Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Darfur Sudan news round-up: Alex de Waal, New York Times, SRS (Sudan Radio Service)

Sharp Increase in Lethal Violence in Darfur
Report from Alex de Waal's blog, Making Sense of Sudan
By Alex de Waal, published on Saturday, 5 June 2010:
May 2010 saw the largest number of recorded violent fatalities in Darfur since the arrival of UNAMID in January 2008. According to the figures compiled by the Joint Mission Analysis Centre (JMAC), there were 491 confirmed fatalities and 108 unconfirmed but very probable fatalities during the month, about five times higher than the average for the last year.

The reason for the increase in violence is fighting between JEM and the Sudan Armed Forces, which accounts for 440 deaths. At the time of the ceasefire agreement signed in N’djamena in February (and subsequently in Doha), JEM was required to relocate inside Darfur and joint Sudanese and Chadian forces began patrolling the border. A large and well-equipped JEM force established itself at Jebel Moon. The ceasefire lasted two months, and after it collapsed, with no additional progress in the Doha talks, the fighting rapidly resumed, alongside GoS efforts to prevent Khalil Ibrahim from returning to the field. Unwilling to fight defensively, JEM preferred to go on the offensive. It was forced out of Jebel Moon and instead dispersed across Darfur and into parts of Kordofan, taking the war to these areas. The largest number of clashes has been in south-east Darfur but JEM has also been active in the vicinity of al Fashir.

Reports indicate that JEM has made alliances, possibly tactical and operational, with the SLA in Jebel Marra and with disgruntled Arab groups.

JEM forces have also been responsible for an upsurge in carjacking, capturing 13 vehicles. Among them were UNAMID supply trucks carrying fuel and other provisions. Cut off from its Chadian supply base, JEM is now resupplying itself from whatever resources it can find in Darfur and Kordofan, and UNAMID supplies are an attractive target.

Even without this, May would have been an above-average month for lethal violence, because of an increase in inter-tribal fighting in West Darfur, which caused 119 fatalities (monthly total for inter-tribal fighting: 126). The previous two months have actually seen even higher levels of inter-tribal violence, including fighting in the Kass-Jebel Marra area between the Missiriya and Nuwaiba Arab tribes. The repercussions of the collapse of the Suq al Mawasir pyramid scheme in al Fashir also have security repercussions, first in that the angry defrauded investors have been mobilizing to make their case to the authorities, and second in that commanders of armed groups had been profiting from the scheme and are now left without that source of easy income.
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News from SRS (Sudan Radio Service):

Saturday, June 05, 2010

Sudan activists - "Rethinking Darfur" by Marc Gustafson

  • As an awareness campaign, the SDC was very effective, but it failed to portray the story of Darfur accurately.
  • During 2007 a number of American political figures proposed that the United States should attempt to fix things by attacking Sudan.
  • The violent death rate in Darfur declined significantly after a ceasefire was signed in April 2004, while the number of those who were dying of disease and malnutrition remained high.
  • Despite the decline in violent deaths, activists, journalists, and academics continued to sensationalize the problems in Darfur.
  • The very existence of peace talks was rarely mentioned in American media. Activist groups and individuals dismissed the process as irrelevant.
  • The increase of international troops in Darfur did not reduce the problem of banditry or improve access to the affected population.
  • Stories of race-based rampage and warfare—like the one activists promoted in Darfur—attract more attention than do more mundane but materially more devastating events.
  • Ignoring the changes in the scale and nature of the Darfur conflict has hindered understanding of and response to the conflict.
Source: Cato Institute - Foreign Policy Briefing No. 89
June 1, 2010
Rethinking Darfur
By Marc Gustafson

Here is a copy, in full:

Executive Summary

The war in Darfur has been devastating to the Darfuri people, and its aftermath has been a tragic story of suffering, displacement and sorrow. At the same time, the war has become one of the most misunderstood conflicts in recent history. Analysts and activists have oversimplified the causes of the war, slighting its historical and systemic causes. For years, public commentators ignored important changes in the scale and nature of the violence in Darfur, causing important misperceptions among the public and in the policy community.

Analysts misrepresented the scale of the conflict by selecting high-end estimates from local casualty surveys and then extrapolating them over the entire region. They also largely ignored the fact that the majority of the deaths from violence occurred before the end of 2004. Similarly, many commentators failed to mention that disease and malnutrition (as a consequence of war) caused over 80 percent of the casualties in Darfur, far more than violence itself. The total number of people who have died from violence in Darfur is approximately 60,000, which is considerably smaller than the 400,000 casualties often cited by activists.

This policy briefing draws on historical analysis, explores mortality surveys, and dissects six years of American budgetary allocations in Sudan to demonstrate that the conflict in Darfur has been misunderstood by both policymakers and the general public, leading to problems in crafting policy toward that troubled land.

Marc Gustafson is a Marshall Scholar and doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford. He is currently writing his dissertation on political trends in Sudan.

Introduction

In the summer of 2004, one of the largest American activist movements in recent history emerged in response to the plight of a population located in Darfur, one of the most remote regions of the world. In this mostly desert province along Sudan’s western border with Chad, a civil war between the government of Sudan and two rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Army, or SLA, and the Justice and Equality Movement, or JEM, had killed thousands of civilians and displaced millions from their homes. The Khartoum government perpetrated war crimes against civilians in Darfur, and the rebel groups showed a similar disregard for the most basic human rights of the civilian population in the region.

The causes of the civil war in Darfur include a troubled history of sub-state political and economic disputes, land rights, geopolitical interference and the rapid diminution of water resources and arable land due to desertification.[1] This decades-long story of Darfur’s development, however, is a complicated one to convey to a large public audience. Instead, by the summer of 2004, stories of unidirectional murder, rape, and genocide started to appear in American newspapers. In the absence of historical context, these stories came to define the public’s perception of Darfur and ultimately moved millions of Americans to join a campaign intended to stop the violence.

