Darfur, the Media and the ‘War on Terror’

How was the encounter of Muslim and Western represented in the Darfur crisis? Starting in the spring and summer of 2004, the crisis in the western Sudanese region of Darfur became the most intensely covered African crisis in the world media, ever. Not only this, but it also occasioned one of the most sustained and enthusiastic international responses to any crisis of this kind. From the summer of 2004, people who could hardly locate Africa, let alone Sudan, on a map, knew about the crisis in Darfur, and could effortlessly pronounce the word janjaweed. School-children were donating their lunch money or organizing raffle sales to help the humanitarian effort in Darfur. The crisis became headline news for every major media outlet. The Secretary General of the United Nations, and almost every foreign minister in any country that considered itself a serious world player, came visiting. Hundreds of journalists and thousands of aid workers poured into the region. Celebrities and iconic movie stars, such as Mia Farrow, George Clooney and Angelina Jolie, were jostling each other for photo-opportunities in refugee camps. There was never anything like it, before, or since. Darfur, as one author put it, became ‘everyone’s favourite African war’[1], while the campaign to put it on the world map became ‘the most successful propaganda campaign of its kind this decade.’[2]

Echoes of the ‘War on Terror’?

The attention Darfur received eclipsed many other crises, which hardly received a mention during that period, but were much more devastating in terms of human cost. In neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the estimated causalities in the civil war since 1998 reached over 5.4m dead by 2007,[3]  with millions displaced (compared to 200,000 dead and 2m displaced in Darfur according to the higher estimates). Even in Sudan itself, the war that had raged in the South for decade was said to have also claimed over 2 million dead and over 4 million displaced. But the human carnage in those crises hardly elicited substantial media coverage, let alone feverish international campaigns. Envious aid workers in Somalia or Congo wished they could entice celebrities like George Clooney and others who flocked to Darfur to drop by, so that ‘their’ crises could get similar attention, while journalists suggesting stories about them would be rebuffed by editors. The latter, however, would jump on any Darfur story, no matter how trivial.[4]

More interestingly, according to Columbia University’s Mahmoud Mamdani, the Darfur crisis erupted at the same time as the war in Iraq. The two conflicts followed a similar pattern (clashes between rebel forces and regular armies, proliferation of militias and heavy civilian casualties). Both conflicts flared up around the same time, and both involved a very high level of civilian casualties. In fact, the Iraq civilian casualties were higher (estimates range between 400,000 and 1,033,000, compared to between 70,000 to 400,000 in Darfur), with a higher ratio of violent deaths (estimates vary between 38 to 92%, compared to 20-30% in Darfur). However, the conflict in Darfur was classified as genocide, while Iraq was described as a ‘counter-insurgency’.[5]

Why, therefore, did the Darfur conflict elicit such a powerful reaction from American and Western audiences, while the conflict in Iraq did not? What attracted so much media attention than comparable conflicts in Africa and beyond? One obvious answer, hinted at by Mamdani, but made more explicit by others, revolves around the identity of the accused. If the alleged perpetrators had happened to be the US or some of its allies, as was the case in Iraq or DRC, then the crimes would be overlooked. If the perpetrators were America’s enemies, then there would be an outcry. Unlike the case in Darfur, therefore, Kinshasa is not Islamic, and its foreign exploiters are the United States, Britain, France and other African states allies with the West –most notably Rwanda and Uganda. Hence, it is Congo’s vastly greater death toll over ten years that has been totally ignored, while to its north, it was Darfur that became a “cause célèbre in America”.[6]

Mamdani’s slightly more nuanced answer is derived from the very nature of the response to Darfur, which he noted was eminently “apolitical”. The Save Darfur Coalition brought together political groups from left and right: Christian evangelists rubbing shoulders with black civil rights campaigners, liberals fraternising with conservatives, and Jews and atheists campaigning alongside Muslim activists. The campaign managed to gather ‘support among entertainers, the spin doctors of modern culture, and literary giants in the world of culture, almost across the political spectrum.’ All were seduced by the chance to bask ‘in the moral glow of a global humanitarian cause’ that was above and beyond politics.[7]

