Washington Post video of rally in support of Bashir.
The Sudanese government's decision to expel 13 humanitarian agencies and keep expelling and threatening other groups confronts the international human rights movement with a new and nasty reality. In all the speculation about what was going to happen after the ICC indictment, this particular scenario -- expulsion of all the Western humanitarian relief operations -- wasn't really contemplated. People took more or less at face value the government of Sudan's pledge to distinguish between the ICC and the UN and non-governmental organizations. The theory was that the GOS might mount some kind of attacks on humanitarians, or feign to stand by while outraged rent-a-crowds demonstrated or even grew violent, or would chase rebels into camps, catching unarmed humanitarian workers and civilians in the crossfire.
That Bashir would retaliate in this particular way despite UN protest, essentially halting the bulk of aid to more than 4 million needy people, including 2.7 internally displaced, wasn't contemplated but is now likely an irreversible reality. The effect might not be immediately dramatic, although water will start running out in some camps this week. The Darfurians are extraordinarily resourceful at survival, the GOS has always been good at keeping out journalists who try to record their struggles, and the massive deaths are likely to go on as they always have -- slower, due to disease and starvation rather than armed clashes as in the Rwandan genocide. This will make it harder to keep a sustained attention on the outrage.
All these developments put us in front of an awful dilemma. We are used to having governments and UN member states tell us that in order to achieve or maintain peace accords, justice might have to be delayed, as we were often told during negotiations for the Dayton Accords or peace talks in Sierra Leone or in the years of efforts to get the North-South peace in Sudan. This "peace without justice" is a frequent scenario to which some governments and humanitarian groups are resigned. We're also getting more used to hearing that justice might have to be delayed in order to prosecute war successfully, too, as in Afghanistan, where human rights concerns and accumulated injustices are getting short shrift while NATO and the U.S. concentrate on the war.
But Bashir's gambit represents an innovative horror -- not just justice, not just implementation of human rights have to be delayed, but humanitarian aid itself must be held hostage to "peace". The ICC essentially pursues its mandate, declaring crimes against humanity; now we are seeing what a sitting indicated head of state will do -- pressure the Security Council, which referred the case, and the whole international community to delay justice in order to buy not even peace, but just basic sustenance.
This is a pretty intolerable formula, and the international community might be forgiven if it blinks on this, but so far, what we're seeing instead is a reaching for the same ineffectual remedies that were debated 4 years ago when the genocidal actions began -- a "no fly zone" which in fact no Western power is prepared to maintain. (Usually what happens in this debate is all eyes turn to the French Foreign Legion based in Chad, where EUFOR is still struggling and was supposed to leave this month, but the French simply have never shown interest in reviving invidious colonialist comparisons or leading the West into yet another battle with an Islamic country).
And that indeed is what it means, starting another front in the war on fundamentalist Islam, when we are already bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. A government that was willing to starve out millions of people isn't going to be fazed by an ineffectual half-hearted war attempt, and unfortunately, it has friends in this, chiefly China and Russia, but also leaders in the African Union, Egypt and Libya, and the other members of the Organization of Islamic Conference, Saudi Arabia and other Arab powers -- powers the U.S. placates to "get things done" on other fronts, like preventing Iran's nuclear capacity from turning deadly.
Veteran Russian human rights leader Ludmila Alexeyeva and colleagues march in protest against the murder of lawyer Markelov and journalist Baburina with a sign, "Your Silence is Justification for Murder". Photo Andrei Blinushov.
The GOS claims to have a huge dossier which will "prove" that somehow these Western groups are guilty of...something. The fact is, the relief operations are not engaged in human rights fact-finding, don't join in promoting or enforcing the ICC indictment, and are keen to distinguish themselves from such positions due to the need to keep access and fulfill the purpose of their mission. The human rights groups that do gather information put it instantly on their website, and no one needs to "collect a dossier" on them, it's already on the Internet. The ICC makes its own careful research independent of these groups, and at best human rights organizations can only validate what they do, or provide argumentation for the need for the ICC to act. Yes, these distinctions are blurred in the minds of the GOS, which not only merges all these carefully-separated functions, but rants and raves with some Arabic media that they are Zionist plots as well. In the end, a murderous regime will do anything to justify its actions, and painstaking efforts to teach the lessons of different mandates of different agencies are lost on it.
