From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Fri Mar 05 2010 - 09:14:11 EST
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8277/
Friday 5 March 2010
Philip Hammond
Darfur: every celeb’s favorite African war
A new book reveals how celebrities’ and human rights activists’
simple-minded moral posturing on Darfur made the conflict even worse.
This article is republished from the February 2010 issue of the spiked
review of books. View the whole issue here.
‘I had come for an adventure’, says freelance foreign correspondent Rob
Crilly of his time in Sudan. ‘Changing the world or saving Darfur were not
part of my agenda.’ This characteristically frank and unpretentious comment
captures the core strength of his book Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite
African War: its honesty.
That honesty means that Crilly refuses to ignore awkward facts that don’t
fit the accepted narrative about the ongoing conflict in the Darfur region
of Sudan. His fair-minded efforts to understand the motivations of the
various actors involved ultimately lead him to challenge head-on the
over-simplifications and distortions perpetuated by many Western journalists
and Save Darfur campaigners. ‘By focusing on criminalising a government and
making military intervention the top priority’, he argues, ‘[the Save Darfur
Coalition] has made peace more elusive and increased the suffering of
ordinary Darfuris’. His challenge springs, not from having some axe of his
own to grind, but from the good reporter’s desire to really nail the story.
Crilly conveys the excitement and glamour of the foreign correspondent’s
work, sometimes in unpromising circumstances. His most animated account of
pursuing elusive leads and racing to scoop his rivals concerns the
apparently trivial story of Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher in a
Khartoum school who was arrested in 2007 for allowing her pupils to name a
teddy bear ‘Mohammed’. When a snooty US colleague dismisses this light
human-interest piece as a frivolous distraction from the serious stories
needing to be told about Darfur, Crilly’s robust retort is: ‘I think you are
talking bollocks.’ Insisting it is a ‘bloody great story’, Crilly recounts
his ‘elation’ at being in the right place at the right time to reap fame and
fortune from telling the tale. And, as he chases down the story, it turns
out that this minor episode of cultural misunderstanding yields valuable
insights into the workings of the Sudanese political system.
Gibbons was released after the intercession of two British Muslim peers,
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi and Lord Nazir Ahmed: it was not lectures and threats
that produced a result but ‘an appeal to common sense’, which offered
President Omar al Bashir a face-saving way out instead of backing him in to
a corner. Might this tell us something about the international approach to
Sudan over Darfur, wonders Crilly – that shrill Western hectoring is
actually counterproductive, making an already shaky regime feel even more
threatened?
This is not to suggest that Crilly is in any way sympathetic to Bashir’s
government. He frequently deplores its cruelty and vividly describes the
suffering it has caused. What he does not do, however, is demonise it as an
evil regime hell-bent on genocide. Instead, he suggests that Bashir has
pursued a strategy of ‘counter-insurgency on the cheap’, in the words of
Sudan scholar Alex de Waal. Crilly’s encounters with Sudanese soldiers
reveal an unreliable military with doubtful loyalties – the army is full of
Darfuris and also includes men from southern Sudan who until recently were
themselves at war with the government. Recruiting proxy militia forces – the
Janjaweed, or ‘devils on horseback’ – with promises of land and money, and
giving them ‘the chance to loot and steal’, argues Crilly, ‘seemed to be the
way a government with a thin grip on its vast country fought for survival’.
Previous Sudanese presidents did much the same thing, he notes, and so did
the British when they were Sudan’s imperial rulers.
Although this is a personal account, full of colourful anecdotes and wry
asides, Crilly resists the temptation to put himself at the centre of the
story. Since the early 1990s the fashion has been for Western journalists to
use other people’s wars as a backdrop for their own existential voyages of
moral self-discovery. Crilly’s more down-to-earth approach shuns the
simplification and narcissism of that emotive and ‘attached’ style of
journalism. Arriving in Sudan in September 2004, shortly after then US
secretary of state Colin Powell had described the situation in Darfur as
‘genocide’, Crilly quickly finds that the war as understood in the West is
‘slipping out of focus’, as ‘black and white certainties’ start ‘mixing into
grey’. Rather than seeking, as so many have done, to speak on behalf of the
victims of conflict, Crilly’s aim is to ‘broadcast the real voices from the
aid camps, the rebel villages and the Arab camel markets’.