This was a by-product of the success of ‘depoliticising’ the Darfur crisis, detaching it from any context, history or politics. It was simply a case of good against evil, echoing the rhetoric of the ‘War on Terror’, with which it was closely linked. This depoliticization also impacted the American arena itself, as shown by the way it managed to paper over the fundamental cleavages within American politics. This feat has been achieved by depicting the campaign as a moral crusade against pure evil, one in which (unlike Iraq) America bears no political responsibility, but had a moral responsibilitytowards. Therefore, Iraq was a divisive cause which did not manage to gain similar support, since it involves politics and American responsibility.[8]

The Darfur campaign link to the ‘War on Terror’ does not stop at its comparable use of the language of good versus evil, but can also be seen in the targeting of the alleged ‘Arab’ perpetrators of ‘genocide’. The campaign focuses on the claim that ‘perpetrators and victims in Darfur belong to two different racial groups, Arab and African, and that the Arab perpetrator is evil.’ As a consequence, Darfur can be neatly integrated into the War on Terror, for Darfur gives the Warriors on Terror a valuable asset with which to demonize an enemy: a “genocide” perpetrated by Arabs. More precisely, because the crimes in Darfur were perpetrated mainly by “Arabs,” they could be demonized as genocide.[9]

This is made easy by the fact that the “Arabs” ‘have already been successfully demonized by the War on Terror.’ The Arabization of the violence in Darfur—of the Janjaweed in particular, and the counterinsurgency in general—derives less from the history of Darfur than from the logic of the War on Terror. The harsh truth is that the War on Terror has provided the coordinates, the language, the images, and the sentiment for interpreting Darfur… The more such an interpretation takes root, the more Darfur becomes not just an illustration of the grand narrative of the War on Terror but also a part of its justification.[10]

One can infer that the prominence of such groups as the religious right and pro-Israel lobby at the head of this agitation confirms the link to the ‘war on terror’, since these groups did support the war in Iraq and fiercely defend Israel’s far-from-humanitarian victimization of the Palestinians. Their so-called ‘moral compass’ which, in the words of New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof, is activated ‘not only by human suffering but also by human evil’, seems to malfunction in the vicinity of Israel or around Iraq’s killing fields. Further confirmation can be found in the wilful representation of the facts, not only in the inflation of figures and the insistence of portraying the conflict as one between ‘African’ and ‘Arab’, when in fact it was in essence mainly a conflict between landless tribes and land-rich rivals, and both groups included ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ components.[11]

Background to the Debate

Before delving further into this debate, it might be useful to briefly outline the context in which the Darfur conflict erupted and unfolded.[12] The current war in Darfur flared up in 2002-2003 when two rebel movements, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Development Movement (JEM) began launching attacks on police and army posts in Darfur. One of the most spectacular attacks was a joint assault on the airport at El-Fasher, the capital of the state of North Darfur, where rebels destroyed six military aircraft, killed scores of soldiers and captured Sudan’s Air Force Commander, himself from Darfur. He was later released when his tribe put pressure on the rebels.

After a number of fruitless attempts to resolve the matter politically, the government launched an all-out attack on rebel strongholds, using air bombardment and ground troops. Most controversially, the government enlisted the help of militias known by the pejorative generic name ‘Janjaweed’, (which implies lawlessness and banditry). Most of these militias come from nomadic ‘Arab’ tribes in North Darfur, as well as recent migrants from Chad and other neighbouring countries. In this, the regime has exploited long-running tensions between Darfur ethnic groups vying with each other for increasingly scarce natural resources. This pitting of one group against another, by a state which is supposed to protect both, is in itself an ethically questionable tactic. However, the core issue has revolved around accusations of mass atrocities committed by the Janjaweed, aided and abetted by the military, including mass murder of civilians, women and children, as well as rape, looting and burning of villages. The government, it is alleged, did not make an effort to restrain the militias, nor did it bring any of the perpetrators to justice.

Over 80 tribes and ethnic groups live in Darfur, evenly divided in numbers between ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ tribes. The designation ‘Arab’ and non-Arab is a loose one, and often refers to life-style more than anything else. The ‘Arabs’ are mostly nomadic, and they do not speak any of the indigenous languages as a first language. However, since the ‘Arabs’ have lived in Darfur for many centuries, and have intermarried with other groups, it is often not possible to distinguish the different groups by appearance.

