
malnutrition and disease, rather than direct violence, yet last week when I
queried an assertion that "400,000 black African Muslims" had been slaughtered
by the Sudanese government and Janjaweed militia, a blogger at Harry's Place
accused me of "genocide denial" and "belittling mass murder". "You almost make
me ashamed of my Irish origins," he concluded.
Were this confined to debates in cyberspace it would not be so serious.
Unfortunately, it also seems to have become a hallmark of Tony Blair's foreign
policy.
A couple of weeks ago "sources in Downing Street" let it be known that Blair
was pushing the UN security council to authorise military strikes against the
Sudanese air force to enforce a no-fly zone over Darfur. The proposal has been
widely derided by military experts and a Ministry of Defence official was quick
to insist that "there are absolutely no plans for any UK military action at all
in Sudan or the Darfur region of Sudan", yet a senior Blair aide restated that
the UK might be prepared to act unilaterally if its plans did not receive UN
approval. "The prime minister believes in a values-driven foreign policy and
believes you have to evenly apply those values to have any credibility. He sees
Darfur as a test of the international community's commitment to its own values."
The only point that I can see to this type of spin, gesture and make-believe
is that it is intended to make Blair seem tougher than the UN. International
Development Secretary, Hilary Benn, who has played an active part in the
attempts to find a negotiated solution to the Darfur crisis, has very pointedly
distanced himself from this type of approach by arguing that British foreign
policy must return to a commitment to multilateralism.
Ten years ago New Labour was elected with a promise to put human rights at
the heart of their foreign policy and there are still some achievements to be
proud of from its first term in office. What was needed was consistency,
coherence, honesty and realism to leave a lasting legacy in international
affairs. Unfortunately Blair blew it and led Britain into its most disastrous
foreign policy blunder since the Suez crisis.
This remains the fundamental weakness of the debate about international
interventions on human rights grounds. Time and again its supporters project
their own ideological prejudices on to particular situations. "It is all about
me," you can almost hear them saying. The result, unfortunately, is flawed
policy prescriptions and a failure to see the world as it really is.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/conor_foley/2007/04/no_tony_blair_this_is_not_abou.html
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