Thus the international network of people of conscience, which includes a wide variety of groups with humanitarian and human rights mandates as well as dedicated workers of the UN and other multinational agencies are at a particularly hard crossroads with a particularly awful choice. They can either gut it out, and keep making the distinctions about missions to deaf and cynical ears, and keep engaging in advocacy and suffer the consequences. Or they can greatly retract, end any sort of advocacy whatsoever, go back to a 19th century ideal of the silent but effective Red Cross, and save human rights aspirations for work at home in their own countries.
The reason why the international movements are soul-searching, and why the second option seems like capitulation, is because of four factors that have increasingly come into play in the last decade:
o some relief organizations with chiefly a humanitarian goal have nevertheless taken on the mission of advocacy, not only witnessing human rights atrocities quietly but reporting on them and condemning them -- groups such as Medicins san frontieres
o some human rights groups which used to limit themselves as amateurs to gathering human rights stories and defending victims in campaigns have increasingly professionalized and now want to participate in international justice -- legal action to prosecute perpetrators. Their documentation and their media outreach do not have to meet the same test as evidence for prosecution, however.
o nowadays, even groups that once began as strictly non-governmental in their funding sources now take large donations from both their own governments and multinational agencies under the UN or EU, and therefore are inevitably aligned with their governments' foreign policies -- and seen as too close to intelligence operations and political decisions about prosecutions or sanctions
o groups that once focused just on relief operations such as digging bore-holes or delivering sacks of flour, as well as groups that used only to restrict themselves to human rights monitoring, have now taken on what are in fact development and even democracy-export functions -- mounting operations to cope with long-term problems that spawn conflict in the first place, and instituting programs such as education of women and girls, health care for women and girls, opening up clinics for rape victims, promoting rule-of-law efforts that help victims of violence obtain justice, etc.
These programs didn't exist 10-15 years ago, before the UN began "mainstreaming human rights" and donors also began to demand more long-term solutions than palliative care during "complex emergencies" -- and now the Taliban has shown it is willing to shoot to kill over such programs it rejects, and in many other settings, including Darfur, aid activists face a concerted struggle attempting to help victims in this fashion.
And that's just it -- they are aid *activists* now not only because of donor pressure but because the victims themselves demand it. The same media that creates the global village and makes us aware of disasters in the poor world also works in the other direction to bring the news of the rich world's standards. The messages not only of affluence and but the equality of men and women and free media that create such societies is news that travels fast, even without any special relief operation's gender program. Anyone who has worked on a successful human rights campaign to get a political prisoner out of jail knows that on the next day he will turn to you and ask for a laptop to publish his newsletter and rent money for an office. Helping people is not something you can keep compartmentalized.
I honestly don't have an answer today for how these challenges posed by the bad actors of the world are to be faced, nor how the good actors are to sort their way through a labyrinth of cooptation at every turn. I do think we cannot hide from these challenges or allow them to split groups apart needlessly in squabbles with each other. We're at a point that if relief agencies that never engaged in human rights fact-fathering and speaking out are targeted for expulsion anyway, trying to parse the distinctions and make the firewalls stronger simply may not work. We're also looking at another grim and unattractive option: that dropping all programs related to changing the society or fixing problems at the roots may work, and if we are humanitarians and not revolutionaries using human rights as a cover, we'll have to live with that. Well?
In a totally abstract sense, if we care only about the immediate relief of the Darfurian people, we could only encourage the GOS, now faced with the huge responsibility to protect people that it refused to get help with rationally, to look for other options. Perhaps the People's Army of China is available for rescue work -- they did an admirable job during the Chinese earthquake and won the trust of the Chinese people and even the approval of the always-critical international media. Perhaps the OIC, always holding these disasters involving its fellow Muslims at arm's length, might dig in now and assume the burden of running the camps Westerners were forced to abandon. Perhaps the Russian Orthodox Church, sometimes described as a church without a church basement, could get into the foreign relief business.
The GOS claims there are hundreds of African groups including in Sudan itself that are prepared to help with internally-displaced -- let's see how they do if they don't have to work in an environment of constant obstacles the way Westerners did. Yes, now's the opportunity for those who liked making this distinction "The West and the Rest" to see how the Rest can do -- go ahead and impress us, after all, as humanitarians, we care first and foremost not whether we can impress our donors with numbers of girls educated in order to get more money, we care that people resume life in their villages and never have to face rape while collecting firewood again. Surely, whatever the ideological differences of "the West and the Rest," we can all agree that women shouldn't be raped while trying to care for their families, right?