Most tribes have their own historically designated territory, or ‘dar’ (home). This in turn has its roots in practices within the ancient Kingdom of Darfur (the ‘Land of the Fur’), which emerged as an independent Muslim kingdom at the beginning of the 17th century. It covered about a fifth of Sudan’s area (before the secession of the South, around 500,000 square kilometres). The territories were assigned by rulers, or were traditionally acquired through actual residence. Some of the territories (such as Dar Masalit or Dar Tama), belonged to kingdoms incorporated into the Kingdom of Darfur at various stages in its history, which remained autonomous until its incorporation into Egyptian-ruled Sudan in 1874. Darfur regained its independence after the fall of the Mahdist state in 1898, but was annexed to Sudan by the British again in 1916 when its ruler sided with Turkey during World War I.

However, not all tribes have dars. In particular, the nomadic Arab tribes known as ‘Abbala’ (camel herders) did not earlier need, nor were they given, dars. However, these tribes have acquired acknowledged grazing and watering rights along their customary migratory roots, known as masars. Some tribes that migrated from Chad and other areas in the past few decades also did not possess dars. However, all acquired customary rights either of residence and use of land. Since the devastating droughts of the 1970s, pressure on land began to mount, as tribes residing in the North began to move south in search of fertile land. At the same time, settled farmers began to dispute the grazing rights of nomads, who found their customary grazing routes and watering areas being blocked by expanding farms. Conflicts began to erupt, and had been exacerbated by other factors, including endemic instability in neighbouring Chad and foreign interventions in that country. The establishment of regional autonomy in 1981 also re-ignited ethnic rivalries. From 1999, the split within the ruling Islamists also impacted Darfur. Many Darfurian Islamists sided with the ousted speaker of Parliament and former ruling party chief, Dr Hasan Turabi, against President Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir, and were in turn victimised by the regime. The loss of large sections of its Islamist cadres in Darfur also made it difficult for the regime to use its ‘assets’ on the ground to contain and resolve local conflicts and dissent.[13]

Among the two rebel movements, the SLA is more secular in inclinations, and was supported mainly by Eritrea and the Southern rebel movement, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). Its main constituency is the Fur tribe, but in an alliance with sections of the Zaghawa tribe. JEM, by contrast, drew its support mainly from the Zaghawa, with more support on the Chadian side of the border. It has also been accused by the regime of close links to the Turabi faction, and the movement received support from Chad and Libya. The third major non-Arab ethnicity, the Massalit, did not have a rebel movement of its own, but some factions in both the SLA and JEM belonged to it.

The government main counter-insurgency operations lasted from around June 2003 to February 2004, and targeted the rebel strongholds in the dars of the Fur, Zaghawa and Massalit. Estimates of casualties range from 70,000 to 200,000 dead, with around 2m displaced. The government continued to contend that no more than 10,000 died, including casualties on the government side. But while the figures continue to be a source of acrimonious disputes, two facts can safely be asserted. The first is that many atrocities have been committed. A report commissioned by the government in 2004 conceded that acts of murder, rape and pillage did take place, but on a much smaller scale than being widely alleged by international NGOs and others. The report also blamed all sides for the violations.[14] A UN commission appointed in 2004 also rejected the claims about genocide, but found that atrocities have been committed, and recommended referring the issue to the International Criminal Court (ICC).[15]

The other fact relates to subsequent developments. Most observers agree that the bulk of violence took place before the summer of 2004. Since then, the conflict in Darfur has turned into a low intensity one, hardly involving genocide and mass murder. In fact, the Commander of the UN-African peace keeping troops in Darfur (UNAMID), the Rwandan General Martin Luther Agwai, expressed the view in August 2009 that the conflict in Darfur had turned into "very low intensity" clashes and banditry. Speaking to reporters at the end of his tour of duty in Darfur, he said that, apart from sporadic clashes that were few and far between, ‘’there is no war as of now in Darfur." His remarks infuriated rebels and Darfur activists, who accused him of making ‘misleading’ and ‘biased’ remarks.[16] However, journalists and other people working in the field concurred that what was going on in Darfur by 2008 was ‘a low-intensity conflict, where deaths come in ones and twos’.[17]

