[progchat_action] The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency
 
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2007 02:31:04 -0500 (CDT)



Mahmood Mamdani on Darfur:
 "The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency"

Democracy Now! Monday, June 4th, 2007

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Darfur. President Bush has ordered new sanctions
to be placed on the Sudanese government for its role in the violence in
Darfur. Last week's announcement blocks thirty-one companies tied to the
Sudanese government from using the US banking system.

The sanctions were seen as a victory for the Save Darfur Coalition, a US
group leading a vocal campaign pressuring the White House to take action.
But the New York Times reported Saturday some of Save Darfur's public
efforts have angered aid groups working on the ground in Sudan. The aid
groups say Save Darfur's call for imposing a no-flight zone could lead to a
halt in aid flights and put their workers at risk. Aid groups have also
criticized Save Darfur for not spending its multi-million dollar budget on
aid to Darfur's refugees.

Mahmood Mamdani is one of the world's most prominent Africa scholars.
Earlier this year, he wrote a major piece for the London Review of Books
called "The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency." He was
born in Uganda and now splits his time between Uganda and New York, where he
is a professor at Columbia University. Mahmood Mamdani stopped by our
firehouse studio Friday. I began by asking him about the name of his
article, "The Politics of Naming."

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: I think the larger question is the names -- genocide, in
particular -- come into being against a background of the twentieth century
and mass slaughter of the twentieth century, and particularly the Holocaust.
And against that background, Lemkin convinced the international community,
and particularly states in the international community, have an obligation
to intervene when there is genocide. He's successful in getting the
international community to adopt a resolution on this.

Then follows the politics around genocide. And the politics around genocide
is, when is the slaughter of civilians a genocide or not? Which particular
slaughter is going to be named genocide, and which one is not going to be
named genocide? So if you look at the last ten years and take some examples
of mass slaughter -- for example, the mass slaughter in Iraq, which is -- in
terms of numbers, at least -- no less than what is going on in Sudan; or the
mass slaughter in Congo, which, in terms of numbers, is probably ten times
what happened, what has been happening in Darfur. But none of these have
been named as genocide. Only the slaughter in Darfur has been named as
genocide. So there is obviously a politics around this naming, and that's
the politics that I was interested in.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think this politics is?

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, I think that what's happening is that genocide is
being instrumentalized by the biggest power on the earth today, which is the
United States. It is being instrumentalized in a way that mass slaughters
which implicate its adversaries are being named as genocide and those which
implicate its friends or its proxies are not being named as genocide. And
that is not what Lemkin had in mind.

AMY GOODMAN: The simplifying of the conflict by the US media, you write
extensively about this, who the sides are.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, I was struck by the fact -- because I live nine
months in New York and three months in Kampala, and every morning I open the
New York Times, and I read about sort of violence against civilians,
atrocities against civilians, and there are two places that I read about --
one is Iraq, and the other is Darfur -- sort of constantly, day after day,
and week after week. And I'm struck by the fact that the largest political
movement against mass violence on US campuses is on Darfur and not on Iraq.
And it puzzles me, because most of these students, almost all of these
students, are American citizens, and I had always thought that they should
have greater responsibility, they should feel responsibility, for mass
violence which is the result of their own government's policies. And I ask
myself, "Why not?" I ask myself, "How do they discuss mass violence in Iraq
and options in Iraq?" And they discuss it by asking -- agonizing over what
would happen if American troops withdrew from Iraq. Would there be more
violence? Less violence? But there is no such agonizing over Darfur, because
Darfur is a place without history, Darfur is a place without politics.
Darfur is simply a dot on the map. It is simply a place, a site, where
perpetrator confronts victim. And the perpetrator's name is Arab, and the
victim's name is African. And it is easy to demonize. It is easy to hold a
moral position which is emptied of its political content. This bothered me,
and so I wrote about it.