By 2005, the Darfur activist movement had ballooned into a multimillion-dollar, highly commercialized awareness campaign. In its first year, the Save Darfur Coalition, which acted as an umbrella organization for most of the activist campaigns, raised more than $15 million.[2] By 2006, the organization had more than tripled its income, raising almost $50 million in donations and spending 95.1 percent of its funds on advertising and mobilization.[3] Mostly through direct advertising and public events, the campaign shaped the public discussion on Darfur and ultimately influenced American foreign policy. Since the same mischaracterizations that fueled interest in the conflict came to influence American policy, it is worth examining the nature of the war and how activists portrayed it over the last six years.

How Activists Mischaracterized the Darfur Conflict

As an awareness campaign, the SDC was very effective, but it failed to portray the story of Darfur accurately. Activists began by inflating casualty rates, often claiming that hundreds of thousands of Darfuris had been “killed,” when in reality, the majority of the casualties to which they refer occurred as a result of disease and malnutrition (as a consequence of war).[4] Differentiating between those who “died” and those who were “killed” may seem callous in the shadow of the horrific acts of war crimes and injustice in Darfur, but ignoring these distinctions has been central to how the activist movement has gone astray. Since many activists assume that hundreds of thousands of Darfuris have been “killed,” they have pressured the U.S. government to fund violence prevention plans and international peace-keeping troops, as opposed to different, potentially more effective, policy changes.

In 2006 the SDC hired lobbyists in Washington to draft legislation and pressure politicians to focus their efforts and funds toward violence prevention and United Nations troop deployment. After hiring lobbyists, the SDC launched a public pressure campaign with the central purpose of “urging the immediate deployment of international peacekeepers to protect the people of Darfur.”[5]

At more than 150 nationwide events, activists learned how to pressure government officials by mail and telephone. By the end of 2006, according to the Save Darfur website, supporters had sent a million postcards and 764,570 e-mails to President Bush and Congress and called the White House 12,545 times.[6] The central message of the calls and mailings was that “time is running out” and that the violence must be stopped.[7] The SDC held rallies in New York City and Washington, D.C., where advocates such as George Clooney spoke about how the situation in Darfur was “quickly worsening.” After the rallies, Clooney, who had recently returned from a trip to Darfur where he was advised and escorted by the SDC, addressed the United Nations Security Council on September 14, 2006. He stated in his address that the situation in Darfur was “getting much, much worse,” and that “in the time that we’re here today, more women and children will die violently in the Darfur region than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel, or Lebanon.”[8]

Before the lobbyists, public pressure campaigns, and activists emphasized the need for troop deployment in 2006, the United States Congress had approved more than $1 billion in assistance funds to Sudan. Less than 1 percent of those funds were allocated to support the peacekeeping efforts of the African Union, which began deploying troops in 2004.[9] These numbers indicate that the U.S. government was initially more focused on providing humanitarian aid and development support than it was on funding peacekeeping activities.

Figure 1
U.S. Contributions to Peacekeeping in Darfur

[ See chart at http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb89.pdf ]
Note: The yearly totals are taken from two sources: (1) the actual and supplemental allocations listed in the congressional budget justification under the categories of “Contributions for International Peacekeeping Activities” (CIPA), and “Peacekeeping Operations,” (PKO); and (2) the funding for private contractors as documented in U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Darfur Crisis: Progress in Aid and Peace Monitoring Threatened by Ongoing Violence and Operational Challenges,” GAO-07-9, November 2006, http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d079.pdf. For a more detailed description of the CIPA and PKO allocations for 2007, 2008, and 2009, see the Stimson Center’s Future of Peace Operations Program Reports. The reports for CIPA allocations are available at http://www.stimson.org/fopo/?SN=FP200808071796, and the PKO reports are available at http://www.stimson.org/fopo/?SN=FP200808071797.

From 2006 until 2008, when the SDC and many other groups began to directly pressure the U.S. government, the allocation of U.S. funds to peacekeeping activities increased dramatically (see Figure 1) to approximately 50 percent of the total budget allocated to Sudan.[10] Overall emphasis on deploying military forces increased dramatically. By 2007, the United Nations announced that it would begin deploying the world’s largest peacekeeping mission in Darfur and the United States promised to fund one quarter of the UN peacekeeping effort.[11]

Meanwhile, during 2007 a number of American political figures proposed that the United States should attempt to fix things by attacking Sudan. In February then-senator Hillary Clinton suggested to Defense Secretary Robert Gates during congressional testimony that the United States should consider “directing punitive strikes against Sudanese planes known to have taken part in illegal bombing missions in Darfur.”[12]

Figure 2
Violent Deaths in Darfur (per year) 2004–2009

[ See chart at http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb89.pdf ]
Note: The yearly totals listed above are taken from a variety of sources. Year 2004 was taken from the 2005 Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters report. Year 2005-2009 are estimates based on the following: 1. The CRED report’s partial reporting of 2005. 2. United Nations African Union in Darfur monthly violence reports. 3. The United Nations Mortality Survey for Darfur 2005. 4. Data-set from Armed Conflict Location and Event Data. 5. African Union Mission in SudanMonthly News Bulletin. 6. United Nations Mission in SudanMonthly News Bulletin. 7. Unpublished UN mortality reports posted on the Social Science Research blog entitled, “Making Sense of Sudan.” All the reports indicate that the average annual violent death rate in Darfur between 2005 and 2009 was somewhere between 1000 and 3500.