America & Darfur

Riding the crest of this feverish media interest, Kristof began to warn that an ‘unnoticed genocide’ was taking place in Darfur. Together with Anan’s remarks, this repeated mention of genocide alerted the powerful Jewish lobby in the US. On July 14, 2004, Ruth Messenger, head of the charity US Jewish World Service, and Jerry Fowler, head of the Committee on Conscience at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, convened a meeting on the crisis in New York, which was addressed by Holocaust survivor and Noble Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel. That meeting became the nucleus of the Save Darfur Coalition, which boasted 180 member organizations with an estimated reach of 130 m people. Of these, 1 million were active supporters and 30,000 grass roots activists. Over 750 student groups all over US universities became involved.[18]

A great part of the success has been due to SDC’s media savvy tactics. It employed a specialized advertising agency and spent the bulk of the money it generated on media campaigns. It succeeded in recruiting prominent celebrities from sports and the entertainment industry, and what Mamdani called “child soldiers”: tens of thousands of students who campaigned tirelessly and used the new media technologies to get thousands more hooked into the campaign. But what was crucial was the simple and simplified narrative employed, and the powerful and evocative language used: genocide was being committed; evil “Arab” militias, recruited and financed by a despotic “fanatical Islamist” regime were committing mass murder against helpless “African” civilians.

The regime in Khartoum was an easy target for vilification. Throughout the 1990s, it had been the focus of concerted campaigns from almost every quarter: human rights groups appalled by its dismal human rights record; aid agencies frustrated by lack of access to the war zones and famine affected regions; Christian evangelists and church groups agitating over what they saw as persecution of Christians in the South and attacks on religious freedoms, etc. The Christians right also made accusations against the regime of engaging in slavery in the South, allegations that were later revealed to have been largely fabricated.[19] The US and major western governments (and some Arab and African neighbours, such as Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda) accused it of sponsoring terrorism. After 1991, the US added the charge of destabilising neighbours, especially when the regime took a lead in opposing the US intervention against Iraq in Kuwait, and later in Somalia.

So when the Darfur crisis erupted, there was already a pre-existing powerful coalition of anti-Sudan activists poised for action.[20] Some of the activists, such as Eric Reeves and Congressmen like Donald Payne and Frank Wolf, just continued their on-going campaigns on the South and added Darfur to their repertoire.[21] It was thus not a hard task mobilising Congress to address Darfur, with the debate reaching ‘fever pitch in both houses through June and July, as Congress debated in earnest whether to declare Darfur ‘genocide’ under a Concurrent Congressional resolution’. The resolution was passed on 22 July, and ‘both houses declared Darfur to constitute genocide – the House by a unanimous vote of 422 to 0, the Senate by a voice vote.’[22]

In September, Secretary of State Colin Powell took the decision to declare the conflict in Darfur a genocide. In a testimony before a Senate hearing on September 9, 2004, Powell expressed the view that ‘genocide has been committed in Darfur … and genocide may still be occurring’, blaming the government and its allied militias for the atrocities.[23] Powell based his determination on an investigation conducted among refugees in Eastern Chad by a selected group of NGO’s was contracted by the State Department. Powell admitted that his legal team informed him that the data was inconclusive, but he took the personal decision to call Darfur a genocide. He did not consult the Defence Department, nor did he seek permission from the President.[24]

This was the first time the US officially designated an ongoing conflict as genocide, in stark contrast to the deliberate avoidance of using the term in the case of Rwanda. However, Powell specifically argued that no change in policy would follow. This has led many activists to argue that the Bush administration use of the term was the ‘cheap option’, deliberately deployed merely to camouflage its lack of effective action and as an alternative to it.[25] But the designation, coupled with the obvious inaction, and the explicit and implicit invocation of the spectre of Rwanda as the epitome of international (and in particular US) failure to act in time, galvanized civil society actors, provoking a virtual intifada of grassroots activism unprecedented in its reach and intensity with regards to foreign cause. As a result, Darfur became ‘a public issue rather than a bureaucratic one.’ The resulting broad political support made Darfur ‘the only issue about which Barack Obama and John McCain publicly agreed not to disagree at the start of their presidential contest in 2008.’[26]