What people who actually work in these countries tell you is that all the artificial distinctions created by the politics of conflict and the donor community don't mean much. The labels of "internally displaced" versus "refugee" versus "villager" are more and more distinctions without a difference. The greater care that the international community is willing to give to refugees forces some IDPs into either pretending to be refugees, or actually making themselves refugees by crossing borders, just to get care. And the idea that either group, IDP or refugee, is somehow more in need than the locals who didn't get on the move is another fiction -- the aid in camps is so attractive, that people who have homes will make themselves homeless, living in the bush for days without food and water, just to avail themselves of relief.
That ought to tell you that something is very broken in the whole concept of "relief" which maybe should be recast as "after-care" -- but let's not forget what broke it. What forced agencies to break into mandates in this fashion were the great powers, the UN members who cannot stand up to the states among their ranks who attack their own people and create the IDPs that in fact make up most of the world's crises. They can't stand up -- not only because of sovereignty, and not only because of the weak notions of "responsibility to protect," but because they aren't willing to wage war -- and nowadays even we humanitarians can't prove that waging war can credibly include a relief operation that leads to long-term stability.
There aren't any examples of "regime-change-through war" working in history. The NATO bombing of Milosevic had its collateral damage that lives with us today in the Russians' invocation of that act as justification for their invasion of Georgia. Going back further in history, we find the hideous dropping of a nuclear bomb on the Japanese people, having General MacArthur take over their surrendering society, closing down all the martial arts schools as hotbeds of resistance, interning Japanese citizens in the U.S. and...waiting 30 years for that approach to work its magic. Is this a recipe we'll be wanting to use again? No? Then perhaps you liked the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia as your example of "responsibility to protect"?
I think we as a movement are faced with some really hard soul-searching and reassessments in a climate where the wind of human rights revolutions are no longer at our backs as they were in the 1980s and 1990s. For one, the "Rest" perspective grows, and acquires power. Russia is increasingly gaining access to the Internet as is China. The views that you read on even independent blogs is overwhelmingly anti-Western, and at times fascistic. It's not just the Taliban that doesn't like women's rights; it's ordinary bloggers in Eurasia. The liberal Western position that infuses the ideals of humanitarianism is in a distinct minority worldwide and no longer has the high tide of Western capitalism to sustain it.
I do think there are principles to guide us here, however, even if we have to reconcile ourselves to being smaller, poorer, and more besieged as a movement. These are:
o responding to the pleas of victims of massive human rights violations, war, and poverty and taking our lead as to what best meets their needs in a given situation
o focusing on defense of victims of human rights violations, the poor, and those without a voice and helping to amplify their voice in international affairs.
o bearing witness to the suffering of others and speaking up on their behalf in the most effective way possible
o not accepting facile, ideologically-driven explanations of social systems as the reason for the architecture of violence, and not seeking to come to power in order to achieve our visions
I think if you refresh the discussion on these four principles, you will have a humanitarian debate in a new light. I don't believe in the futility or hopelessness or the quietism that you are driven to from a full-blown critique of the West as essentially wicked from reading books like David Rieff's Bed for the Night or Conor Foley's Thin Blue Line. That is, I'm more than willing to engage in the rethinking of humanitarianism that these books lead one to, and I encourage everyone to read them, but I am not willing then to be driven to a conclusion that paralyzes us from further action while we fret about the evils of Western imperialism and Western capitalism and the well-intentioned groups that hitched their wagons to them -- because frankly, the evils of the Government of Sudan, willing to hold humanitarianism hostage to make good on that implicit critique of Westernism, are *more* evil and require a less facile response.
First of all, I think when we are at our best, we take our cue from those in need first, rather than our own needs that can be dictated by an increasingly tight donor space in the worldwide economic recession and increasingly challenging media attention space with the death of the newspaper. If a movement has to spend most of its time fund-raising and "raising awareness" in the media to get donations, and can't break out of that cycle to actual effective work, maybe it's time to go out of business or at least break up into smaller, cheaper parts. And it's also a good time to rethink the mandates of mass movements that become so simplified and reductivist -- masses amounts of money were gathered to mount a mass movement to safe Darfur that could only culminate in demanding that George Bush "do something," but could never take on more difficult tasks, like challenging China through an effective boycott of the Olympics, or debating Chinese students and scientists in the U.S. about their government's support of the Government of Sudan.
