The following is the first of a two-part post by Marc Gustafon, following an earlier series of posts from Tim Nonn, Rob Crilly and Alex Meixner, on the question of “What’s Next?” for Darfur advocacy. I have some comments on the proposal below, but will wait until the end of the second part of this post to share them.
A Prescription for Darfur Activists (Part 1/2)
By Marc Gustafson
For the past two years, I’ve written critically about the American activist movement for Darfur, usually arguing that the campaigns have exacerbated the situation in Darfur. In response to my arguments, Rebecca Hamilton has rightly pointed out that it is easier to be a critic than it is to offer suggestions for improvement and positive change. In light of this, I offer suggestions for how the activist movement could help ameliorate the conflict in Darfur.
The American activist movement for Darfur consists of many different participants such as journalists, student groups and religious organizations, to name a few. Their agendas vary, to a certain degree, but most have followed the Save Darfur Coalition’s lead in the way they mischaracterize the conflict publicly. These mischaracterizations need to be corrected if Darfur activists wish to have a positive impact on the conflict.
Mischaracterizing the Scale of Violence in Darfur
The first and most obvious mischaracterization of the situation in Darfur pertains to the scale of violence throughout the region. Since the movement for Darfur began in 2004, activists have inflated casualty rates, often claiming that hundreds of thousands of innocent Darfurians have been “killed”, when in reality, the majority of the casualties they are referring to have occurred as a result of disease and malnutrition (as a consequence of the war in Darfur). Differentiating between those who “died” and those who were “killed” may seem insignificant in the shadow of the horrific acts of war crimes and injustice in Darfur, but ignoring these categorizations has been central to how the Save Darfur movement has gone astray. Since many activists assume that hundreds of thousands of Darfurians are being “killed”, they have been pressuring the US government to fund violence prevention plans and international peace-keeping troops, often at the expense of providing humanitarian aid and funds for peace-making.
The Save Darfur Coalition (SDC) has been particularly effective in using their scores of followers to pressure policy-makers. They have hired lobbyists in Washington to draft legislation and pressure politicians to focus their efforts and funds on violence prevention and UN troop deployment. Before these lobbyists were hired, the United States government had sent a total of $1.01 billion dollars to Darfur. $839 million dollars (83 percent) was allocated to refugee camps and humanitarian assistance, while $175 million dollars (17 percent) was allocated to funding peace-keeping activities. These numbers indicate that the United States government was initially more focused on providing humanitarian aid than it was on funding peace-keeping activities.
From 2006 until 2008, when the Save Darfur Coalition and many other groups began to directly pressure the government, the allocation of US funds shifted dramatically from humanitarian aid to peace-keeping, presumably due to the influence of the lobbyists and public pressure campaigns. Of the $2.01 billion dollars that was spent on peacekeeping and humanitarian aid during this period, $980 million (48.7 percent) was spent on funding peace-keeping missions, while $1.03 billion (51.3 percent) was spent on humanitarian aid. This indicates that there was a significant proportional increase in the amount of aid allocated to peacekeeping, while there was a significant proportional decrease in the amount of aid allocated to humanitarian projects.
In the end, these proportional changes were problematic because, as many casualty reports show, the violent death-rate (those who were “killed”) in Darfur after April of 2004 declined significantly, while the rate of those who were dying of disease and malnutrition remained high. Had the Darfur activists not advocated for a reallocation of funds, more lives would have been saved.
Mischaracterizing the Nature of Violence
Many activists have also mischaracterized the nature of the violence, intimating that the government of Sudan and rogue Arab tribes are responsible for most, if not all, of the bloodshed. Campaign advertisements, newsletters and websites frequently use the term “ongoing genocide” to describe the conflict, even though the nature of the violence has changed significantly since the height of the conflict in 2003-2004.
The term “genocide” was originally employed to provide a sense of gravity to the war so that international governments and institutions would respond more rapidly to the conflict. Despite the good intentions of activists in using “genocide”, the popularity of the word in the US posed many unanticipated problems, the most important of which was that it distorted the balance of culpability and innocence. Using the term “genocide” immediately implies that there is a unidirectional crime taking place, one in which there are victims (the people of Darfur) and a culprit (the government of Sudan).
In reality, however, there are victims and villains on both sides. The government of Sudan has killed many people and is responsible for atrocities such as rape and war crimes, but the rebel insurgents are also guilty of atrocities in Darfur. The rebel groups have also been accused of rape, civilian killings and the killing of peacekeepers and humanitarian aid workers. In fact, when the United Nations conducted its International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, they found that many of the rebel groups engaged in “serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law.”
By using the word “genocide”, however, and attaching the term to only one side of the conflict, the other side is easily ignored. This is especially problematic when the current “genocide” is described in the context of past genocides, such as the genocides in Rwanda and in Germany, where only one side was guilty of crimes. In Darfur, the use of the term genocide has allowed the rebel groups to slip under the radar and commit crimes against humanity without the rest of the world taking notice. Had “genocide” not been the focus, activist campaigns may have challenged the rebel groups and checked their criminal acts of violence and bloodshed. For example, Eritrea, Chad and the SPLM were the principal funders of the rebel groups in Darfur. They are also allies and aid recipients of the US government, which means they could have easily been pressured to cut their lifelines to the rebel groups.
