The Republic of Dissent

Bling bling and humanitarianism

Outrageously funny ! (hat tip: Alice Fishburn)

Celebrity activism

Nathalie Rothschild on Celebrity activism, which she has trouble to view as selfless:

Farrow and her fasting buddies are presenting their efforts as selfless sacrifices, all done for the sake of suffering Darfurians, to ‘raise awareness’ of their plight and put pressure on the ‘international community’ to intervene. But rather than shedding light on the conflict in Darfur, aloof celebrity activists are primarily drawing attention to themselves while at the same time obscuring the facts on the ground, which are, in reality, complex.
However, for Farrow and other celebrity activists, like Matt Damon and George Clooney, the conflict in Sudan is a black-and-white issue. They present themselves as the virtuous good guys in a morality play where the Khartoum regime are the evil barbarians, the people of Darfur the pathetic victims and Western celebrities are the heroes coming to their rescue. Clooney, for instance, once said of the conflict in Darfur: ‘It’s not a political issue. There’s only right and wrong.’
(...)From celebs demanding, in neo-colonialist fashion, that the West intervene to save Africans from themselves, to greens claiming to represent ‘The Planet’ against mankind, many protests today are staged ‘on behalf of others’ – even if those others have not asked for it. Farrow’s diet for Darfur is part of this contemporary trend. These days, it seems that protests that lack celebrity endorsements and which are staged by those who are actually affected by the conflict they are trying to end, get little attention or airtime.

I'm agnostic on the subject of celebrity activism because celebrities have the right as any citizen to get engage in causes. Nevertheless what I deplore on these celebrity campaign is that they end up being about celebrity and good and evil which is not solely the fault of celebrities, but also of the media, which loves nothing much that syrupy tabloid like of serious topic without feeling questioning their own ethics while being ensured to get a wider audience. Thus the trouble isn't that celebrities don't get celebrity and are unable to be selfless even for good causes, the trouble is that the globalized media likes so much beautiful and effective storytelling that it has let celebrities become the better advocates for causes, which have more knowledgeable, but less flashy advocates.

The Big story and indifference

BHL (Bernard-Henri Lévy) on Darfur, Human rights, western superiority and on the reasons why too many on the Left don't give a damn:

And in America and in France, you have a lot of people [of] the Left, to which I belong, [who believe that] we cannot interfere in the internal affairs of Sudan. Let’s be careful not to impose under the flag of human rights the old rule of Western superiority. The result of which is that we are abandoning to that [idea] the worst death, these unnumbered lots of people. And in the end: anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and anti-imperialism. We are prisoners of a scheme of thought in which, if you are a victim and if you don’t play a role, if you don’t have a part on the big stage, in the big history, in the big tale of the opposition of the evil empire and the good anti-imperialist forces, you don’t really deserve attention.

In past decades, in the 60s and 70s during the Cold War, if you were neither with the Soviets nor with the US, you had a pretty good chance of falling into the big hole of the ignored wars. If you didn’t have a real role in this big fight, which [was] supposed to be the fight of the poor against empire, you didn’t exist. These poor people, these women—the son of whom will die in a few hours—have nothing to do with the Big Story, which is the story of Mr. Chomsky, the story of Mr. Badiou in France, the story of people in England, the story of the fight against empire. So [they are] out of the frame, out of our visibility. Nonexistent.

The question, which BHL doesn't answer is the following: what is the point of belonging to a left, which only cares about the Big story and considers that everything else is a footnote to history?

France, Africa, les Liaisons Dangereuses, and exceptionalism

Johann Hari has an article in the Independent in which he accuses France of leading a secret war in Africa (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan). Hari talks about his trip the country of Central African Republican (CAR) in the poor and ravaged region of Central Africa and about what he believes to be the consequences of the French realpolitik:

