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Sudan Archive: Some Concluding ThoughtsJune 1-3, 2004(Part 2, 3, 4 , 5 & 6)It's worth noting that Samantha Power was among the first to draw parallels between the war in Darfur and the genocide in Rwanda (NYT; transcript of lecture). Ms. Power aroused controversy by publishing an article (text) accusing the Clinton Administration of willfully suppressing UN intervention in Rwanda, or even diplomatic reference to the word "genocide"; the substance of her allegations are supported by State Department files.1 In her NYT editorial, she urges the Bush Administration to urge Sudan to accept a UN mission, probably involving tens of thousands of peacekeepers. In fact, this is another sensitive issue because of the US standing in the Muslim world. On the other hand, the EU has tended to keep its hands clean by ducking involvement even more effectively; it has a longstanding record of rejecting any diplomatic pressure on countries for human rights violations, for which it avoids friction with foreign governments. Much of the pressure for the Clinton Administration to resist using the word "genocide" to describe events in Rwanda came from Brussels, the former colonial power in Rwanda, which wanted to withdraw its peacekeeping force to avoid being a belligerent in the civil war. I do think a lot of the rhetoric about Rwanda is about blame. Power developed an intense loathing for Clinton that made me initially classify her as just another right-wing Clinton-hater with a novel twist. Whether that's true or not, I later decided that the message was largely accurate. However, the blame was predictably used by other parties with an ax to grind-not with any interest in preventing this from happening again, but to demonize liberals. Making these judgments is an extremely dangerous business; most journalists around the world, for example, leapt to the conclusion that the Serb government was carrying out a genocide in Kosovo; later, when this was proven to have not been the case, the moral authorities shifted their skepticism up many notches. Intervention in Somalia: evil power grab? error? sincere humanitarian intervention? How about in Rwanda? We all know about Rwanda now: the information that the White House suppressed was the truth, that Kigali was gearing up for a mass murder. But if the United States had undertaken to opposite policy, and instead demanded intervention in collaboration with (say) Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya, would we have saved a significant number of lives? Would not the great majority of the human race have assumed that was a power grab? Bosnia Herzegovina? There, opinion ranges between the "it's all lies, lies I tell you" school (example), to this testimony before Congress on Srebrenica (both accounts indict US policymakers). Readers are invited to use whatever language they like in explaining how I should know whom to believe. Most commentariat aren't shy about condemning those who guess the wrong way. All right, how about the sequel to B-H? That would be Kosovo. We've established that nothing like tens of thousands of Albanian Kosovars were massacred by Serb police or anybody else; we know that the colossal exodus of Kosovars began after NATO bombing commenced in April 1999. But was there legitimate reason for the OSCE or NATO to believe military action was necessary? Invasion of Iraq (posing as a humanitarian operation)? One consistent feature of these interventions is that the caliber of the government's motives and defense thereof keeps declining. There's ample evidence to suggest the results were not worthy of the costs, but in the case of Iraq I would venture to say that was so obvious it's an anthropological conundrum to say why anyone accepted the Administration's views in the first place. In Rwanda, the scandal was that the US government ran like hell. In Lebanon (1983), the consensus is that the US intervened to ensure the least-bad political outcome in Lebanon, as far as Israel was concerned. Conclusions of an Ignorant Blowhard I feel embarrassed pontificating about this because I haven't been to any of these places. I rely on newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. However, I feel responsible for participating in the political process, and I hope readers do as well. And the fact is that the US government intervenes, or affects, a lot of places in a lot of ways. Those affected are prone to hold the electorate responsible. This is why a number of commentators decided, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, to offer up their own answers to the question, "Why do they [sic] hate us?" For the record, I think most of the efforts in this direction were total failures. Ironically, the people who really do hate America and Americans live in Europe, not the Middle East (I have met an awful lot of them). On the other hand, some people-an increasing number, obviously-in Muslim communities believe that there is a war between the umma and the US government. They believe America's failure to declare such a war is shrewdness and strategy, not benevolence. A person can believe this and not actually hate the citizens of the hostile country. That person is, however, likely to believe that certain violent actions are justified against the hostile population, much the way the US government routinely bombs the population of countries