The success of campaign surprised even its most optimistic advocates. Within 18 month, the organization had managed to achieve remarkable success in lobbying, organizing rallies and maintaining media attention. Significantly, it succeeded in engaging broad constituencies of activists who ‘were new to human rights activism’ and who ‘believed that the power to make “never again” meaningful was in their hands.’[27]

The tactics used contributed to this success. The activist networks were connected through elaborate web links, allowing members to monitor the passage of legislation through Congress and lobby congressmen at the appropriate time. Congressmen were also publicly graded on a scale of A to F over their responsiveness to the Darfur lobby. The scores were in turn used to pressurize ‘low score’ legislators and heap praise on those with high scores. The pressure reached a level that congressmen with low scores would call Save Darfur and ask what they needed to do in order to raise their scores. By the same token, government officials began to send their demands for funds to Congress via Save Darfur lobbyists, and regularly received more funds than what they asked for.[28]

Some of the tactics bordered on the underhand. For example, when activists decided to put pressure on China by threatening to damage the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which they dubbed the ‘Genocide Olympics’, one tactic used was to blackmail Steven Spielberg into quitting his position as artistic director of the opening and closing ceremonies. Activists likened Spielberg publicly to Hitler’s favorite film maker, and kept a campaign of attacks that eventually forced him to resign in February 2008.[29]

Such ‘bullying’ tactics angered some critics, and prompted some disillusioned activists to quit. Disagreement over tactics also led to frequent infighting, resulting in the sacking of Dave Rubenstein as Executive Director of the Save Darfur campaign in 2007.[30]

Debating the Debate

In contrast to the critics, supporters of the activism conducted by the Save Darfur Coalition (SDC) argue that it had, in fact, been a model of citizen engagement by publicly spirited idealists. Its achievements were ‘due to the thousands of ordinary American citizens who wanted to have a positive effect on the lives of ordinary citizens in Darfur.’[31] Inspired by works like Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (2002), which chronicled America’s serial failure to stop genocides from Armenia to Rwanda, activists took to heart her adage that the battle to stop genocide is won or lost in the ‘realm of domestic politics’ and that, ‘to stop genocide, Washington must first say the word.’[32] Students and other activists ‘believed that if by raising their voices they could push the U.S. government to stop the atrocities in Darfur quickly.’[33]

As the movement snowballed into one of the most successful mass mobilisation campaigns, it managed to achieve most of the goals it set itself: UN authorisation for peace keepers, the appointment of a US special envoy for Sudan, referring the genocide accusations to the International Criminal Court (ICC), and legislation passed against the lifting of sanctions on the Sudanese government. They then went on to conduct a relatively successful disinvestment campaign against Sudan, in addition to pressurising China to limit its support for Khartoum.[34]

While celebrating their successes, Save Darfur activists and supporters do acknowledge some of its many shortcomings. For one thing, they concede that they ’have been guilty at times of simplifying the nature of the conflict in order to attract and retain supporters’, and have also been ‘slow to recognize [their] influence over the decision-making of Darfuri rebels who assume that the advocacy movement will remain quiet about their negotiating intransigence and human rights abuses in Darfur and neighboring Chad.’[35] The misuse of mortality figures and the casual use of the genocide determination apart, the movement’s belligerence and its hold on Congress and the media intimidated US policymakers into decisions that ‘were more motivated by what advocates wanted to hear than to do what Darfuris needed.’[36] This included focusing on intervention to ‘stop genocide’ at a time when the fighting had already died down, and the need was more for aid than armed intervention. They have also negatively impacted peace efforts and, by pushing for legislation against lifting sanctions on Sudan, prevented much needed support for the peace agreement reached with the South in 2005. By the time the activists began to realise the limits of their approach, however, it was already too late, since they had already helped steer US policies onto a less than optimum course.