For forty years, the French government has been fighting a secret war in the dead-centre of Africa, hidden not only from the French people and parliament, but from the world. It has led the French to slaughter democrats, install dictator after dictator - and even to fund and fuel the most vicious genocide since the Nazis. Today, this war is so vicious that thousands are even fleeing across the border from the Central African Republic into Darfur - seeking sanctuary on the world's most notorious killing fields. I first heard whispers of this war in March, when a few scattered newspapers across the world reported in passing that the French military was bombing the remote city of Birao, in the far North of the Central African Republic. Why were French soldiers fighting there, thousands of miles from home? Why had they been intervening in central Africa this way for so many decades? I could find no answers out here - so I decided to travel there, into the belly of France's forgotten war.
[…]At every one of these scenes, the question keeps coming back: why? Why are the French providing military support and training for these militia? The French government says they are in CAR because they signed a military agreement back in the 1970s to protect the country from external aggression. The rebellions in the North are, they say, supported by Sudan – so this counts. Mes amis, we are protecting a democratically elected President from a tyrannical and genocidal neighbour.
But I couldn't find anyone in CAR - not a single person, not even the most pro-French - who thought Sudan had anything to do with the rebels. So I arrange to meet up in Bangui with Louise Roland-Gosselin, an Anglo-French director of the group Waging Peace who has been studying CAR. "The policies here in the Central African Republic are part of a much bigger approach by France towards Africa," she says. "We call this system 'Franceafrique', and it was set up by Charles De Gaulle to replace the former colonial system. There is clear continuity from the imperial system to the present day."
The motives for this war are, Roland- Gosselin says, drenched in dollars and euros and uranium. "The overarching goal is to take African resources, and funnel them towards French corporations," [...] This neo-imperial war reached its psychotic apogee in 1994, when the French government used CAR as a base to fund and fuel the Rwandan genocide, the most bloody since the death of Adolf Hitler. Vincent Mounie is a leading figure in Sur Vie, a French organisation monitoring their government's actions in Africa. He explains: "The French were totally complicit in the genocide. There were French troops there before, during and after the genocide, backing the most extreme Hutu forces as they murdered the Tutsis. You know the identity cards that divided the Rwandan population into Hutus and Tutsis in preparation for the slaughter? They were printed in Paris."

Even when one makes the judgment to believe Johann Hari’s version of history, it is difficult to be satisfied with his narrative. What makes me uncomfortable is that Hari seems content to blame the French and never asks himself the real question of why there are secret wars in Africa and why certain powers are able to do things to maintain their sphere of influence that they wouldn’t be allowed to do anywhere else. One needs to read John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardner or to watch the movie based upon that book to understand that Africa is still viewed as a dark continent where powers are allowed to use savage methods to gain their share of its resources whether it is oil or anything else. Many fingers are pointed on China in the case of Darfur. Sarkozy met with Gordon Brown last Summer and took the opportunity to grandstand on Darfur by promising to do anything to stop the genocide when it is clear that the reason why it has lasted this long is because Western powers allowed it to happen because their hands are not as clean as they would like it to be. The point is that it is easy to go to Bangui and to be outraged about French’s involvement in the region, but it is harder to go further and to say that there are double standards when it comes to Africa. The world (that includes many Africans so it isn’t a West versus the rest issue) accepts because it believes that Africa is an unfortunate place that no one can help and that barbarism, savagery is natural to Africa. Africa is still the Congo of Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, it is a place where genocide, forgotten wars, brutal dictatorships are inevitable and thus tolerable. Michela Wrong explained in a post on her blog last week the dangers of exceptionalism:

The danger of the exceptionalism voiced by Holmes, Egeland and their ilk is that it does more than stiffen backbones in UN chambers. It enforces an incipient racism towards the con tinent, which so many people, in their hearts, regard as somehow predestined for misery. Ask an ordinary Brit for his image of Africa, and you will get a collage of nightmarish visions of flyblown, skeletal children and vile diseases festering in tropical forests. Every time he hears an African crisis has been crowned "worst in the world" or "most neglected on the planet", the old Heart of Darkness cliché takes deeper hold. "Just as I thought," he mutters. And the continent I write about just isn't like that.

The trouble with Hari and even Andrew Sullivan is that when it comes to Africa, they fool into that exceptionalism trap. They never elevate their rhetoric to the level of their outrage by challenging their readers to view Africa as a continent like any other, to do more than blaming the French and weeping more tears on the misfortunes of Africans.

