Rob Crilly is a British journalist I met in Nairobi. He has spent the past five years covering Darfur, and has his first book coming out later this year, entitled Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War. He and I disagree on several things (the value of the ICC for instance) and he, like many, has been known to find my earnestness most frustrating: “You don’t seem to understand my role. I am the bloke who stands on the sidelines criticising other people. I don’t actually offer solutions”, he finds cause to remind me. But for all that I enjoy speaking with him and value his opinion.

In this post Crilly is coming from the exact opposite end of things from Tim Nonn’s piece, with his focus firmly on the strategic question of what policies to push for. Posting this forces us head-on into the challenge of even attempting to have this discussion today – namely, there is currently no consensus among those interested in Darfur about what the situation that we are dealing with actually is. Policy prescriptions flow from an analysis of the situation. When there is no consensus on the analysis, it is not surprising there is no consensus on what policies to push for.  The debates going on within the advocacy movement are the same ones going on among those involved in the Obama Administration’s Sudan policy review.

I’m increasingly of the view that above and beyond the undoubted power of “the g-word” to motivate people to join a movement for Darfur, Powell’s genocide determination had another function in the U.S., which was to create something much closer to a consensus on what the situation was than we have today. Mamdani now argues that the genocide determination was purely political. I disagree, but regardless, the point is that it was not viewed as such by the majority of people in the U.S. at the time.

It is partly for the benefits brought by having a consensus on what the situation is, that David Scheffer argues we should stop talking about whether or not a situation is genocide while the crimes are ongoing. If there are what he terms “atrocity crimes”, then that is cause for action. So is this the most sensible way forward?  This series is not the place to re-hash the is it/is it not genocide question on the merits (I can set up a separate series for that later if useful). But I’m interested in whether the Scheffer approach is a way out, or whether fudging over our disagreements on this just means we end of up with policies that no one really believes in?

The Analysis Is The Problem

Rob Crilly

There are longer, bigger, more deadly wars in Africa. More than five million people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s conflicts. Somalia has been mired in anarchy ever since the collapse of central government in 1991. Yet Darfur is the one that has captured public imagination and dominated what little coverage there is of Africa’s bloodshed.

The triumph of the Darfur advocacy movement has been to turn what could have been just another war into everyone’s favourite African war, one that matters to politicians and that mobilises thousands of protesters to take to the streets.

Its tragedy has been to waste that public pressure on the wrong solutions.

The Darfur advocates have got a lot of what they wanted. The deployment of a blue-helmeted United Nations peacekeeping force would not have happened without the intervention of George Clooney or huge displays of public support. They have also come out in favour of the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir

Both are serious impediments to the search for peace in Darfur.

Criminalising Bashir reduces the prospects that mediation and negotiation will be successful.

And for two years the focus on rehatting the struggling African Union force meant any peace process was forgotten.

All this means the advocates have not failed in their objectives, rather that they have picked the wrong targets.

Their challenge now is to set their sights on measures that will achieve peace rather than regime change.

That means adopting a more realistic analysis of the messy conflict that rumbles on in Darfur, ditching their black and white analysis of an Arab genocide directed at African tribes.

Of course that comes with challenges. Save Darfur’s simplistic analysis has helped generate support and kept Sudan on the news pages.

Is a more complex, nuanced understanding compatible with the mass movement campaign of the previous years? Maybe not.

But the strident cries to Save Darfur by a movement dominated by Evangelical and Jewish groups has polarised the debate, alienated key thinkers and silenced the Arab world.

Time and again Bashir has been able to outmanoeuvre his divided opponents and accuse them of misrepresenting the conflict.

Every time pressure has built to take action it has been dissipated by a regime that knows how the United Nations Security Council works.

Saving Darfur isn’t important enough to mean the US, Britain and France will spend political capital on bringing China and Russia into line every time a vote comes up. We get a shot every now and again. Too often political capital has been spent on the wrong solutions – sending UN peacekeepers, for example – and the political capital and pressure are wasted.

The trick now is to work together to keep pressure on Sudan to get through the crucial next couple of years without plunging further into bloodshed. Next year’s elections and south Sudan’s referendum both hold the key to building a modern Sudan, but they also carry risks of complete meltdown.

The advocates have to recognise that their narrow focus on Darfur misses the fact that Darfur is only one part of Sudan’s bigger malaise: the country is an empire barely held together by a centre that is weaker than many people realise.

Darfur will be solved by addressing the institutional weaknesses of the country, not by short-term military interventions.

The advocates don’t need to change their game. They simply need to up their game, and make sure their analysis matches reality – rather than their prejudices.