In October, Susan E. Rice, who would later become President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, proposed that Congress should immediately “authorize the use of force in order to end the genocide.”[13] Most boldly, Sen. Joe Biden, during his campaign for the presidency, stated flatly that “I would use American force now,” asserting a “moral imperative” to “to put force on the table and use it.”[14]

In retrospect, the emphasis on military means and peacekeeping seems misguided because, as many casualty surveys now show, the violent death rate (those who were “killed”) in Darfur declined significantly after a ceasefire was signed in April 2004, while the rate of those who were dying of disease and malnutrition remained high. According to the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) in Brussels, which has produced three of the most comprehensive casualty studies to date, the number of violent deaths dropped to approximately 150 per month by the end of 2004.[15] In an interview conducted in 2005, UN official Jan Pronk also confirmed that “about 100 persons” were being killed per month by violence and that most of the violence in Darfur consisted of “banditry, looting and crime.”[16]

In 2005 the United Nations conducted another, more comprehensive survey, which concluded that the decline in violent deaths since its previous report in 2004 has been “substantial.”[17] By the middle of 2005, the CRED conducted another casualty survey in Darfur; the U.S. Government Accountability Office called it the most reliable study of casualties in Darfur to date.[18] In addition to criticizing other mortality reports for improperly extrapolating the limited surveys conducted to the entire Darfur region, the 2005 CRED report examined more than 20 surveys conducted throughout the region and concluded that the total number of violent deaths from 2003–2005 was approximately 30,000. A later report from CRED published in the Lancet in 2010 estimated the total number of violent deaths in the conflict from 2003 to 2010 at 62,305.[19] Figure 2 outlines estimated deaths from violence from 2004 to 2009.

Despite the decline in violent deaths, activists, journalists, and academics continued to sensationalize the problems in Darfur. In fall 2006, the SDC, ignoring the recent CRED report and UN statements about the rapid diminution of violence, began to run ads in the United States and the United Kingdom reading “SLAUGHTER IS HAPPENING IN DARFUR. YOU CAN HELP END IT. In 2003 Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir moved to crush opposition by unleashing vicious armed militias to slaughter entire villages of his own citizens. After three years, 400,000 innocent men, women and children have been killed.”

Shortly after the ads were released, the British Advertising Standards Authority found that Save Darfur’s ad campaign violated codes of objectivity, and it ordered the group to amend its ads to present the high death toll as opinion, not fact.[20] But by that point, the Save Darfur Coalition had already convinced millions of Americans that the situation in Darfur deserved immediate military intervention.

Activists have also mischaracterized the nature of the violence in Darfur, highlighting almost exclusively the crimes of the government of Sudan and rogue Arab tribes. Save Darfur advertisements, newsletters, and websites continue to use the term “ongoing genocide” to describe the conflict, even though the nature and scale of the violence has changed significantly since the height of the conflict in 2003–2004. The repeated use of the word “genocide” distorted the balance of culpability and innocence. Using the term “genocide” implies that there is a unidirectional crime taking place, one in which there are victims (i.e., the people of Darfur) and a culprit (i.e., the government of Sudan).

In reality, however, there are victims and villains on both sides of the civil war in Darfur. The government of Sudan has killed many people and is responsible for war crimes in Darfur, but the rebel insurgents are also guilty. When the United Nations conducted its International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, it found that in addition to Khartoum’s “crimes against humanity,” many of the rebel groups had also engaged in “serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law.”[21]

The international community has largely misunderstood the role of the rebel groups, believing that they emerged to protect the people of Darfur from the government’s genocidal onslaught. In reality, however, the rebel groups initiated the war by launching an insurgency in 2003, winning the first 32 out of 34 battles against the government.[22] Unable to control the insurgency, the government armed ad hoc militia groups in Darfur to suppress the rebel movement. These militiamen, often alongside Sudanese government soldiers, killed, raped and tortured tens of thousands of innocent Darfuris. After 2005 and the introduction of international observers, government-led attacks declined rapidly and the rebel groups began to fissure. Rebel infighting became the primary cause of violent deaths and other atrocities in Darfur by 2006. The government and its ad hoc militia groups were likely responsible for the majority of casualties from violence before 2005, and the majority of casualties from violence overall, but by 2006, fractured rebel groups and individual defectors were wreaking havoc in Darfur, becoming the chief perpetrators of violence against civilians and attacks on peacekeepers and humanitarian workers.[23]

The Activist Impact in Darfur

Most of the rebels’ actions have gone unnoticed in the international community because of how the conflict has been framed by activists and American government officials. Use of the term “genocide” has allowed rebel groups in Darfur to slip under the radar and commit crimes without the rest of the world taking notice. Had “genocide” not been the focus, activist campaigns might have also challenged the rebel groups. For example, Eritrea, Chad, and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, or SPLM, were the principal funders of the rebel groups in Darfur. They were (and some still are) also allies and aid recipients of the U.S. government, which means they could have easily been pressured to cut their lifelines to the rebel groups.[24]

Additionally, a disproportionate emphasis on “genocide” and military violence has hindered the peace process. The primary peace process, which led to the Darfur Peace Agreement, lasted almost two years, but was hastily concluded in May of 2006 after seven rounds of negotiations. UN official Jan Pronk stated a month earlier that the peace talks were being given a one-month deadline. One of the reasons for the deadline, according to the chief African Union mediator, Salim Ahmed Salim, was that the process was “severely underfunded.”[25] The other reason for the deadline, according to Alex de Waal, a Darfur expert and program director at the Social Science Research Council, was that the international community, particularly the United States, was putting pressure on the AU mediation team to expedite the agreement.

If U.S. political leaders and activists had been more focused on peacemaking, perhaps more funding and time could have been allocated to the talks. Instead, the U.S. government spent over $1 billion on peacekeeping and rushed the peacemaking process to an end. “With more time,” argues Alex de Waal, “the AU team and [British international development secretary Hilary] Benn could probably have found a formula to satisfy” all parties.[26]

The abrupt end of the peace talks caused a number of problems. First, one of the most important provisions of the Darfur Peace Agreement was the incorporation of the rebel groups into both the armed forces and the local police force. This police force could have addressed the issues of banditry and the safety of the aid workers, which would later become significant problems in Darfur. It also could have provided jobs for many of the rebels who eventually turned to banditry in desperation after their rebel groups broke apart. The creation of the police force was one of the provisions that was being negotiated in the final days of the peace talks and was cut short before all parties came to an agreement.[27] Second, more time may have prevented the rebel groups from splitting into different factions. After the peace agreement ended, fighting between rebel groups became one of the most significant causes of violent deaths in the region. Alex de Waal argues that the peace agreement’s abrupt end is one of the reasons why the rebel groups split into so many different factions.[28]