it deems malevolent. So I think a lot of the public reaction, such as numerous essays trying to explain why foreigners might hate America, were without any grasp of the nature of human conflict. Dangerous anti-American actors are usually focused on a single grievance.2 Humanitarian interventions require defeating a malevolent state actor, or that state's surrogates. According to this BBC article, there is some controversy as to whether the janjawid ("Arab" militia in Darfur) are actually controlled by Khartoum, but they certainly were armed by Khartoum, and often tell refugees they "are the government." According to the Samantha Power article, they benefit from government airstrikes against villages, although once again, I tend to smell a rat when I hear reports like this because of the way they were manipulated in the leadup to the Kosovo intervention and the late invasion of Iraq. Many allegations against the Sudanese government (e.g., that it is engaged in the slave trade in southern Sudan) failed to survive scrutiny. Moreover, for many years the US government sought to isolate Sudan and punish it for sponsoring terrorism, despite the fact no evidence existed of any such link. Resuming pressure on Khartoum could be a method of attacking a fundamentalist country on the grounds that it was perpetrating genocide against the Black portion of its population. Are there any readers who understand my skepticism? The reason I am explaining this is not to argue for doing nothing; far from it. The reason is that there has to be a choice between "doing nothing" and obliterating the core state, whether the "Sudanese Arabs" (or Funj) or the Serbs. In the case of Sudan, there is a chance that we can make real headway by avoiding the sort of moral triumphalism that characterized American diplomacy in the 1990's. But it is unlikely if people insist on simple formulae: in this case, for example, that the Janjawid are prima facie agents of the Sudanese government, or that we can solve this problem by arriving to dissolve Sudan and aid the SLA/JEM. In view of the fact that several generations of Sudanese leaders resorted to scorched earth tactics to liquidate insurgencies-or to wage them-it's prudent on the part of readers to pause before they decide that the Khartoum government's writ in Darfur must be ended at once. There's a good chance either a US-spearheaded invasion could be driven to similar tactics, or a UN-managed peacekeeping force could wind up in the region, enabling the killing but doing nothing to stop it. These are outcomes that could arise. That's as close as I'll come to the word "should," in this essay. I have no illusions that my notion of what the US government, or the UN, or readers, ought to do, will be of the slightest relevance . What I am trying to do is explain the pitfalls of intervention. There is a good possibility our government, or somebody else's, will seek to use the Darfur conflict to impose a solution of convenience-a silent Rwanda, with a smiley face attached.
What am I Afraid of?What sorts of imperialism accompany humanitarian intervention?Imperialism in the 21st century is in many respects a repetition of a recurring fad in the history of western nations. The USA was bitten by the expansion bug in the 1830's, and wasn't sated until the 1850's; during the interim, about half the land area of Mexico was seized by Anglophonic settlers from the United States, while the Oregon Territory was divided with Great Britain. This phase increased US land area by 67%. The bug bit again in the 1890's, when the early "neo-cons" came into vague. At the time, the object was to acquire global clout with sovereign naval bases. This mania was short-lived; while the bellicose Theodore Roosevelt succeeded William McKinley (1901), the war in the Philippines was raging. Roosevelt does not appear to have suffered politically for the war he provoked; but the Anti-Imperialist League was, so to speak, a cloud the size of a man's hand. On April 30, 1899, the Central Music Hall was secured for a "Liberty Meeting," which had for its purpose "to protest against American Imperialism, and especially against the attempt of the United States to subjugate by force the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands." The call for the meeting was signed by 466 persons. Among them [...] Miss Jane Addams [...] Jenkin Lloyd Jones, [father of Frank Lloyd Wright]; Edwin Burritt Smith [...]. The Philippine-American War, as the Filipinos called the conflict between themselves and the United States army [...] or the Philippine Insurrection, as the American government preferred to call it, had been going on for four months at the time of the Chicago Liberty meeting. This struggle was interpreted by the anti-imperialists to mean that the islanders were fighting for their liberty [...] Reports of the struggle between the two forces with their accompanying stories of cruelty and retaliation, were received with conflicting emotions in the United States. Some Americans felt indignant against the islanders, and called them and their leaders,"robbers", "half-castes", "Indians", "barbarians" and so forth. On the other hand, there were Americans who believed that the Filipinos were not the wild tribes they were represented to be, and who were shocked at their "slaughter" by the American army. "The American Anti-Imperialist League," Maria Lanzar-CarpioLanzar-Carpio