And the answer to those urging a return to 19th century style Red Cross mandates of absolute silence and neutrality is to point to the formerly silent victims -- they have email and cell phones, too, at least access to those who do, and they get their story out in ways they couldn't 100 years ago. We can't ignore them and we have an obligation to respond out of human solidarity when they ask us to act.
I do think that in deciding to become "an international justice movement" rather than "an international human rights movement" we've made a strategic blunder that inevitably puts us in harness with the ICC. Some would say we belong there, as natural conveyor belts to the ICC with our information. I don't think we do belong there, because I think our focus should be on defense, not prosecution. I think we are better as lawyers, not as prosecutors -- I think as lawyers, we are in an independent and adversarial space criticizing the powers that be, but as prosecutors, we are inevitably aligned with executive powers, be it of one government or of concerted multi-governmental powers. I think that needs to be looked at -- especially given that international prosecution usually only effectively prosecutes a handful of perpetrators, and never brings instant relief and compensation to victims, but only establishes a kind of rhetorical cover you can use to rebuild society over the long term -- and only if other factors are present. While the U.S. should now ratify the ICC, we should be mindful that international justice is extraordinarily expensive, and not add to its cost unless it is effective.
I also think that all relief operations of the world today are already far beyond the 19th century model and already speak up in many settings in ways that they never used to as a matter of course, and without dire repercussions. We take it for granted that UN officials now speak out, whereas once they were the target of journalists like Rieff for their passivity. But it is always good to ask *what is effective*. Usually one finds the lone UNCHR worker speaking out finally to the wires, or the otherwise quiet International Committee of the Red Cross speaking out because they have determined that the effectiveness of quiet diplomacy is exhausted.
The international human rights movement has also reserved for itself for 25 years a moral luxury that it likely can't go on holding, and that is refraining from pronouncements on the use of force or of any essential commentary on war other than to parse in complex and endlessly serialized ways "violations of international humanitarian law" (in fact, taking on this function was debated vigorously by human rights groups, some of whom opposed it, 20 years ago). The moral luxury stems from a kind of purity of mandate -- war is legal, international law does not preclude it, therefore human rights groups do not condemn it as such to avoid politicization.
don't think mainstream groups will change in this regard, and I don't think that a sectarian effort to try to prove legally that war is "illegal" works, either. Rather, I simply think that movements should -- and will -- come into being that don't create these artificial necessities for "purity of mandate" because they will see the task of stopping regime-change war as a moral imperative -- and they will make themselves more credible than the Soviet-influenced peace movements of the 1960s or 1980s by vocally condemning the violence of the regimes that need changing, as well, and making common cause in solidarity with those seeking peaceful change in such countries.
So I expect that in the next 20 years, we will likely see more all-purpose movements of conscience come into being that will more emphatically take on the issue of war abroad as well as war on one's own people in state-sponsored violence, especially if they can document that it isn't a just war, even without hewing to a pacifist viewpoint, and document that the exigencies of anti-terrorism or security or territorial integrity don't justify the violence used on civilians.
And I think we will also see more compartmentalizing of some organizations that will follow their cue from the deadly connections Bashir has made to more silence and less confrontational programming. Inevitably we will see governments, rather than leaving humanitarian aid to an independent sector, taking on these functions because they will justify it not only as "winning hearts and minds" in an invasion, but the only way to deliver care safely in a climate where the hostile powers murder unarmed humanitarian workers who try to run schools for girls -- and *that* very problematic merging of war and peace functions will drive more people to more all-purpose movements of conscience.
I think it will be a very harsh period for the movement credited for saving so many, as it faces not only loss of funding but faces having lost its way among competing powers and their interests.It may be that the election of Obama, and the increasing awfulness of Putin, might open up the political space where mass movements in the U.S. don't have to carefully hew to a "single issue" like Darfur or the phony "Support Our Troops," or and that leftist anti-war movements will no longer be able to remain silent in the face of continuing terrorist murder of Iraqis, the murder of Russian journalists or jailing of Chinese bloggers, but take on a more all-purpose anti-violence agenda that can full-throatedly condemn all sides in the war in Iraq, the expulsion of humanitarians from Darfur, and the killing of a Russian reporters. We are now really politically freer to create an international movement across frontiers that accomplishes those moral goals yet does not seek to come to power like a Green Party or a Transnational Radical Party. I think if we don't seize this historical moment to make better, credible, more all-purpose movements of conscience, we will be reduced to becoming either small and ineffective sects, or thinly-disguised arms of governments.
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