Before the peace talks had come to an end, activists had already decided that the deployment of international troops was the best solution to the problems of Darfur. The very existence of peace talks was rarely mentioned in American media. A survey of Save Darfur newsletters since 2004 shows that the peace process was scarcely mentioned to the SDC community. Other activist groups and individuals dismissed the process as irrelevant. For example, only one week after the peace agreement was signed, Eric Reeves, one of the most prominent Darfur activists and chroniclers of Darfur events, declared that the agreement was “a meaningless piece of paper signed under genocidal duress” and that more effort should be focused on stopping the violence.[29]

In defense of SDC’s strategy to focus primarily on violence prevention and claims of genocide, rather than on the peace agreement or development, Alex Meixner, SDC’s policy director, argues that violence in Darfur was preventing humanitarian aid from reaching those who needed it. Peacekeeping was therefore “necessary to complement humanitarian assistance.”[30]

An analysis of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s monthly reports partially supports Meixner’s point. In 2005 and 2006 USAID reports document attacks on aid workers and note that some locations were too dangerous for aid workers to provide assistance. The humanitarian groups, however, still had access to approximately 90 percent of the affected population in 2005, which is remarkable given the landscape and size of Darfur and the short time they were given to reach such a dispersed population.[31] Insecurity was part of the reason why the humanitarian groups could not reach the remaining 10 percent, but according to the newest CRED report, released in January 2010, the primary problem by 2006 was that the humanitarian aid budget had been significantly cut.[32] The World Food Programme, the primary supplier of food to Darfur, experienced a 50 percent budget cut, while UNICEF was only able to raise 11 percent of its yearly budget. The number of aid workers was reduced by 18 percent, meaning that the number of affected populations without assistance increased.[33] At the same time that the humanitarian budget was cut, the budget for peacekeeping soared into the billions, meaning that donors were more interested in funding the peacekeeping mission than providing humanitarian assistance.[34]

Insecurity, however, was still a problem and was preventing access to some regions of Darfur, particularly in West Darfur. USAID reports indicate that the primary causes of insecurity in the inaccessible camps came from bandits and car thieves, two problems that peacekeepers are not traditionally deployed to address. These issues require a local police force, a developed penal code and further civic development, all important elements of the failed peace agreement. As the rate of violent deaths in Darfur dipped below emergency levels, attacks against peacekeepers and humanitarian aid workers began to rise.

Figure 3
Humanitarian Access to Affected Populations in Darfur

[ See chart at http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb89.pdf ]
Source: United Nations Darfur Humanitarian Profile no. 33, http://www.unsudanig.org/docs/DHP33_narrative_1% 20October%202008.pdf.

Richard Gowan, an expert on peacekeeping at the Center on International Cooperation, says that this trend is indicative of the current “crisis in peacekeeping” worldwide. Part of the problem, says Gowan, is that the traditional role of peacekeepers has changed significantly since the Cold War, when peacekeepers were meant to perform military tasks and monitor the implementation of peace agreements.[35] Today, the mission of peacekeepers is often unclear, as “there is no strategic formula for determining when peacekeepers should be deployed, or more importantly, when they should leave.”[36]

In Darfur, peacekeepers were originally sent in to monitor the April 8, 2004, ceasefire and to act as a deterrent to warring Sudanese parties. Over time, civic infrastructure broke down in the absence of a viable peace agreement, and the peacekeepers were suddenly responsible for local development and civic duties for which they were not trained.[37] Therefore, the SDC and the international community’s demand for more peacekeeping troops not only precipitated a harmful reallocation of funds away from humanitarian aid in 2006, but it was also ill-conceived, signaling a belief that peacekeepers, instead of the local citizenry (via the peace process), could repair Darfur’s infrastructure and perform the necessary law enforcement duties.

Not surprisingly, then, the increase of international troops in Darfur did not reduce the problem of banditry or improve access to the affected population. In fact, humanitarian access to affected areas worsened after the United Nations began to deploy troops (see Figure 3). In 2008 the United Nations published a report indicating that during the months following the April 2004 ceasefire, the accessibility to affected populations was relatively high, averaging roughly 90 percent. However, once the international peacekeepers began to be deployed in 2006, the accessibility decreased. (It is important to note that only one third of the authorized peacekeepers had been deployed by summer 2008.[38])

Had the Abuja peace talks been properly funded and the two sides given adequate time to come to an agreement, a more robust local police force could have been established to control the banditry that impeded humanitarian assistance. Also, rebel groups may not have fractured into as many splinter groups, causing rebel defectors and rebel infighting to become a significant threat to aid workers.

Darfur and Activists Today

Today the situation in Darfur continues to be mischaracterized. Most of the ongoing violence can be attributed to banditry, lawlessness, and fighting between rebel groups, with one notable exception being the recent government attacks in Jebel Marra.[39] According to UNAMID reports, the average monthly casualty rate for the last five months of 2009 was 51.[40] Very few of these are linked to the conflict between Sudanese government forces and the rebel groups. Since last year, the conflict in Darfur has not met the 1,000 casualties per year threshold that many political scientists consider necessary for a conflict to be categorized as a “civil war.”[41] In January Lt. Gen. Patrick Nyamvumba, the commander of the peacekeeping force in Darfur, described the situation as “calm, very calm at the moment, but it remains unpredictable.”[42] Additionally, Sudan’s elections in April - which were expected to reignite violence in many areas of Darfur - were surprisingly peaceful.

Despite these changes, there still seems to be no consensus over what to call the situation in Darfur. On the one hand, many government officials and activists have not changed the way they talk about the conflict. President Obama used the word “genocide” in the present tense when addressing the issues of Darfur in speeches in Germany and Ghana in 2009.[43] U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice also continues to use the term “genocide.”[44] Activist groups such as the SDC and the Genocide Intervention Network still frequently use the terms “ongoing genocide” and “war in Darfur” in their literature and advertisements.