takes a carping view of the League, but her scare quotes around "slaughter" are wildly out of place. In complaining of the inaccurate information disseminated about the Philippines, she refers to a speaker criticizing the seizure of "1000 to 2000 islands" when in fact the Philippines has 7,083 islands. I'm not sure I see how this is terribly germane. Oddly, the occupation of the Philippines was a decision taken for ostensibly humanitarian reasons. Even the Anti-Imperialist League accepted the need for a protectorate; there was little likelihood that the Philippines could survive as an independent country without any experience in self-government. Subsequently, when the US launched another wave of annexations or invasions, mainly during our neutral years of WW1, all was done with a humanitarian gloss. Wilson, a virulent racist who segregated federal facilities and sacked African American employees [*], is generally associated with high-minded internationalism; compared with Clemenceau, I guess Temujin seems high-minded. Until quite recently, textbooks referring to the occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) tended to emphasize "nation building" efforts; the Internet has thankfully changed the emphasis. Likewise, the occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916-1922) and the intervention in the Mexican Civil War. These were propagated at the type as hygienic, if not entirely altruistic. Humanitarian intervention fell into disfavor as Americans reacted to the disillusion of the War and the Red Scare. The FDR Administration ended the foreign occupations and adopted a "Good Neighbor" policy. This was tainted by covert activity and front groups, but for the most part this was a period of recovery from the imperial disease. The American civil service became cleaner and more professional; a phase of massive internal improvement began, and with it, relatively civic-minded business. The reason was simple enough: the USA was no longer a flophouse for tycoons looking for a quick buck. People were reluctant to soil their own bed. The Second World War was, in the long run, a horrible poison to our nation. It drew us back into the affairs of Europe, and the lust for foreign clout. Of course it was urgently necessary to defeat Fascism and rebuild the war-devastated countries; but it led to disastrous preoccupation with foreign matters beyond the ken of the vast majority of American citizens. US taxpayers were taken for a ride to surfeit the egos of their hapless leaders. Having furnished the right side with weapons, supplies, and a dash of HR, we got snookered into taking sides in the postwar political squabbles. The winners would never accept that we had done enough, while the losers turned their venom on us instead of their domestic rivals. And we picked up atrocious habits in the bargain. This notion of our indispensability has remained as a disease. It has raged like a paranoid delusion. We seem to be indispensable to everyone now, and yet everyone wishes we would go away. The undertaking in Haiti in '95 was undertaken to resolve a grave national embarrassment and security risk: the CIA had taken a chance on ousting Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the new regime of Raoul Cedras was a disaster for all involved. The US State Department loathed Aristide because he was a populist and his language threatened the foundations of Caribbean economic relations. Of course, Aristide was saying the things he did because he had seen too many parishioners get murdered by Duvalier's touton macoutes, and by the way, the kleptocracy had driven the Haitian economy off a cliff. After a brief spell of UN-US occupation (which failed to disarm the militia), the presidency of the IMF-friendly Rene Preval (with its attendant economic collapse), Aristide took over the country again. The Bush Administration did too, and declared that it was Aristide's fault that Haiti was a mess. Words, Dear Readers, fail to express my exasperation at this. But could anything have been less of a surprise? The greatest perk of power is not only denying that one makes mistakes-it is requiring others to believe it. UPDATE: Brian (in comments below) points out that this is not limited to the USA, not today, and obviously, not in the past. This brings me around to some thoughts I had meant to include, but neglected: that humanitarian imperialism is a global phenomenon. Nearly all nations reflect some internal imperialism, usually of the city against the country; and nations like Sudan, China, Congo-Kinshasa and Indonesia often represent cases where cases of a people inherit an empire that they then struggle to conquer. So imperialism is often a problem of elites who themselves are accustomed to waving the bloody shirt of imperialism. Second, the imperialism that people usually think of when they use the word-country A invades country B, formally annexes B as possession, governs B and collects taxes from B's population, without significant input from B-that is significantly worse than insidious forms of imperialism; and it deserves the kind of focused outrage when it arises. Until 2003, that sort of behavior was so rare even I didn't spend very much time thinking about imperialism. Now that it's going on, it's easier and easier to see how the European-settled world collaborated for centuries in a huge project to make money in the imperialism