Mitterrand, France, national interest, and Rwanda

Le Monde had an article this morning, which the Independent discusses, which confirms what many suspected to be true: Mitterrand knew about the Rwandan Genocide, but feigned ignorance because it didn’t want to intervene. Sugary excerpt:

Among the evidence to suggest France was informed of the mounting genocide is a diplomatic telegram from October 1990 in which the French defence attaché in the Rwandan capital Kigali alerts Paris of the "growing number of arbitrary arrests of Tutsis or people close to them". The cable adds: "It is to be feared that [it could] degenerate into an ethnic war.''

Another diplomatic memo, sent by French ambassador Georges Martres on 19 January 1993, quotes a Rwandan informant as saying that the president of the country, Juvenal Habyarimana, had suggested "proceeding with a systematic genocide using, if necessary, the army''.

These revelations show something, which Tara McCormack seemed in her article in Spiked not to be able to acknowledge when she argued that Kouchnerism was grandstanding interventionism disconnected from national interest and that is that real politik can lead to disaster because countries will always find it in their best interest not to intervene in messy and bloody affairs such as the Rwandan Genocide.

I doubt that even if Mitterrand had acknowledged that he knew and that massacres were happening in the ground that France would have intervene in a strong and decisive manner to stop the Genocide. What happened later in Côte d’Ivoire, in my opinion, demonstrated how difficult it is for France to play a peacekeeping role in Africa given its history and its deep ties to many parts of the continent. The sad truth is that there wasn’t enough public pressure and public outrage at that time to force actions because people believe that it was just another unavoidable African tragedy, which would had no bearing on the interests of the Western powers. I think that Mitterrand was just a faithful follower of real politik. He didn’t want to intervene because he knew that he was too weak politically to do so. He believed probably that on the contrary to the first Gulf War, he wouldn’t have allies willing to join in and more importantly that intervening meant engaging France in long process, which would never be sealed by a victory. It is sad. It is even shameful. Nevertheless, it is the way the world works and will continue to work as long as atrocities are tolerable. Some human lives are more valuable than others, we only need to look to Darfur to see that this is true.

Darfur, France, and Grandstanding

Tara McCormack slams France's new foreign policy team by arguing that it issuing Darfur to grandstand, to make a point about France’s power on the international scene. McCormack sees last week’s conference on Darfur in Paris as a worrying sign that foreign policy is disconnected from real politik and national goals. Sugary excerpt:

The conference was an example of the peculiar nature of much contemporary foreign policy. Today, foreign policy tends to be disconnected both from any national interest or a broader political framework (10). The aim of foreign policy among the big powers today is twofold: to try to establish a sense of moral purpose at home, and to create a framework of meaning through which international relations can be conducted. The content and lack of connection to anything that is actually going on is therefore largely irrelevant; the point of an event like Kouchner’s conference is the gesture itself. This is foreign policy as performance and grand gesture, something which Kouchner has long been a master of (11).

More broadly, the appointment of Kouchner as French foreign minister, and Sarkozy’s promises to keep Sudan at the top of his agenda, reveal that Sarkozy, in this one respect, really has adopted the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model: compensating for a lack of any genuine political programme at home by using the international sphere to grandstand and gain moral authority.

I disagree with McCormack on her point about the disconnection of  foreign policy form national interest for I think that increasingly in this age of terrorism, states are viewing the stability of countries, which are far away from as important to avoid creating rogue or failed states, which will then harbor terrorists. It is true that Darfur is a means to Sarkozy and Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister, to achieve the great ambitions for France and to restore its international prestige. However, it is unfair to say that it is only about grandstanding for it too soon to say whether the French approach to the conflict will yield results rather than a continuation of the same immobility. Foreign policy is usually about grandstanding and about creating an aura that will lead to actions and that will make the consequences for misbehavior severe. I share McCormack’s concerns about the possible implications of Kouchnerism for recent history has shown that interventionism may lead to catastrophes when it becomes the end of a foreign policy when the crucial issues always happened after the intervention. I like Kouchner and although I don’t like the fact that he had “to switch sides” to achieve his dream of becoming the head of French diplomacy, I think that he might surprise the world about how much a realist he turns out to be for after all the key is not really Kouchnerism, but Sarkozysm.

