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NEWS & LETTERS, October 2004The Left fiddles while Darfur burns
by Peter Hudis On the surface, it may appear that the international
community is finally waking up to the genocide that the Sudanese government has
been inflicting against the Black people of Darfur. After refusing for months to
use the word "genocide" in reference to attacks by Sudan’s
government and its Janjaweed militias, Secretary of State Colin Powell stated in
early September that genocide is occurring in Darfur. And on Sept. 20 the UN Security Council passed a
resolution calling on Sudan to "resolve" the crisis peacefully and
threatened sanctions if it fails to do so. However, there is less substance to
these responses than meets the eye. First, the resolution passed by the UN Security Council
limits itself to calling for an international commission to
"investigate" charges of war crimes and only says it will
"consider" imposing sanctions on Sudan if it does not cooperate. The
UN has not taken any steps to actually stop the fighting, which is taking 10,000
lives a month. Second, the UN and Bush administration are calling on
the Sudanese government--the very force which instigated the atrocities in
Darfur--to "disarm" the Janjaweed militias, which it has so far shown
virtually no interest in doing. Third, Powell has stated that no action will be taken
against Sudan unless the UN Security Council agrees that genocide is occurring
in Darfur--something that will almost certainly not happen, since that approach
is staunchly opposed by China, which has large investments in Sudan’s oil
sector, as well as its own oppressed minorities. As a result, while thousands of people in Darfur
continue to die from military attacks and from malnutrition in refugee camps
near Sudan’s border with Chad, the international community, including the
Africa Union, continues to respond with either indifference or watered-down
resolutions. Hundreds of thousands more may die within the next few months,
unless the Sudanese government is forced to stop its scorched-earth policy in
Darfur. Yet the Bush administration has made it clear that it is not interested
in directly intervening in Darfur, given the trouble it is facing in trying to
keep control of areas (like Iraq) which it deems "vital to U.S. national
interests." RESPONSE FROM THE LEFT It should come as no surprise that the U.S. has
responded so meekly to the genocide in Darfur; after all, stopping genocide has
never been a major factor in its deliberations over whether or not to intervene
in crises overseas. The failure of the U.S. to take any action to stop the
genocide in Bosnia in the early 1990s (200,000 dead) and in Rwanda in the
mid-1990s (800,000 dead) are the most recent cases in point. More shocking (though perhaps also not surprising) has
been the response of many left-wing critics of U.S. foreign policy. Incredibly,
many are now denying that genocide is occurring in Darfur at all. Some argue
that the belated efforts of the U.S. and European Union to get Sudan to stop its
attacks on Darfur is part of an effort to gain control of Sudan’s oil and to
undermine the position of China, which is the largest foreign investor in
Sudan’s oil industry. Such denials of genocide fly in the face of both
accounts by independent journalists and reports issued by Amnesty International
and Human Rights Watch. One leftist, John Laughland, wrote in THE GUARDIAN on
Aug. 2: "We ought to treat with skepticism the U.S. Congress declaration of
genocide in the region....Our media has taken this complex picture [in Sudan]
and projected on it a simple morality tale of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
They gloss over the fact that the Janjaweed militia come from the same ethnic
group and religion as they are allegedly persecuting."(1) In fact, no one has questioned that the Janjaweed as
well as the residents of Darfur are Muslims. The conflict is not an
intra-religious conflict (as has been the case with Sudan’s three-decade war
against secessionists in the southern part of the country) but one in which the
central government is trying to crush aspirations for self-determination and an
equitable distribution of the nation’s wealth by Darfur’s non-Arab, Black
populace. LEFTIST EXCUSES Laughland and others are recycling the same kinds of
arguments in regard to Sudan that we used to hear on Bosnia and Kosova, namely
that Germany (which helped broker the recent negotiations between Sudan and the
rebels in the south) is trying to "break up" Sudan just as it
supposedly helped break up Yugoslavia, and the U.S. is "inventing"
tales of ethnic cleansing in Darfur in order to bring down an
"anti-imperialist" government. (In fact, as late as June 1991, when
Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, Germany reaffirmed its support
for a unified Yugoslavia, as did the U.S.; and Milosevic’s Serbia was an
authoritarian state-capitalist regime which never represented any kind of
alternative to the capitalist West.) Until the crisis in Darfur became too noticeable to
ignore in the past few months, the Bush administration was trying to forge
closer relations with Sudan. Sudan denounced the September 11 attacks and said
it was willing to work with the U.S. to "combat terrorism," and Bush
followed this up by repairing some of the damage caused by Clinton’s
destruction of Sudan’s main pharmaceutical plant by a U.S. preemptive attack
in 1999. Then as now, all too many on the Left seem willing to
close their eyes to the brutal fact of ethnic cleansing and genocide, so long as
the government committing such crimes issues enough "anti-imperialist"
rhetoric to be viewed as a "victim" of U.S. policy. Another leftist, Stephen Gowens, has recently written
that while genocide "may" be occurring in Darfur, we should still
oppose efforts by outside powers to stop the fighting since "the only
effective protection against these attacks is to put an end to the imperialism
that prompts them in the first place. And since what lies behind the exploiting,
subjugating, and plunder is the incessant drive to accumulate that lies at the
heart of capitalism, the task of achieving [an end to the violence] is
inseparable from the task of replacing capitalism."(2) This abstract revolutionism that ignores how to
IMMEDIATELY stop the genocide in Darfur isn’t worth the paper it’s written
on. It tries to USE the suffering in Darfur to generate "a movement against
capitalism" instead of actively solidarizing with the people of Darfur.
Such abstract calls for "revolution" only undermine the very idea of
revolution. For why should anyone listen to leftists who call for a revolution
against capitalism if they display such insensitivity towards actual people
facing genocide? The reason why many leftists failed to solidarize with
Bosnia and Kosova and are repeating that with Darfur today is that despite their
"anti-capitalist" rhetoric, they aren’t rooted in a vision of a new
society centered on the self-activity of the human subject. What Marko Hoare
wrote of the non-response to the "ethnic cleansing" of Bosnia and
Kosova remains unfortunately all too true: "More striking even than the
defense of denial of crimes against humanity by the left revisionists is their
sheer lack of any positive vision for the future." The IMMEDIATE--solidarizing with the people of Darfur--is
inseparable from the ULTIMATE--working out a comprehensive, liberating vision of
a noncapitalist future. NOTES 1. See "The mask of altruism disguising a colonial
war," by John Laughland, THE GUARDIAN, Aug. 2, 2004. 2."Sudan:
Round Gazillion," by Stephen Gowans |
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