Archive for January, 2009

January 15th, 2009

The New Rice

Here are some Susan Rice quotes to get us all excited about Obama’s inauguration, courtesy of the Save Darfur Coalition. (Susan Rice is the incoming US Ambassador to the United Nations)

“The Bush administration has remonstrated for five years about the genocide in Darfur. Yet we have imposed only the mildest of sanctions, and we have given only lip service to standing up a [joint] African Union-United Nations force. The imperative has to be to pressure the regime to stop the killing, and to allow the A.U.-U.N. force to deploy effectively.”

[National Journal, July 12, 2008]

“There are only two ways to end a genocide: to apply powerful enough pressures or inducements to persuade the perpetrators of genocide to stop; or to protect those who are the potential victims of genocide. A negotiated solution would do neither, though it is necessary, ultimately, to resolve the underlying conflict.”

[Testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 11, 2007]

“How can the administration explain to the dead, the nearly dead and the soon to be dead people of Darfur that, at the end of the day – even when we declare that genocide is occurring, even when we insist repeatedly that we are committed to stopping it – the United States has stood by for so long while the killing has persisted.”

[Testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, February 8, 2007]

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January 12th, 2009

Memories of all-nighters and William Zartman…

Stand Director of Operations and all-around smart guy Yoni Levitan recently commented on one of my posts, saying that in his mind the situation in Darfur is just about “ripe” for resolution. If he had known how long I stayed up researching that concept for my thesis in senior year, he may have chosen different words. Ahhhh, coffee gut, sleepless nights, five minute dance breaks, how I miss it all!

Anyways, the point is that this guy I. William Zartman basically began the academic study of civil wars by suggesting that they only end when the time is “ripe for resolution.” A civil war is considered ripe for resolution when both sides find themselves in a “mutually hurting stalemate”: i.e. no one has the upper-hand, both sides feel that they have little to gain from continued violence, and both sides will continue to take losses if the situation remains the same. Since Zartman first suggested the idea, there have been lots of additions and elaborations to the theory, but it’s still the same basic idea: international pressure to end a civil war will be most effective when the timing is right. Often the timing is right after some big event or change happens that makes both parties realize the pain and loss of continued fighting.

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January 10th, 2009

Reading Up

Ruth Gonzales, a reader of this blog, recently contacted me with a great idea about recommended books for people interested in learning more Darfur, Rwanda, and the history of genocide. She also very generously sent a list of recommended books to me, which I have been hoping to compile for some time but of course never got around to. So keep an eye out on the recommended reading list in the sidebar as I add many new books to check out. And big shout out to Ruth for all the work and energy on this!

Of the books on there, many of them I personally have not yet read. I have mentioned Not on Our Watch before, the quintessential advocate’s guide to Darfur complete with suggestions, tools, and calls to action. For the avid scholar, anything by Alex de Waal is recommended. He is THE recognized expert on Darfur and Sudan, although he raises some interesting questions about the advocacy movement, particularly celebrity activism. For a history of genocides, Samantha Power’s A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide is a must-read, although personally sometimes the style of writing is too journalistic for me – ie. policy-makers are damned if they do, damned it they don’t. However, it is definitely the best compiled history of genocides I have encountered yet.

In terms of gut-wrenching, emotive writing, I would point to either Dallaire or Philip Gourevitch’s accounts of Rwanda. The Philip Gourevitch book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, sparked my interest in human rights and preventing mass atrocities. It is really well-written, mixing anecdotes, interviews, and well-researched histories of the conflict and country. Highly recommended.

I would love to hear everyone else’s thoughts on recommended reading. Please send me an email with suggestions and ideas. And thanks to Ruth once again!

UPDATE: Check out the Comments section for some more good recommendations!

Link

Posted in The Scholar | 4 Comments »

January 7th, 2009

Oh Sudan, Sudan, Sudan…

The more I read about Sudan, the more there is to read about Sudan. How can one country be so complicated?

I have recently been given the privilege of reading a briefing paper about one expert’s opinions about the future of Sudan. Unfortunately, I am still awaiting the word as to whether I am allowed to say who or what this paper was, but I thought that in the meantime I would transmit some of its extremely illuminating and troubling details.

The Premise: How to prevent the entire country of Sudan from erupting into a huge war when the South votes for independence in the referendum scheduled for 2011?

For those who don’t know, the peace treaty between the North and South signed in 2005 between President al-Bashir and Southern hero John Garang guaranteed a referendum on the status of the South to be held in 2011. The thinking was that this time could be used to convince the political elites from the North and the South of the benefits of working together, so they could subsequently either come up with a new agreement or convince the Southern people that a unified Sudan is not that bad. Unfortunately, with the violence in Darfur, the ICC indictment, and the unfortunate death of John Garang, the elites have been more than a little distracted.

If the vote were held today, the vast majority of Southerners would vote to secede from Sudan, a situation that is unlikely to change in the next two years. The North would not be too happy about this because of oil and the effect that would have on the rest of the country. Similarly, the South Sudan Government is not known as the most well-functioning government around and could quite possibly turn into a fragile or failed state itself.

Basically, the possibilities for violence in the case of a secession by the South are all-too-likely, even as it appears that this situation is an eventuality. So how do we prevent a possible future humanitarian crisis even while trying to solve the one that is happening right now?

The writer of the briefing paper has a few ideas to this end, but none of them are simple. Along the basic things that need to happen to prevent catastrophic war in 2011 are:

1) Ending the violence in Darfur.
2) More implementation of the parts of the Comprehensive Peace Treaty that have still not been implemented.
3) An agreement between political elites in the North and the South about how to proceed with the referendum. Postponing it could lose the Southern leaders their legitimacy; holding it could lose the Northerners a large chunk of their country.
4) Coming up with a contingency plan for how to deal with the possibility of a vote for secession.

Is that all? That should be easy in a country that has had a total of 13 years peace since 1956.

I hope you are all up for challenges…

Posted in The Politician, The Scholar | 2 Comments »

January 5th, 2009

Along the Border

There is an article in a recent New Yorker that gives a really good anecdotal account of life in the refugee camps in Chad. It’s a long read but full of first hand accounts, historical narratives, and in-depth commentary on the situation along the border between Sudan and Chad. It begins with this juicy line…

“Everything is fine, until the moment when it is not. And when that moment comes it can be very quick and very bad.”

It continues to talk about the aid workers who enter such situations and what they encounter upon arrival. This story comes from 2003, the outbreak of violence in Darfur:

“In mid-afternoon, [the UNHCR worker] arrived in Adré, a town of ten thousand inhabitants directly across the border with Darfur. Travelling along the border, he saw hundreds of people encamped in makeshift shelters of reeds and straw, with rags and tattered blankets suspended overhead on sticks. Under the midday sun, the temperature could soar to a hundred and ten degrees. Dry winds and sand storms parched the terrain and sucked moisture from anything animate. Women and children dug deep into the sand of the dry riverbeds to find water and foraged miles into the countryside collecting wood to sell at the markets. As Sturm and his team continued along the border, the hundreds became thousands. About seventy-five per cent were women and children, hollow-eyed and lank-skinned from hunger and despair and fatigue. Interviews conducted later by Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders told of families being burned alive in their homes, and of men who had been forced to watch, in the moments before their own deaths, as their wives and daughters were raped. Some refugees had been there for months, and more came every day. Every so often, they saw in the distance a column of black smoke rising from another burning village. In the month before Sturm’s arrival, thirty thousand new refugees had crossed into Chad. The total number gathered along the four-hundred-mile border with Darfur, by rough estimates, came to seventy-seven thousand.”

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