Bringing the sexist back

The Independent has an article on Ségolène Royal, which appalls me because it makes the assumption that because women are running for president, journalists are allowed to bring the sexist back. The article is about fashion and it gives such critical information such as the fact that Ségo’s beauty isn’t natural for she has had esthetic surgery to fix her teeth. What is appalling is the fact that the writer of the article admit that the observations  are sexist, but justifies them by saying that Ségo is using fashion and her femininity to be elected. What a wretched a woman Ségolène Royal is, she should stop wearing nice clothes and stop wearing make up so that people would stop focusing on her self and instead focus on her politics. The Independent’s article shows why Ségolène Royal has had a tough time in the French presidential campaign for she just can’t win with the press or with the French electorate. If She is tough, they say she is acting as an elementary school teacher. If she is nice and sympathetic, they say that she is using compassion to score political points. When she talks about politics without smiling, they say that she is robotic and can’t be natural. The lesson of this story is easy to learn, a woman to run for president must not be beauty and must be from the right to negate her femininity.

Compassion fatigue, action, and mass killings

Paul Slovic attempts to explain why people ignore mass killings. He argues that it is harder to react and to act when killing happens on such a large scale as it does with mass killings. Sugary excerpt:

The answer may lie in human psychology. Specifically, it is our inability to comprehend numbers and relate them to mass human tragedy that stifles our ability to act. It’s not that we are insensitive to the suffering of our fellow human beings. In fact, the opposite is true. Just look at the extraordinary efforts people expend to rescue someone in distress, such as an injured mountain climber. It’s not that we only care about victims we identify with—those of similar skin color, or those who live near us: Witness the outpouring of aid to victims of the December 2004 tsunami. Yet, despite many brief episodes of generosity and compassion, the catalogue of genocide—the Holocaust, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur—continues to grow. The repeated failure to respond to such atrocities raises the question of whether there is a fundamental deficiency in our humanity: a deficiency that—once identified—could be overcome. […]When writer Annie Dillard was struggling to comprehend the mass human tragedies that the world ignores, she asked, “At what number do other individuals blur for me?” In other words, when does “compassion fatigue” set in? Our research suggests that the “blurring” of individuals may begin as early as the number two.

Slovic is right, I wonder if scale is a more important factor in the setting in of compassion fatigue than distance that is whether one feels that the mass killing can endanger one’s own life. In other words, I wonder whether the silence or rather the manufactured and inactive outrage expressed by most about what is happening in Darfur can be explainable not only in the fact that hundred of thousands are dying by also that they are dying in Sudan, a country that is located away from most of them and that is at the center of a continent used to poverty and to mass killings. The Iraq war is still defendable not because there aren’t Mass killings, but because there exist American interests. Defenders of the Surge and of action even though it is unclear whether it will stop the killing can argue for the mass killing in Iraq should be stopped by the use of American troops, because the war in Iraq is in some way about America’s safety and the mass killings may happen in American streets.

Darfur and Iraq : Genocide, civil war and military intervention

Mahmood Mamdani argues in a provocative that there are many similarities between Darfur and Iraq and the only difference is that one conflict is named Genocide and the other a Civil War. Mamdani's argument is that the naming of these deadly conflicts has to do with politics  because genocide is a" label to be stuck on your worst enemy, a perverse version of the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical arsenal that helps you vilify your adversaries while ensuring impunity for your allies." In other words, the US and others are less risk averse when it comes to Iraq and are willing to intervene because the perception is that the civil war can be stopped while they are most risk averse when it comes to Darfur because a genocide is harder to stop and to police. In other words,:

What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics – a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? Why should an intervention in Darfur not turn out to be a trigger that escalates rather than reduces the level of violence as intervention in Iraq has done? Why might it not create the actual possibility of genocide, not just rhetorically but in reality? Morally, there is no doubt about the horrific nature of the violence against civilians in Darfur. The ambiguity lies in the politics of the violence, whose sources include both a state-connected counter-insurgency and an organised insurgency, very much like the violence in Iraq.