On the other hand, U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan Scott Gration argues that the genocide in Darfur had ended.[45] The Obama administration’s Sudan policy, released last October, referred to the genocide in Darfur as if it were still happening, but substantively centered on a more conciliatory approach to Khartoum, offering both incentives and pressure.[46] Additionally, former top commander of UNAMID, General Martin Agwai, has stated that the war in Darfur has come to an end. Most of the remaining violence, he says, is due to “low-level disputes and banditry.”[47] Even Eric Reeves, a promoter of erroneous casualty figures early in the conflict, concedes that “there is no doubt that violence has diminished significantly in the past two or three years - and many, including myself, have been slow to recognize how significant this reduction has been.”[48]

SDC has learned many lessons from its mistakes and has made efforts to improve the way it provides information. It has decreased the Darfur casualty rate on its website, from 400,000 to 300,000, and provided a section explaining the “myths” of the Darfur conflict. It has shifted its central focus away from violence and toward the upcoming referendum in the south, the peace process in Doha, Qatar, and pressuring the U.S. Government to not recognize the results of Sudan’s recent elections. Other groups, such as the Genocide Intervention Network have also adjusted the casualty rates, and have made efforts to encourage support for the peacemaking process. Additionally, Special Envoy Gration has shifted the U.S. government’s primary focus to the peace process in Doha, and to the peace agreement between the north and the south.

Regardless of these changes, however, members of the current administration do not agree with Gration’s response to the Darfur conflict and many activist groups regularly criticize Gration’s efforts to support peace over punishment and engage diplomatically with the current government of Sudan. There is still disproportionate emphasis on the government of Sudan’s role in the conflict and undue attention paid to the issue of genocide over the root causes of the conflict.

While activists have contributed to these conditions, it must be said that the current landscape of Darfur activism is vastly mixed, with different groups pursuing different policy objectives.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that American activists were able to bring attention to the conflict in Darfur. In fact, their efforts may be the reason why Darfur is host to the largest humanitarian assistance effort in the world. Even so, their efforts have had negative consequences. One likely unintended consequence was the diversion of public attention from other wars of greater scale and longevity. For example, in the nearby Democratic Republic of the Congo, the annual casualty rate since 2003 has been approximately four times higher than it was in Darfur. A decade-long civil war in that country has led to the deaths of almost one million people, many more deaths than in Darfur.[49] But there is no American activist movement for the Congolese and the level of international humanitarian aid and peacekeeping assistance is still smaller than what it is in Darfur.

One possible explanation for why the public came to pay attention to Darfur and not to the DRC is rooted in the nature of the Darfur activists’ campaign. Stories of race-based rampage and warfare - like the one activists promoted in Darfur - attract more attention than do more mundane but materially more devastating events involving complicated political processes, famine, or other causes of death. Some activists are aware of this phenomenon.[50] Accordingly, one could see how the stories of genocide and rapine in Darfur not only mischaracterized the conflict, but turned attention from other, more devastating environments like the one in the DRC.

It is easy to understand why activists do not want the U.S. government or the international community to shift their focus away from the difficulties that many Darfuris still face, especially since violent conflict could easily return in the absence of an effective peace agreement. However, ignoring the changes in the scale and nature of the Darfur conflict has already hindered understanding of and response to the conflict. Today, Darfur’s peacekeeping and humanitarian missions continue to grow, yet the level of violence has remained below emergency levels since the end of 2004. Banditry, intra-tribal fighting, and, most importantly, the absence of a peace agreement still pose serious problems, but these are problems that demand the development of local infrastructure and participation, not the type of intervention advocated by activists and even some political leaders.

In the case of Darfur, activists created a number of negative consequences. They promoted an inaccurate perception among the public and policy elites about the nature and extent of violence in the region; they helped shift U.S. diplomatic emphasis away from the peacemaking process and from atrocities committed by rebel groups; and they diverted attention from more devastating problems elsewhere. Despite activists’ good intentions, these costs are real, and should be added to the ledger we use when measuring the impact of political activism on the Darfur issue.