Crilly meets the civilian victims of indiscriminate government bombing raids
and brutal Janjaweed militiamen. But he also seeks out the voices of those
who go ‘un-vox-popped’ in most reporting because they do not easily fit into
reductionist accounts of a ‘genocide in Darfur’ perpetrated by
‘lighter-skinned Arabs’ against ‘black Africans’. He talks to the
Arabic-speaking victims of rebel attacks, for example, and to former militia
members who have defected to the rebels, discovering not an epic tale of
Good versus Evil but a more prosaic and more complex story of shifting
allegiances and ambiguous divisions. ‘Delving into context’, he finds,
‘showed that rational actors were at work, defending the interests of both
sides’.
Equally, while he listens sympathetically to the rebels of the Sudan
Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, he instinctively
mistrusts their ‘glowing media profile’ and refuses to gloss over the
rebels’ political fragmentation, their attacks on African Union
peacekeepers, obstruction of humanitarian aid and recruitment of child
soldiers. Unlike many of his colleagues, Crilly exercises proper
journalistic scepticism when courted by media-savvy rebel groups who want to
appeal to an international audience. Instead of simplifying the picture, his
objective is to ‘tease out… loose ends, to complicate, and correct, the
story of Darfur’.
Of course, complexity does not always go down well with newspapers eager for
attention-grabbing headlines (Crilly wrote for The Times and the Daily Mail,
among others). ‘Hmm, it’s a bit “Inside Baseball” isn’t it?’ was the
response of editors who thought his attempts to present a more nuanced
picture were too laden with esoteric detail. Sometimes they would even
insert terms such as ‘black’ and ‘African’ into his articles in order to
make them conform to the clear but misleading narrative that dominated news
coverage. ‘[I]t was only after a couple of years covering the conflict that
I began to object,’ he recalls, ‘pointing out that everyone in Darfur was
black and African.’ While candid about his own mistakes, Crilly is highly
critical of Western media coverage of Darfur – especially the simple-minded
moralism of crusading journalists such as Nicholas Kristof of the New York
Times.
The main focus of criticism, though, is the celebrity campaigners and human
rights activists of the Save Darfur lobby – the target of the book’s ironic
title. He pokes fun at some of their media-friendly stunts, such as the 2008
‘Day for Darfur’ when celebrities smashed up toys to symbolise the suffering
of Darfuri children – ‘Matt Damon took a baseball bat to a dolls’ house…
Thandie Newton blowtorched a Barbie.’ But his criticism is deadly serious.
It was the campaigners and ‘celebrity diplomats’ who did most to ‘[turn]
Sudan’s desert conflict into the world’s favourite African war’, yet they
did so only by simplifying and distorting it. In the process, Crilly
concludes, far from ‘saving Darfur’ the campaigners have actually made
things worse.
By exaggerating death tolls and depicting this ‘messy war’ as the ‘first
genocide of the twenty-first century’, he argues, the activists and
celebrities bear much of the responsibility for framing Darfur as a problem
demanding drastic solutions – not quiet diplomacy but UN troops, not patient
mediation but arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court (ICC).
It is a timely point. The book’s publication this month coincides with the
ICC’s decision – welcomed by the Save Darfur Coalition – to re-examine the
possibility of adding the charge of genocide to its indictment against
President Bashir. Coming just ahead of elections in Sudan scheduled for this
spring, the court’s move to further criminalise the country’s president is
unlikely to improve the chances of a negotiated peace settlement.
Even though it was ‘the search for adventure’ that took Crilly to Darfur, he
says that in the end it also became his ‘favourite African war’. After five
years of trying to get inside the minds of the rebels, militiamen and
refugees, they got under his skin too. Crilly was honest enough to admit
that ‘the more I travelled through Darfur the more it seemed everything I
knew about it was wrong’, and to reappraise his preconceptions in light of
experience. Save Darfur campaigners should read his book and do the same.
Philip Hammond is reader in media and communications at London South Bank
University, and is the author of Media, War and Postmodernity, published by
Routledge in 2007. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)
Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War, by Rob Crilly, is published
by Reportage Press. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)
This article is republished from the February 2010 issue of the spiked
review of books. View the whole issue here.
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