Food for thought II: Gadaffi, darfur, and exploitation

“Western countries and America are not busying themselves out of sympathy for the Sudanese people or for Africa but for oil and for the return of colonialism to the African continent. […] Reject any foreign intervention. […] To be occupied by the Sudanese army is better than to be occupied by U.N. forces, and the biggest disaster is if the Atlantic army came and positioned itself in Sudan. […] The West exploits tribalism, sectarianism and (skin) colour to feed war, which leads to backwardness and Western intervention in a number of countries. […] All the conflicts in Africa are caused by colonialism, which does not want the rise of the United States of Africa and works for division and interference and for military coups.” Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi talking about the Darfur crisis.

Blog, politics, and reality in Darfur

Jan Pronk, the UN envoy to Darfur was ordered to leave the devastated region by the Sudanese government for comments he made on his blog. Dan Brezer makes a good point on his blog about the whole incident, but the one thing that I believe he fails to emphasize is the fact that the Sudanese government is using this so-called incident as a pretext. They would have found something else to justify the expulsion of Pronk. The sad truth is that nobody seems to find the atrocities horrific enough to stop them. The timid reactions of the Bush administration are the most disturbing because after having the courage to call what is happening in Darfur “genocide” it has failed to adapt its responses to the situation as it has identified it. The message that this lack of urgency sends to the world is that there are some genocides that the world and the US will tolerate.

Complicity and Darfur

The Times has an article on the confession of a Sudanese Arab, Dily (which isn’t his real name) who was a part of one of the militias, which destroyed and killed thousands in Darfur that the government of Khartoum gave them its support. Is this news a surprise? It isn’t, but his account is fascinating nevertheless because it shows how systematic the killing in Darfur is and has been. Money quote:

The battalion would send scouts to check whether there were armed fighters in the targeted village. “If there were no fighters we just attacked straight away. If there were we had to be more cautious.” Sometimes they used satellite telephones to request airstrikes by the Sudanese military helicopters before attacking. “We would see smoke and fire and then we would go in.”

The attacks usually started early and lasted most of the day. The commanders said the villages had to be destroyed, and they did not spare women or children. “Mostly they said “Kill the blacks. Kill the blacks,” Dily said. “The majority of (the victims) were civilians, most of them women.”

Dily said he never raped a woman but other Janjawid did. “They took girls and women away, just out of sight, and started to rape them. Sometimes you heard gunshots if they refused.” They took away the cattle. Some were drunk.

Food for thought: Is what is happening in Darfur Genocide and does it matter?

“In spite of efforts to describe the killing in Darfur as genocide, neither the UN nor the EU went along with this description. It was not because of moral myopia, but because they understood the difference between a brutal civil war and a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing. Darfur is not Rwanda. Only the US accepted the genocide description, though this seemed a concession to domestic lobbies rather than a matter of conviction. Washington never followed through with the forcible intervention in Darfur that international law requires once a finding of genocide is made.”  Jonathan Steele, “A brutal civil war, but not genocide.”

“I call it a process of genocide. If we let it continue it will end in genocide. Genocide is not a one-time action. It's a process. They began a process. And therefore I think the United Nations will have to accept that definition. I am usually very, very careful in using that word.” Elie Wiesel, during his visit to the United Nations to ask the world to act on Darfur.

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Article II of Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

“The campaign of massacres, rapes, and ethnic cleansing may well fit the definition of genocide established by the Genocide Convention, which does not require a Rwanda-style extermination campaign but, rather, an attempt to “destroy” a substantial “part” of a group “as such.” But genocide is a crime based on intent, and pin-pointing who has acted with the goal of destroying Darfur’s non-Arab groups will remain difficult unless investigators dig up the wells, examine the ravines, apprehend perpetrators, and ascertain the command-and-control relationships among Sudanese leaders, Air Force pilots, and Arab militiamen. This will not happen soon: the major powers have not established an intelligence-gathering operation in Darfur that is sophisticated enough to gauge either the death toll or the intentions of perpetrators. In the meantime, the debate over semantics has only further distracted the international community from the more important debate about how to save lives.” Samantha Power, “Dying in Darfur: Can the ethnic cleansing in Sudan be stopped? ”

Words or Genocide? What is more outrageous?