When perusing past congressional bills, one can see that shortly after the US government sent aid and military support to the SPLM in 2006, the SPLM sent financial and military support to Darfur rebel groups. It was as if the United States government was funding the Darfur rebel groups via the SPLM. This could have been easily prevented if American activist groups had not ignored the involvement and culpability of rebel groups in Darfur.
[To be continued . . .]
Marc Gustafson is a doctoral candidate and Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford. He is currently writing his dissertation on political trends in Sudan: www.marcgustafson.com
Without getting into the argument itself Marc Gustafson seems to make the facts fit the theories. Before SDC came into existence in the summer of 2004 there was no peacekeeping in Darfur so that the US changed its financing can/cannot be related to SDC campaigning. That a AU force came into existence had many reasons, US policy is only one factor.
He writes: ”Had the Darfur activists not advocated for a reallocation of funds, more lives would have been saved’
Perhaps Marc Gustafson does not realise that much of the reason of deaths from disease and malnutrition is not a lack of funding for the humanitarian response; actually Darfur has never had so many doctors and nurses working there; the hospitals have never been stocked so well with medicines. Many of those now interested in Darfur seem not to know how it was before the conflict started; healthcare was terrible/non-existent to large parts of the population and the WFP was feeding 200.000 people in North Darfur in 2002 already.
That those lives were lost to death and disease is a combination of living in IDP camps, loss of livelihoods, part obstruction of humanitarian aid by the Sudanese government and many other factors; to blame changed US funding because of SDC is ignorant.
Let’s try not to make facts up, or make them fit the theories, rather than the other way around.
Marc gets the funding issue all wrong. There wasn’t a shift away from humanitarian funding toward peacekeeping due to lobbyists. The reason the budget went up was the deployment of UNAMID. UNAMID was authorized in July 2007, before which the much smaller AU peacekeeping force was the only protection force on the ground. After UNAMID was authorized by the UN Security Council the US was required by UN rules to pay about a quater of the total budget of the force. Thus, the numbers went up. The funding split for the first few years of the conflict can be explain by the fact that humanitarians were able to provide assistance and large numbers of peacekeepers were not present. It had nothing to do with lobbyists.
Humanitarian funding did not suffer from the deployment of UNAMID. In fact, humanitarian organizations were strongly calling for UNAMID to deploy quickly. If anything there is an arguement that long-term development assistance (in the form of the Milennium Challenge Account) in other places in the world were cut as a result of the growing global peacekeeping budget. US funding for the humanitarian opperation in Darfur remains robust.
Hey Bec,
We posted a reply to Mr. Gustafon’s article on our website, it can be found here:
http://operationbrokensilence.org/2009/08/20/a-rebuttal-to-an-article-by-marc-gustafon-concerning-darfur/
Jan,
First, I don’t think it is at all off the mark to say that the reallocation of government funds can be linked to the SDC lobbying and public pressure campaigns. According to public IRS records, the SDC hired lobbyists and transformed itself from an awareness campaign to a public pressure campaign almost two years after it was first launched in the summer of 2004. Before the SDC hired lobbyists and actively began to pressure US government officials to focus on military intervention, the US government proportionately allocated more money to humanitarian aid than it did to violence prevention and peace-keeping. After the lobbyists were hired, the SDC began to pressure US officials to focus more on preventing violence and funding military intervention. I know this because I have almost five years of SDC newsletters in my email inbox and I have cataloged every public pressure effort directed by the SDC. The SDC always makes it clear to its supporters what legislation it is lobbying for or drafting itself.
This is no secret, the emphasis on military intervention and violence prevention has been the central driving force of the SDC for many years. As an observer, who has attended Darfur rallies, meetings and other events since its inception, I am surprised that anyone would argue that the SDC’s lobbying efforts (post 2005) did not play a role in how the US government allocated its funds. I think you might be confused, thinking that I meant that the SDC started lobbying the US government when it first incorporated, but you’ll see above that I specified the date (2006) that the campaign began to lobby and pressure the government directly.
Second, I am aware that Darfur has many doctors and an unprecedented amount of humanitarian aid. But the fact remains that the number of those dying of disease and malnutrition remained high after 2004 while the number of violent deaths declined rapidly, which can only mean one thing: The humanitarian needs of the Darfur community were still not being met. Even after looking at each UNAMID assessment report for the past year, one can see that disease and diarrhea are still serious problems in Darfur and Chadian refugee camps.
I do not, as you say, blame the SDC for the loss of lives in refugee camps. I am simply saying that the SDC should not have put so much pressure on the US government to focus on violence when the problems of disease and malnutrition were much greater. Of course, the SDC is not responsible for the loss of lives, but more lives could have been saved if the SDC had lobbied for humanitarian support rather than violence prevention.
Mark,
I have read your rebuttal and was disappointed to see that the comments section under your response to my article was closed. Since you’ve devoted such a large section of you website to my CSMonitor piece, I would like the opportunity to respond. Hopefully, you’ll be willing to post a response from me?
Marc,
I’d love to see your response. We disabled the comments on the website due to some major spamming issues that we could not find a good enough solution for. You can email it to me at mchackett@operationbrokensilence.org