Notes

1. On economic disputes and land rights, see Alex de Waal, ed., War in Darfur and the Search for Peace (Cambridge, MA: Global Equity Initiative, 2007). On geopolitical interference, see Julie Flint and Alex de Waal, Darfur: A Short History of a Long War (London: Zed Books, 2006), p. 51. The diminution of annual rainfall over the last century is documented in Alex de Waal, Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984–1985, 1st ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 85.
2. Internal Revenue Service, Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax—Save Darfur Coalition, Vol. Form 990, 2005–2006.
3. Ibid., 2006–2007.
4. Olivier Degomme and Debarati Guha-Sepir, “Patterns of Mortality Rates in Darfur Conflict,” The Lancet 375, no. 9711 (January 2010): 294–300, http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/P IIS0140-6736(09)61967-X/fulltext. The CRED report is the most comprehensive assessment of casualties to date. It draws its data from more than 63 different casualty surveys conducted in almost every region of Darfur. For the claims of the Darfur activists, see www.savedarfur.com, www.enoughproject.org, and www.standnow.org. Also, see news archives by activist Eric Reeves and journalist Nicholas Kristof, where one can see cited casualty rates between 450,000 and 700,000. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Will We Say ‘Never Again’ Yet Again?” New York Times, March 27, 2004; and Eric Reeves, “Darfur Mortality: Shoddy Journalism at the New York Times,” SudanReeves.org, August 14, 2007, http://www.sudanreeves.org/Article180.html.
5. On the pressure campaign, see Save Darfur, “Global Days for Darfur,” SaveDarfur.org, April 3, 2007, http://www.savedarfur.org/page/community/post/lisaravenscraft/BWf. Other efforts of the campaigns are available on the www.savedarfur.org website. As for the lobbyists, this is public information available on opensecrets.org and by looking at the publicly available yearly IRS reports on Guidestar.org.
6. Save Darfur Website, http://www.savedarfur.org/pages/darfur_by_the_numbers.
7. Save Darfur Website Archive at www.archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20060918213342/www.savedarfur.org/content?splash=no
8. A transcript of Clooney’s speech is available at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/georgeclooneyunitednations.htm.
9. United States Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations, 2004, 2005, http://www.state.gov/s/d/rm/rls/cbj/.
10. The total annual budget includes contributions to the United Nations through the Contributions for International Peacekeeping Assistance (CIPA) account.
11. Lauren Landis, “En Route to Darfur,” Dipnote: U.S. Department of State Official Blog, September 28, 2007, http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/entries/ index/en_route_darfur.
12. Comment during hearings on Department of Defense Authorization for Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2008, February 6, 2007.
13. Susan E. Rice, “The Genocide in Darfur: America Must Do More to Fulfill the Responsibility to Protect,” Brookings Opportunity 08 Position Paper, October 24, 2007, http://www.brookings. edu/papers/2007/1024darfur_rice_Opp08.aspx.
14. “Biden Calls for Military Force in Darfur,” Associated Press, April 11, 2007.
15. Debarati Guha-Sepir, Olivier Degomme, and Mark Phelan, “Darfur: Counting the Deaths. Mortality Estimates from Multiple Survey Data,” 10 Ignoring the changes in the scale and nature of the Darfur conflict has hindered understanding of and response to the conflict. Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters Report, May 2005, http://www.cedat.be/ sites/default/files/ID%20211%20-%20Counting %20the%20Deaths.pdf.
16. Quoted in IRINNews.org, “Interview with Jan Pronk,” August 4, 2005, transcript at http://www.janpronk.nl/interviews/english-french-and- german/interview-concerning-sudan.html.
17. “Mortality Survey among Internally Displaced Persons and Other Affected Populations in Greater Darfur, Sudan,” Report of the World Health Organization and the Federal Ministry of Health in Sudan, September 2005, p.2, http://www.emro.who.int/sudan/pdf/CMS%20Darfur%202005%20final%20report_11%2010%2005.pdf.
18. U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Darfur Crisis: Death Estimates Demonstrate Severity of Crisis, but Their Accuracy and Credibility Could Be Enhanced,” GAO-07-24, November 2006, p. 19,
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d0724.pdf.
19. Degomme and Guha-Sepir, p. 298.
20. British Advertising Standards Authority Adjudication on Save Darfur Coalition, August 8, 2007, http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/adjudications/Public/TF_ADJ_42993.htm.
21. United Nations, “Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations Secretary General,” January 25, 2005, p.158, http://www.un.org/News/dh/sudan/com_inq_darfur.pdf.
22. Flint and de Waal, p. 99.
23. See Reports of the Secretary-General on the African Union-United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID) for 2004–2009, http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/unamid/reports.shtml.
24. For evidence of these countries funding rebel groups, see ibid. Washington no longer sends aid to Eritrea.
25. African Union, “Briefing by Dr. Salim Ahmed Salim, AU Special Envoy and Chief Mediator for the Darfur Conflict to the UN Security Council,” January 13, 2006.
26. Alex de Waal, “I Will Not Sign,” London Review of Books 28, no. 23 (November 30, 2006), http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n23/alex-de-waal/i-will-not-sign.
27. In the final days of the peace agreement, the United States Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick insisted that the bulk of rebels incorporated into the Army and local police forces come from one of the rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Army/MM (Minni Minnawi). This bred discontent among the rebel groups and was one of the reasons why the other rebel groups refused to sign.
28. Alex de Waal, “I Will Not Sign.”
29. Eric Reeves, “Why Abuja Won’t Save Darfur,” New Republic (online), May 10, 2006, http://www.sudantribune.com/article.php3?id_article=15581.
30. Alex Meixner, “Misinterpreting the Genocide in Darfur,” BlogforDarfur.org, August 25, 2009, http://blogfordarfur.org/archives/1281.
31. United Nations Darfur Humanitarian Profile, no. 33, http://www.unsudanig.org/docs/DHP33_narrative_1%20October%202008.pdf. See also Chart 2, “Percentage of Affected Population Accessible to UN Humanitarian Aid,” in this article.
32. Degomme and Guha-Sepir.
33. Ibid.
34. The 2010 Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters report shows that after these budget cuts, there was a rise in child mortality rates and diarrhea-related deaths, even though the violent death rate continued to decline.
35. Richard Gowan, “The Strategic Context: Peacekeeping in Crisis: 2006–2008,” International Peacekeeping 15, no. 4 (August 2008): 453–69.
36. Personal interview with Richard Gowan, January 15, 2009.
37. Both the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) and United Nations Mission in Darfur (UNMID) peacekeeping forces have included small police forces, but their capabilities have been very limited, given their size and the extensive training necessary for familiarizing police officers with the cultural and legal norms of Darfur. The failure to control banditry in Darfur, and many other states with peacekeeping activities, has precipitated a systemic reallocation of resources at the United Nations from military- centric peacekeeping to police-centric peacekeeping. This change is addressed in B. K. Greener, “UNPOL: UN Police as Peacekeepers,” Policing and Society 19, no. 2 (June 2009): 106–18.
38. “Darfur Force Only at ‘Half Strength’ by End of the Year,” Telegraph, September 18, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/sudan/2983392/Darfur-force-only- at-half-strength-by-end-of-the-year.html.
39. Recent government attacks in Jebel Marra in early March are of particular concern because they have caused significant civilian casualties, possibly as many as 200. For details see Agence France- Press, “U.S. ‘Extremely Concerned’ by Reported
Darfur Offensive,” March 2, 2010, http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gX MqekdY9K_-t_nyuoSy5N8f3pRQ.
40. Monthly casualty reports from the United Nations African Union in Darfur have been posted on the Social Science Research Council blog, Making Sense of Darfur, http://blogs.ssrc.org/darfur/category/darfur/numbers/. Reports for January and February have yet to be made public.
41. For the casualty reports of the last year, see http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/missions/unamid/reports.html. On political scientists’ 1,000 person per year casualty threshold, see Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816–1980, 2nd ed. (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1991) or Harvard’s Correlates of War website, http://www.correlatesofwar.org/.
42. Quoted in Jeffrey Gettleman, “Fragile Calm Holds in Darfur after Years of Death,” New York Times, January 2, 2010.
43. Transcript of Obama’s Germany Speech, http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/berlinvideo/; Transcript of Obama’s Ghana Speech, http://www.scribd.com/doc/17283880/President-Barack-Obamas-Speech-in-Ghana-Africa-July-11-2009-VideoTranscript.
44. Mark Leon Goldberg, “Amb. Susan Rice: Darfur Is an ‘Ongoing Genocide,’” UN Dispatch, January 26, 2009, http://www.undispatch.com/ node/7599.
45. Colum Lynch, “Sudan’s ‘Coordinated’ Genocide in Darfur Is Over, U.S. Envoy Says,” Washington Post, June 18, 2009.
46. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Susan E. Rice, and Scott Gration, “Remarks on the Sudan Strategy,” October 19, 2009, http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2009a/10/130686.htm.
47. Quoted in “War in Sudan’s Darfur ‘Is Over,’” BBC, August 17, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8224424.stm.
48. Quoted in Gettleman.
49. Human Security Report, “The Shrinking Costs of War,” January 20, 2010, p. 42, http://www.humansecurityreport.info/2009Report/2009Report_Pt2_3_DeathTollInTheDemocraticRepublicOfThe
Congo.pdf.
50. Two analysts at the International Rescue Committee noted that number of deaths seems not to be the primary determinant of attention, and stressed the importance of raising salience. Despite their appalling estimate of deaths in the Congolese conflict—4 million people—they noted that since 98 percent of the deaths were not from violence, people viewed the devastation as “unheroic, seemingly apolitical and therefore untelevisable.” Richard Brennan and Anna Husarska, “Inside Congo, An Unspeakable Toll,” Washington Post, July 16, 2006.