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has a great column in today's Independent titled, “Where are the Muslims protesting about Darfur?” She laments the fact that the Muslims are most outraged about the harmless words of the Pope than the deaths of hundred of thousands of Muslims in the Darfur region of Sudan. She writes, “Where is the shrill outrage when Muslims kill and ethnically cleanse other Muslims from their meagre homes? Why is the anti-African racism of the Arab Sudanese government and militia not damned by Muslims? Where are the perpetually appalled Muslims today?” The fact that the answer is nowhere speak volume about Muslim solidarity and about the fact that it is easier to demonstrate and vent against the West and Non-Muslims than to demonstrate against the genocide of Darfur. The point isn't that that Muslims aren't entitled to their outrage for they are and as I have argued the words of the Pope were regrettable and even responsible. The point is that outrage to keep its moral dimension and to remain legitimate must be consistent. The words of the Pope are nothing compared to the genocide that is happened in Darfur and that will certainly continue because the world isn't prepare to do everything that it can to make it stop. Tomorrow, most of the world leaders will be at the UN for the start of its General Assembly, I wonder if one of them will speak to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and say, “Have you no decency, Sir?”

A video for the day

This is a short film on the horrors of Darfur. I thought that I should do my part to show some of the images that we don't see on televison. It is very graphic, but I don't that in this case, it is necessary to be graphic.

Silence and Inaction are crimes when it comes to Darfur

The tragedy in Darfur is continuing and my fear is that it is going to continue even in spite of the fact that high profile people such George Clooney are courageously standing up and asking the United States and the world to do something. Why will the tragedy continue? Because the genocide that is occurring is a complex issue that is hard to simplify given the fact that there is no great villain, who can be used to epitomize evil and given the fact that the people that are dying do not resemble most Americans. It is not a question of racism, but of identity and of images. The images that come from Darfur although they are graphic are not beautiful in the sense that they don't make human suffering compelling enough to make us watch them and decide that enough is enough. André Glucksmann accused the world last month in the height of the Israeli-Lebanese conflict to have different standards for constitute outrageous behavior and to make the willful choice to view some tragedies as greater than others. He was right. I am not saying that Darfur is the only tragedy the world should be paying attention to. I am forcibly arguing that by choosing to ignore Darfur and to focus on other tragedies the world is sending the loud and morally unacceptable message that genocide is not a crime against humanity, but something with which the world can live with provided that the people who are being disposables. After all, does the death of hundred of thousand of Black Sudanese changing the world?

Darfur and Hopelessness

Marc Goldberg has a great post on Darfur and on what it is going to take for it to have a chance to avoid further violence and chaos. He writes, “Darfur is on the verge of total collapse. Unless this new movement for Darfur turns into real momentum for progress in the region, death and misery will remain the norm in Darfur or the foreseeable future.” Is any leader can make a difference listening? (Hat tip: War and Piece)

The screams of Darfur: Dying to get the attention of the world

Yesterday, I was watching Hotel Rwanda and I thought of Darfur.

1. I came to the realization that Darfur will only receive the attention that it deserves when Hollywood makes a movie about it after hundred of thousands people have died.
2. The Bush administration has called what is happening in Darfur genocide and yet, not much has followed. There hasn’t been the treat to use force when one of the arguments for the war in Iraq was that Saddam killed an intolerable number of Iraqis.
3.   The question that the events raised is the following: Can there be such a thing as an acceptable genocide?
4. The answer to that question has been, so far, yes. I wonder why. I think, and I hope that I’m wrong, that it is because the people who are dying are not only blacks, but are also Africans.
5. After the Shoah, the world said, “nevermore,” but then it forgot and Rwanda happened, and it hung its head in shame (I’m making a comparison, between the response of the world to these events and not between the events),. Now, there is Darfur and once again the response of the world is inadequate and people are dying. The one thing we can conclude is that the world is better at repentance than at anything else especially when it cannot relate to the people who are dying.
6. For more on Darfur, you can read the following blogs: Sudan, the passion of the present and the Coalition for Darfur.