AMY GOODMAN: Columbia University Professor Mahmood Mamdani. We'll be back
with him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to our conversation with Columbia University
Professor Mahmood Mamdani, one of the world's most prominent Africa
scholars, speaking about Darfur in relation to other conflicts around the
world.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, let's begin with the numbers of the dead, OK? The
only group in a position to estimate how many people have died in Darfur is
UNICEF, because UNICEF is the only one that did a comprehensive survey in
2005 in Darfur. Everybody else only knows the piece of ground on which they
work and will then extrapolate from it, like any other NGO, like Oxfam or
Medecins Sans Frontieres or World Food Program. The WFP estimate was
200,000. Out of these 200,000, the WPF report tells you that roughly about
20% died of actually being killed, of violence, and 80% died mainly from
starvation and from diseases. And normally in our understanding of genocide,
we put both those together and look at them as a result of the violence,
because the violence prevents the medicine going in, etc., except in the
case of Darfur, it's not a single-cause situation.

Darfur is also the place which has been hit hard by global warming. The UN
commission which sat on global warming very recently spoke of Darfur as the
first major crisis of global warming. In other words, from the late 1970s
you have had a significant desertification, and you've been having in the
north of Darfur basically a situation where people's simply entire
livelihoods are destroyed, and which has been one of the elements, because
it has driven the nomadic population in the north down into the south. So
how many people are dying from desertification? How many people are dying
from the violence that has been unleashed through this civil war in Darfur?

Second element in this is that there's a civil war going on in Darfur. There
are two rebel movements, and both rebel movements were born in the aftermath
of the peace in the south. And those who were unwilling to accept the peace
in the south, who thought the peace in the south should have included a
resolution for all of Sudan, particularly for Darfur and not simply for the
south, they were the inspiration behind the two movements that developed.
One movement, the Sudan Liberation Army, was a movement strongly connected
with the SPLA in the south, especially with those sections of the SPLA who
were not happy with the partial nature of the settlement in the south.

And the other movement --

AMY GOODMAN: The SPLA is.?

MAHMOOD MAMDANI: The SPLA, sorry, is the Sudan People's Liberation Army,
which had organized and led the guerrilla war in the south for several
decades under John Garang.

The second movement was the Justice and Equality Movement. The Justice and
Equality Movement, unlike the SLA, which is a secular movement, Justice and
Equality is an Islamist movement. And it was a break-off from the regime in
the Sudan. It was a break-off between two sections of the regime, the
military and the civilian section, and particularly the section led by the
chief ideologue, Hassan al-Turabi, who split from the military wing and was
the inspiration behind the formation of the Justice and Equality Movement.
So you have, in a way, a very strong Islamist rebel movement and you have a
strong secular rebel movement, and these two began their operations in 2003.

The government's response -- and I saw the ambassador's response there,
which was as disingenuous as Bush's response, in a sense, because he's
claiming that it's just a civil war inside, the government has nothing to do
with it. It's not true. The government's response was to pick a proxy and
arm it. And the government was, in a way, smart enough to pick those who
were the worst victims of the desertification and the drought. It picked the
poorest of the nomads from the north whose livelihoods had been entirely
destroyed and who had simply no survival strategy at hand and gave them
weapons. And these guys went down south, and their object was not to kill
the peasants in the south, but to drive them off their land.

The government's response was also to pick a second group, and that second
group are the nomads from Chad who have come into Darfur. And to understand
that, one has to look at the third dimension of the conflict, which is that
over the last twenty-five, thirty years there has been a civil war going on
in Chad. Chad, during the Cold War, was a bone of contention, first and
foremost between the US and France, and both had their allies in the region.
France allied with Libya. The US allied with the military dictatorship in
Sudan, with the Numeri dictatorship in Sudan. And every oppositional
movement in Chad had a base in Darfur, and they armed themselves, organized
themselves in Darfur. So Darfur was awash with weapons for two decades, OK.
And those who ran away from the civil war in Chad came into Darfur. So the
other wing of those who were armed, whether by the government or whether by
this weaponry which was awash, were the Chad refugees in Darfur. So what we
call the Janjaweed are two groups. They are the Chad refugees in Darfur, and
they are the poorest of the northern camel -- the pastoralists divide into
two: the camel pastoralists and the cattle pastoralists. And the camel
pastoralists, because the camel is the only game which will survive in the
worst conditions where even cattle will not survive, they are the poorest of
the poor. So these are what are called the Janjaweed.

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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/04/1334230

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