I’m surprised to find this BBC Viewpoint by Alex de Waal, who’s been one of those obscure-academics-turned-heroes-by-college-kids because of his work on Darfur. He’s an area expert on Darfur, wrote a key book about famine there in the 1980s…
He’s always been a guy of nuance and complication, but in this piece, he argues against an intervention in Darfur. He even proclaims the death of “R2P.” Which is the most un-cool thing you can do, in the world of activists. The Responsibility to Protect is like the Marshall Plan of the new century, something that seems new and revolutionary, and young and old scholars and activists alike have thrilled to it. It was an effort to bypass the state sovereignty argument–“You can’t send your troops into my sovereign land; that’s invasion”–that keeps so many interventions from happening; the doctrine, which the UN adopted in 2005, says that if states are unwilling or unable to protect their civilians, the international community is obligated to do so.
It’s part of the lessons-learned-mea-culpa rhetoric that has come after Rwanda. In fact, the idea of Rwanda has become such a strong moral imperative that it’s constantly invoked in the Darfur debate–even by de Waal, who opens his piece by saying, “Analysts say that Darfur is Rwanda in slow motion, that we should send troops to protect African civilians from their Arab killers and disarm the infamous Janjaweed.”
I don’t actually know that many analysts call Darfur “Rwanda in slow motion,” except maybe in the press, and for good reason. It isn’t. Darfur is horrible, but it is both historically and categorically different than what happened in this country. The nature, speed, process, motives, and political objectives of the violence are completely different. And as soon as you stop recognizing that, you’ve trapped yourself. You can’t craft a solution framed by Rwanda for the problem in Darfur.
But you can come up with some rather catchy slogans. Including, de Waal says, “responsibility to protect.”
For the record, I’m not so sure about his next graph either: “In the Rwandan genocide, a million people were slaughtered in a hundred days. It was Africa’s holocaust. Few would have opposed a short sharp episode of colonial-style armed intervention to stop it. ”
The French did have an episode of colonial-style armed intervention here. If you believe Gerard Prunier (and he’s a guy who’s hard to argue with; he’s among the six or so guys thought of as authorities on the genocide), it started even before 1994, with training the Rwandan army–including the interahamwe, the youth militias responsible for much of the violence of genocide–and it ended with Operation Turquoise, a unilateral French invasion of western Rwanda which many scholars think provided cover for the continuation of the genocide.
Meanwhile, what ended the genocide in Rwanda is the same thing that de Waal is calling for in Darfur: “old-fashioned peace.” Here, it was even more old-fashioned than maybe even de Waal is looking for: it wasn’t negotiated or mediated or monitored by peacekeepers. (In fact, that’s precisely what didn’t work the first time around.) The Rwandan Patriotic Front simply won the war. And in winning the war, they stopped the genocide.
So maybe the Rwanda frame suggests a question: Who is Darfur’s RPF? But it’s a question that only makes sense as a metaphor–and, like the “slow-motion” comparison, it’s useless. It does what bad metaphors do: it ignores everything outside the frame, and blurs what’s inside.
Poor Darfur. It’s in desperate need of re-branding.