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Monday, May 24, 2010

Sudan’s Bashir meets outgoing British ambassador Rosalind Marsden

Thanks to Sudan Tribune for this interesting report.

Sudan’s Bashir meets outgoing British ambassador
Report from Sudan Tribune - Monday 24 May 2010:
May 23, 2010 (KHARTOUM) – The Sudanese President Omer Hassan Al-Bashir met today with British Ambassador, Rosalind Marsden who came to bid farewell at the end of her term in the country.

Sudan official news agency (SUNA) quoted Bashir as praising progress of the relations with Britain, and calling for more support to the bilateral ties and joint cooperation to push forward the peace process and the development in Sudan as key elements to realize stability and democratic transformation.

Bashir also asked the Marsden to convey his greetings to the newly elected British government and affirmed the positive role it could play in supporting his country, referring to its commitments in supporting the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and its role in relieving Sudan debts.

The Sudanese head of state has rarely held meeting with Western officials who have largely avoided him since his indictment by the International Criminal Court (ICC). European Union (EU) rules bars its officials from meeting individuals charged by the Hague tribunal.

The ICC urged world officials to sever all "non-essential contacts" with Bashir and other suspects still at large.

Human right groups called on ICC members to boycott Bashir’s inauguration next Thursday saying attending it would be wrong signal to Darfur victims and refugees.

However, the two top U.N. representatives in Sudan will be present at the ceremony according to a statement from the world body in New York. (ST)

Saturday, May 22, 2010

The Mysteries of Sudan's Meroe, an empire on the Nile - Exhibition at The Louvre Paris March 26 - Sept 6, 2010

Les pyramides de la necropole royale nord de Meroe
© M. Baud
Les pyramides de la necropole royale nord de Meroe

Meroe, an empire on the Nile
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Exhibition from 26 March to 06 September 2010
During this first exhibition of Meroe, the capital of a powerful empire located on the shores of the Nile, two hundred works illustrate the grandeur of this ancient civilization that combines African influences, Egyptian and Greco-Roman

Located in Sudan, two hundred kilometers north of Khartoum today, the city of Meroe, the capital of the kingdom, is known for its pyramids for kings and queens who have dominated the region between 270 BC and 350 AD

Consisting mainly of loans from museums in Khartoum - the famous gilded bronze statue of a king archer, British Museum, World Museum and the Museum of Liverpool Garstang, museums in Munich, Berlin and Leiden, the exhibition brings together about two hundred works that evoke the originality and power of the empire of Meroe.

The main topics are everyday life, crafts, social systems, the kings and their symbols of power, the role of queens, known as the candaces, cults exist alongside the Egyptian Amun and the Greek Dionysos , the afterlife as conceived by the people of Meroe.

Another section is devoted to the rediscovery of the ruins of the pyramids of Meroe in 1821 by Frederick Cailliaud, as well as archaeological excavations since 2007 Mouweis, site of the Empire heart, by the Department of Antiquities. A selection of objects found during the last three years reflects the action on the ground by the Louvre.

The exhibition has the main sponsorship of Deloitte's sponsorship partner of Ipsen and sponsorship from Lafarge.

In media partnership with Le Parisien, Connaissance des Arts, France 5 and France Info.

Commissioner (s): Guillemette Andreu-Lanoë, Michel Baud and Aminata Sackho-Autissier, Department of Egyptian Antiquities, Musée du Louvre

Statue d'un roi archer

© Jürgen Liepe
Statue d'un roi archer conservee au Musee national du Soudan Khartoum, provenant de tabo sur I'lle d'Argo
The Mysteries of Meroe
by SOUREN MELIKIAN
The New York Times News Service
PARIS — Agatha Christie could have invented the story. Imagine another Egypt, with a marked black African component. This is Meroe, in present-day Sudan. In art, ancient Egyptian deities appear alongside others, unknown elsewhere. The Meroitic cursive script has been deciphered, revealing that it transcribes an African language. It is related to others spoken today, like Taman in parts of Darfur and Chad, Nyima in the Sudanese Nuba mounts, or Nubian in upper Egypt and Sudan. For the moment though, it is only beginning to be partially understood. Go see the latest on “Méroé, un empire sur le Nil” at the Louvre until Sept. 6.

In the last three years, archaeological discoveries have given a new face to an enigmatic culture that already intrigued Western explorers 250 years ago. In 1772, the Scotsman James Bruce caught sight of broken obelisks and barely discernible traces of pyramids as he traveled back from the source of the Blue Nile. These, he reckoned, had to be the remains of Meroe, known to Ancient Greek historians.

