Where anti-Arab prejudice and oil make the difference The contrast in western
attitudes to Darfur and Congo shows how illiberal our concept of intervention
really is
Roger Howard
Wednesday May 16, 2007
Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2080265,00.html
In a remote corner of Africa, millions of civilians have been slaughtered in
a conflict fuelled by an almost genocidal ferocity that has no end in sight.
Victims have been targeted because of their ethnicity and entire ethnic groups
destroyed - but the outside world has turned its back, doing little to save
people from the wrath of the various government and rebel militias. You could
be forgiven for thinking that this is a depiction of the Sudanese province of
Darfur, racked by four years of bitter fighting. But it describes the
Democratic Republic of Congo, which has received a fraction of the media
attention devoted to Darfur.
The UN estimates that 3 million to 4 million Congolese have been killed,
compared with the estimated 200,000 civilian deaths in Darfur. A peace deal
agreed in December 2002 has never been adhered to, and atrocities have been
particularly well documented in the province of Kivu - carried out by
paramilitary organisations with strong governmental links. In the last month
alone, thousands of civilians have been killed in heavy fighting between rebel
and government forces vying for control of an area north of Goma, and the UN
reckons that another 50,000 have been made refugees. How curious, then,
that so much more attention has been focused on Darfur than Congo. There are no
pressure groups of any note that draw attention to the Congolese situation. In
the media there is barely a word. The politicians are silent. Yet if ever there
were a case for the outside world to intervene on humanitarian grounds alone -
"liberal interventionism" - then surely this is it. The
key difference between the two situations lies in the racial and ethnic
composition of the perceived victims and perpetrators. In Congo, black Africans
are killing other black Africans in a way that is difficult for outsiders to
identify with. The turmoil there can in that sense be regarded as a narrowly
African affair. In Darfur the fighting is portrayed as a war between
black Africans, rightly or wrongly regarded as the victims, and "Arabs", widely
regarded as the perpetrators of the killings. In practice these neat racial
categories are highly indistinct, but it is through such a prism that the
conflict is generally viewed. It is not hard to imagine why some in the
west have found this perception so alluring, for there are numerous people who
want to portray "the Arabs" in these terms. In the United States and elsewhere
those who have spearheaded the case for foreign intervention in Darfur are
largely the people who regard the Arabs as the root cause of the
Israel-Palestine dispute. From this viewpoint, the events in Darfur form just
one part of a much wider picture of Arab malice and cruelty. Nor is it
any coincidence that the moral frenzy about intervention in Sudan has coincided
with the growing military debacle in Iraq - for as allied casualties in Iraq
have mounted, so has indignation about the situation in Darfur. It is always
easier for a losing side to demonise an enemy than to blame itself for a
glaring military defeat, and the Darfur situation therefore offers some people
a certain sense of catharsis. Humanitarian concern among policymakers in
Washington is ultimately self-interested. The United States is willing to
impose new sanctions on the Sudan government if the latter refuses to accept a
United Nations peacekeeping force, but it is no coincidence that Sudan, unlike
Congo, has oil - lots of it - and strong links with China, a country the US
regards as a strategic rival in the struggle for Africa's
natural resources; only last week Amnesty International reported that Beijing
has illicitly supplied Khartoum with large quantities of arms. Nor has
the bloodshed in Congo ever struck the same powerful chord as recent events in
Somalia, where a new round of bitter fighting has recently erupted. At the end
of last year the US backed an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to topple an
Islamic regime that the White House perceived as a possible sponsor of
anti-American "terrorists". The contrasting perceptions of events in
Congo and Sudan are ultimately both cause and effect of particular prejudices.
Those who argue for liberal intervention, to impose "rights, freedom and
democracy", ultimately speak only of their own interests. To view their role in
such altruistic terms always leaves them open to well-founded accusations of
double standards that damage the international standing of the intervening
power and play into the hands of its enemies. By seeing foreign
conflicts through the prism of their own prejudices, interventionists also
convince themselves that others see the world in the same terms. This allows
them to obscure uncomfortable truths, such as the nationalist resentment that
their interference can provoke. This was the case with the Washington hawks who
once assured us that the Iraqi people would be "dancing on the rooftops" to
welcome the US invasion force that would be bringing everyone "freedom".
Highly seductive though the rhetoric of liberal interventionism may be, it is
always towards hubris and disaster that it leads its willing partners. ·
Roger Howard is the author of What's Wrong with Liberal Interventionism
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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