business. A Martian studying world history might have been startled to notice that, prior to the 15th century, empires tended to be expanding core states that grew until they bumped into each other. The Mughul Empire banged up against the Ghaznavids, who squeezed up against the Safavids. The latter were bickering with the Ottomans over the control of land on their shared frontier, as were the Russians with both. Then, there began to appear countries with remote empires: Portugal with bases around the edge of Africa or the Indian Ocean, Spain with beachheads in the Americas, then the Dutch with deeper hinterlands, and so on. The Martian would look at the map of 1911 and conclude the nations of Europe and North America were, in effect, a single country that had conquered the world. His colleague, puzzled, might observe that France and Germany had found a war in 1870; and the countries seemed to be preparing for a war with each other. But they might be compelled to agree it was really a civil war, an inter-European version of the July Revolution brought about by a shifting of the political center of balance within European societies. That, I daresay, is what Martians might imagine.3 Since the Great Patriotic War, of course, the cosmopolitan business of imperialism became far more so. In a sense, the French colonial empire became a European empire; the same was more patently true in the British Empire. The dominions were effectively sovereign states with a very close working relationship with London, and they collaborated in the enterprise of imperial exploitation with clinical efficiency. The Belgian Congo was almost explicitly organized along these lines; a template of the "free market," the Belgian Congo employed Yanks and Brits to explore the hinterland and oversee the rubber plantations. A totally freewheeling administration prevailed there, a libertarian paradise of entirely untrammeled trade. The Bush Administration, in contrast, has made of Iraq a gauleiter state that takes captive markets and captive capital to a whole new level. So it is with "humanitarian imperialism," or colonial domination waged under the pretense of helping the subject people. It can involve the UN, just as the League of Nations mandate system gussied up the spoils of the former Ottoman and overseas German Empires into humanitarian endeavors. And it's not necessary for this to be wholly illegitimate, either; Saddam was, after all, a horrible leader. NOTES: 1 Samantha Power, "Bystanders to Genocide," The Atlantic Monthly, September 2001. As readers can probably tell, the issue was prepared before the 9/11 attacks. Just as the impact was felt, the terror attacks occurred and Rwanda was suddenly forgotten. Ms. Power also wrote, A Problem from Hell (TAP review), which documents the failures of the Clinton White House in this regard. It must be noted that nearly all governmental institutions around the world either enabled the genocidaires in Rwanda or else struggled to avoid any appearance of moral obligation. 2 This writer thinks that a number of activists sought to piggy-back on the attacks by insisting the attacks were valid because of some pet cause of theirs. Domestically, the logic was that the attacks could have been prevented by doing what the writer wanted. This was tasteless in the extreme, but was really just another form of extreme lobbying. NOTE: 3 The type of empire of 19th century Europe was not unprecedented; the early land empires of Renaissance Central Europe followed a similar pattern-disconnected patches scattered across Mitteleuropa. Most of the families involved came from an old corridor of Medieval Europe, stretching from Holland to Tuscany. Similarly, in the Spring and Autumn Period of Chinese history (5th-3rd cent. BCE), the major states of China had as their core a cluster of polities along the Huang River; these states flared south to Vietnam and west to Qinghai Province. And of course, in the Golden Age of Greece, there were a cluster of microstates on either side of the Aegean with colonies from present-day Georgia to present-day Marseilles. One can imagine imperialists living next to each other and commuting to work in the morning over the same sea lanes to their colonies off in some backwater.
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The allegations that Kagame's forces somehow shot down Habyarimana's airplane seem improbable to me; but I continue to be surprised by developments. A lot of the documents I read in the Nat'l Security Archives suggest that the Rwandan regular army officers enrolled in the Interhamwe had told journalists that they were planning to "take care of [Habyarimana]" when asked about a possible peace deal with the RPF; and testimony suggests that the Tutsi, upon hearing of the airplane being destroyed, immediately knew this was the sign for the killings to begin. The only place where I've seen the "Kagame shot down H's plane" story was in Le Monde Diplomatique, which I don't trust on this matter.
As for the Clinton apology--I tend to stay away from the extreme judgements of leaders' characters. You may notice I avoid it with Pres. Bush as well, although sometimes the effort causes me to perspire metallic fluid. All presidents wind up making compromises like this. All. Maybe the job bundles together responsibilites no one man can handle. And I'll stop there.
Posted by James R MacLean at June 3, 2004 10:23 AM