It was the Frenchman Frédéric Caillaud who, on the morning of April 25, 1822, first saw “a host of pyramids.” He accurately drew and described these in his book “A Trip to Meroe on the White River,” published in 1826. The consequences were disastrous. Antique hunters rushed to loot the site.

In 1834, Giuseppe Ferlini destroyed several pyramids. As he blew up one of these, the Italian dealer laid hands on a fantastic treasure that turned out to have belonged to Kandake (Queen) Amanishakheto. The priceless historical documentation that a proper archaeological investigation would have yielded was pulverized by the explosion and the objects were sold to museums in Munich in 1839, and Berlin in 1844.

Eventually, archaeologists stepped in. The Prussian Karl Richard Lepsius, who conducted a three-year-long campaign, produced an exemplary study of the standing monuments.

In the 20th century, a mission funded by Harvard University and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts worked out the chronological succession of the Kushite rulers of Meroe. Bronzes and ivories came to light, as well as gold jewels inlaid with mother-of-pearl and semi-precious stones that had been overlooked by looters in damaged tombs, and others preserved in funerary caches that had escaped destruction.

More important, the American expedition led by George Reisner opened up a new chapter of cultural history. No one had expected Greek and Roman objects to be found deep in black Africa. The northern necropolis of Meroe yielded a wine vessel in the form of an Amazon figure riding a rearing horse and holding a pouring vessel of the type called rhyton. This is a fifth-century B.C. piece, signed by Sotades, a potter from Athens. Stylistically reminiscent of the Parthenon marble riders, the artefact, fit for kings, was found in a royal tomb. A Roman silver wine cup of the first century A.D. from Italy turned up in the landfill of another pyramid.

In the last three years, dozens of objects beggaring belief have shown that the Meroitic Kingdom was in contact with most northern and eastern Mediterranean lands. Wine was imported in amphoras of the common pottery type found along the shores of the French Riviera. A precious glass flask with a marvered pattern, alternately turquoise and black, that is typical of the finest Syrian production were recovered at Sedeinga.

The greater surprise is the culture of Meroe itself, derived from Ancient Egypt and yet profoundly different.

Art here says more than the incompletely decrypted texts in the syllabic script adapted from the Egyptian demotic (i.e. popular) alphabet.

A tall beaker in blue glass painted with polychrome scenes deals with a very Egyptian theme. Offerings are brought to the god Osiris and an inscription in golden capitals urges in Greek — the language imposed on Egypt after Alexander’s conquest in the fourth century B.C. — “Drink and may you live [long].” The cartoon-like humor makes one wonder whether this might be of Meroitic rather than Egyptian make. Either way, it points to a distinctive Meroitic love of a comical touch in serious subjects.

A sense of fun is conveyed by countless Meroitic objets d’art. The small head of a ruler in turquoise frit found on the urban site of Meroe is unlikely to have been molded by the potter with a flattering intention. The puffed-out cheeks, the thick lips and globular eyes make it a perfect three-dimensional cartoon.

This ironical strain was cultivated from early times on. A turquoise frit mask, which may have once been part of an amphora, depicts a woman (rather than a man as suggested in the exhibition book) with a laugh on her closed lips. It is reminiscent of fifth-century B.C. Cypriot sculpture, with which it may be contemporary.

Derision crept into the most solemn scenes carved in sandstone on the Egyptian model. Queen Amanishakheto, receiving the breath of life on a stele from Naga dating from the late first century B.C. or early first century A.D., seems to be amused. The goddess, too, gives the impression of enjoying the fun of it all, whether or not this was the artist’s intended message. Greater drollery is conveyed by the apish look of the ram-headed god Amon excavated at Djabal Barkal. The body, carved out of granite, has the hieratic posture of early Egyptian art but the animal head has a human expression of repressed hilarity. The intention to belie the austerity demanded by the cannon seems clear.

If any doubts remain about the comical effects sought in much of Meroitic art, painted pottery should dispel them. A beaker from the urban site of Meroe is decorated with a frieze of raised cobras, their tails rhythmically wiggling and their dilated eyes appearing to express concern about the precarious balance of the solar disks perched on their heads. The scene would not look out of place in the French satirical weekly “Le Canard Enchaîné.”

Meroitic humor went together with somber Expressionism. The monumental statue of the god Sebiomeker discovered in the Temple of Isis at Meroe has the hieratic posture of Egyptian gods, but everything else is alien to Egypt. The ill-formed rigid limbs and the wide-eyed expression of distress give it a curious modernity.

A strange development in Meroitic art around the second or third century A.D. led to a kind of Cubist Expressionism. The head of a man excavated at Argin is its ultimate masterpiece. The angular geometricism and the extreme simplification parallels a similar trend in the art of Ancient Yemen around that time. The exhibition book, edited by Michael Baud, does not mention the fact, which may reflect contacts between Meroe and the Arabian peninsula.

Many components undoubtedly went into the brew of Meroitic culture. The exhibition book deals with Meroe as if it had been one nation modeling itself on Egypt, with some black African input. The human reality may have been much more complex.

The African contribution is evident in pots such as the stunning black earthenware jar with bulls stylized to near abstraction. Black African ethnic types are represented in a variety of styles, ranging from sophisticated figuration in bas reliefs of the late first or early second century A.D. to artefacts that reproduce Hellenistic models handled in the simplified somber Expressionist manner of the third to fourth century A.D. Such is a scented oil flask from el-Kadata on loan from Boston.

But we know nothing about society in Meroe. The people who molded around the first or second century A.D. the prehistoric looking figures from Muweis and the western metropolis at Meroe; the bronze makers who cast during the same period the small bust of a queen with black African features found in the Temple of Amon at el-Hassa; and the sculptor who carved the bas-relief of Isis in Egyptian style for King Amanitenmomide may have belonged to very different human groups.

The day a bilingual text sufficiently long to give at last a key to the Meroitic language turns up surprises are to be expected. The latest discoveries displayed at the Louvre suggest that it might not be too far off.

Méroé, un empire sur le Nil. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Through Sept. 6.

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