Rays of Light for Darfur

Just in time for the Yom HaShoah season, President Bush has rediscovered the ongoing genocide in Darfur. Bush threated to apply additional sanctions on the Sudanese government should they fail to take action to stop the violence. Bush's speech should be applauded, for no other reason than the possibility that positive reinforcement might spur him into serious action. However, in order to be worthy of anything louder than a golf clap or two, Bush needs to translate his strong, if sporadic rhetoric into concrete action. It is long past time that discussions of establishing a no-fly moved from the realm of the hypothetical.

Two other recent developments give cause for more hope than the recent stirrings from the White House. The first is the recent discussions between the various rebel militia groups and representatives of Darfur Arab tribes about forming a common front against the Sudanese government. While there is something unseemly about the whole process (especially given the leading role the Arab tribes of Darfur have had in committing the janjaweed massacres), a radical change in the political order of Darfur would likely stem the tide of the genocide. The rule of thugs who do not commit genocide is surely preferable to the rule of thugs that do commit genocide.

Even more promising however, is the first sign of the Chinese government's reevaluating its position of providing diplomatic cover for the Sudanese regime.

A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Mr. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs.

So what gives? Credit goes to Hollywood — Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg in particular. Just when it seemed safe to buy a plane ticket to Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, nongovernmental organizations and other groups appear to have scored a surprising success in an effort to link the Olympics, which the Chinese government holds very dear, to the killings in Darfur, which, until recently, Beijing had not seemed too concerned about.

In an op-ed in the WSJ, Farrow had warned Spielberg, who is a serving as an advisor to China for the games, that he could "go down in history Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games." Spielberg immediately noted his concerns to the Chinese government, who in turn dispatched Zhai to Sudan to pass along the word that China was no longer agnostic about genocide.

If the Chinese are indeed serious about removing their political cover for their Sudanese clients, the idea of international diplomatic pressure actually impacting Sudanese policy is no longer farcical. Genocide for the Sudanese regime is a counter-insurgency tactic, not a theological commitment. Real pressure very well may result in real results. If so, we should thank the courage of Mia Farrow, and the anonymous Chinese official who fondly recalled watching their first pirated video of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Draft Chad

After months of inaction, the Bush Administration, the UN and the rest of the international community) has begun to stir again on doing something to halt the Darfur genocide. A theoretical UN force now exists to be deployed, if everything goes according to plan, sometime before 2007.

Unfortunately, the very real forces of the Janjaweed are moving much faster than that. They've now extended their attacks on Darfur Africans across the border into Chad, striking at refugees who had fled from their earlier butchery.

The time has come to think outside the box on what can be done now to halt the genocide in Darfur. One option that needs to be seriously considered, is sending the government of Chad more than merely humanitarian assistance.

In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Stephen Biddle, addressing the rapdily worsening sectarian conflict in Iraq offers some valuable insights into conflicts similar the ongoing conflict in Darfur.

Communal civil wars, in contrast, feature opposing subnational groups divided along ethnic or sectarian lines; they are not about universal class interests or nationalist passions. In such situations, even the government is typically an instrument of one communal group, and its opponents champion the rights of their subgroup over those of others. These conflicts do not revolve around ideas, because no pool of uncommitted citizens is waiting to be swayed by ideology. (Albanian Kosovars, Bosnian Muslims, and Rwandan Tutsis knew whose side they were on.) The fight is about group survival, not about the superiority of one party's ideology or one side's ability to deliver better governance.

.....

Darfur is clearly best understood as a communal war. The original insurgency in Darfur was by black African tribes against the Arab-dominated Sudanese regime. The Sudanese government chose to respond by backing the Janjanweed's genocidal attacks on black African civilians. Similarly, the insurgents seeking to topple the Chad government, who the Sudanese government also supports, are disgruntled from being frozen out of power by the current dominant tribe in Chad.

Biddle offers the following advice regarding what the US should do in Iraq

The only way to break the logjam is to change the parties' relative comfort with the status quo by drastically raising the costs of their failure to negotiate. The U.S. presence now caps the war's intensity, and U.S. aid could give any side an enormous military advantage. Thus Washington should threaten to use its influence to alter the balance of power depending on the parties' behavior. By doing so, it could make stubbornness look worse than cooperation and compel all sides to compromise.