However, for critics like Mamdani, it is as simplistic as the movement’s general approach to plead the case of ‘a well-meaning organization that faced a steep learning curve’. For what is wrong with the movement is much more serious and fundamental than that. It was a movement that ‘masqueraded as a public interest group, but behaved very much in the tradition of a private lobby’.[37] It was a kind of movement that deprives both victims and potential supporters of agency, packaging “victimhood” as a commodity to market it to “consumers” through the media. It had had a negative impact on the cause by wilfully misrepresenting the facts and ignoring the context in favour of a simple and simplistic message. It is in fact, the other side of the coin of the ‘war on terror’, in approach, mind-set, assumptions and motivations, making it ‘the humanitarian face of the War on Terror’, which it also resembles in having turned ‘into a massive ad campaign, a set of mega posters, dedicated to spreading and sustaining a lethal illusion.’[38]

In its obliviousness to context as it emphasised the urgency to act first and think later, focusing on the ‘imperative to act, without offering any concrete guidance as to the form such action should take.’[39]

Conclusion: After Darfur?

The representation of ‘Darfur’ in the Western media and public space has certainly been filtered through several prisms which distorted perceptions about the conflict. First, there was the prism of Rwanda and the sense of guilt widely felt in the West about failure to act in time to stop atrocities. For the Jewish activists who were prominent in the mobilisation, it also evoked the Holocaust and its bitter memories of commission and omission. For most actors, a central filter was the image of the regime in Khartoum, already a pariah regime accused of being a fundamentalist Islamist, Arab supremacist, brutal dictatorship, oppressive of minorities and prone to committing atrocities, not to mention support for terrorism. Further down the line, there is the filter of the stereotype of ‘Arabs’ reinforced and reinvigorated by ‘war on terror’ clichés.

It is a supreme irony that, given the partially valid by some Western intellectuals that ‘our Western culture of consumption and commodification clashes with our humanitarian interests and obligations’,[40] it is interesting that the Darfur activism in particular has harnessed this specific tendency to commodification to stir mass western interest in the cause. Thus the campaigners for Darfur sought to encourage international intervention by ‘exploiting Western narcissism and shame rather than focusing on the complex details of the Darfur crisis’.[41] This radical transformation of the media coverage of Darfur into something more about the West than about Darfur is illustrated by Crilly’s experience with his editors in London and elsewhere, where he was compelled to file a story from Darfur, containing nothing new, which he would not have otherwise written, nor would be accepted by editors if he did.

While all this is compelling, there is another side to the story. The success of the Save Darfur movement in mobilising ordinary citizens who never engaged in human rights activism, and convincing them to give time, funds and effort for a cause of victims in far-away place to which they had no connection, is a great achievement. It should be hailed and celebrated, and its lessons learned and its achievements built on. It is also a fact that serious atrocities have been committed in Darfur, whether we call it genocide or not, and regardless of the fact that most of these are now in the past.

But while conceding all this, if these countries offer to intervene to help victims of atrocities in cases such as Sierra Leone, Libya, Kosovo or Darfur, shall we tell them to go and save Gaza first? Recent episodes, such as the intervention in Libya (or the lack of it in Syria), make it clear that, in spite of reservations about the motives of outside actors, leaving tyrants to rampage and murder at cannot be an option. Civilians need to be protected from mass murder, and if someone is willing and able to do it, then it would be a crime to prevent them from doing so.

Where the Western activists went wrong was in neglecting that the interests of the victims of the conflict would best be served by peace and reconciliation. The international community, including the UN and major Western powers, knew that only a negotiated peaceful solution could work, and consequently intervened to put pressure on all parties to agree and sign the Abuja Peace Agreement in May 2006. However, the rhetoric of ‘genocide’ atrocity is difficult to square with the logic of peace and reconciliation. If the US really believed that genocide was being committed, then there was a duty to intervene, depose the regime by force, and arrest the genocide perpetrators. The fact that this option was not even considered indicates a lack of conviction about the charges. But the maintenance of the rhetoric of genocide, and the persistent activism around it made it very difficult to promote peace. It also helped promote intransigence among the rebel movements and contributed to their fragmentation. Thus the people of Darfur were left in a no-war no-peace situation. In this, the many critics of the Save Darfur activism were right: First, do no harm.