Clearly we have far less power and consequently far less influence in the Darfur conflict. But the basic principles set out by Biddle remain the same. It may very well be that cold, hard, realpolitik tactics are the only way to accomplish a humanitarian objective.

The government of Chad is by no means deserving of military support. It is a corrupt, unrepresenative regime that has been a long-time proxy state of Libya' Ghadaffi. Most recently, it breached an agreement with the World Bank to use revenues from a World Bank funded gas field for solely civilian development purposes, tapping into the funds for military uses. But it is also clearly the lesser of two evils.

However, it is a cold fact that most genocides in the past 50 years have been ended by forces that were all things considered were unworthy of support - the Croat army pursuing a pan-Croat agenda in Bosnia, the Tutsi insurgency that ultimately conducted reprisal attacks against Hutus in Rwanda, and the army of communist Vietnam in Cambodia

The Sudanese government made the decision to use genocide in its proxy war against the current Chad regime. Ringing declarations and limited boycotts have done little to convince the Sudanese government that its tactics are counter-productive. US military aid to Chad (or first the threat of such aid) may be precisely the blunt instrument needed to get their attention and send the message that genocide doesn't pay.

UNNECESSARY GRAVITAS

As Slate's media watchdog, it is Jack Shafer's job to police the press - to alert the cyberpublic to hype, artificial trends, statistical malfeasance and other ways in which those who have the primary soapboaxes distort our public discourse. In his latest column Shafer takes Nicholas Kristof, one of the regular columnists at the World's Greatest Newspaper to task for unfairly picking on Fox News Bloviator-in-Chief Bill O'Reilly. According to Shafer, Kristof's well has run dry, which is why he has taken to goading O'Reilly for choosing to use his uber-bully pulpit to fight on the front lines in the War Against Christmas while ignoring the ongoing genocide in Darfur.

Then, putting the non into non sequitur, Kristof challenged O'Reilly to use his media power to "stand up to genocide in Darfur" instead of contesting the nonexistent war on Christmas. "If you really want to defend traditional values, then come with me on a trip to Darfur," he wrote.

As Kristof readers know, he's such a frequent visitor to the Darfur slaughterhouse that he's purchased a time-share condominium there. I jest, of course, but there's something around the bend about Kristof's Darfur-instead-of-Christmas harping. Every journalist who chooses to report on Subject A receives critical mail and phone calls from folks who insist that the journalist should be reporting on Subject B if he thinks A is a problem. Kristof must think it's clever to stoop to a gambit that's beneath any self-respecting blogger.

Shafer, who feels free to jest about a little ethnic cleansing among Africans, is downright offended by Kristof's violation of the first law of punditry - thou shall not opine on the subject matter of other pundits. Really, who is anyone to judge whether Subject A is any worthier than Subject B? Shafer defends O'Reilly's divine right as a pundit to decide that Wal-Mart's phrasing of its holiday greetings is worth nightly moral outrage, but the greatest ongoing crime against humanity is worthy of nary a peep.

Shafer is also upset by Kristof's refusal to treat his columns as simply a day job. Poor Nick can't seem to keep mass slaughter in proper perspective. He just keeps returning to that depressing topic, column after column after column.

And so Shafer flags Kristof for unnecessary gravitas. Enough already with the genocide, Nick, Jack is bored. And while you're at it, can you get Thomas Friedman to stop it with his crusade for energy efficiency. No matter how many times he says "Manhattan Project" its not gonna happen. And could you get Bob Herbert to let go of the racism thing? After all, that whole Tulia story was a real drag to read about. I'm sure we can find someone to lighten up the page - how about the latest observations on how exurban consumer patterns define American politics from David Brooks or more musings on modern dating from Maureen Dowd. Please, if Americans wanted to deal with Darfur already, wouldn't they? I mean sure the situation is awful, and the world's response varies between malign neglect and token measures, but the last thing that's called for is journalistic gimmicks.

Oh, Nick, while your at it, why stop with O'Reilly? I'd like to chip in for a plane ticket for Jack Shafer to come along. (I'll even donate my old New Republics so he can catch up on his Marty Peretz columns!!) And if Jack can't fit such a trip to Nick's "time-share" into his busy schedule than I have a suggestion for him - stop writing hit pieces attacking the few decent pundits who are desperately trying to focus public discourse on the issues that truly matter. Otherwise, Slate is going to need a Media Watchdog watchdog.