(Courtesy of Melville House Publishing)

There is, today, only one serious political problem:  the tragedy of the disappearance of the other.

Top billing in the competition for media attention has been a veritable blood bath for the past few months. A summer of election politics, Olympic scandal, and the potential loss of overtime pay for six million Americans have dominated “above-the-fold” coverage of most major American newspapers.

What is remarkable about this summer’s press coverage is how unremarkable the stories have been. The old journalistic adage “If it bleeds, it leads” found little place in the editorial decisions of mainstream newspapers. Or else the crisis in Sudan has been deemed unimpressive by media standards for death and destruction. Although most major newspapers offer regular updates about the situation unfolding in Sudan, these stories hardly reach the fever pitch of Paul Hamm’s “mistaken” gold medal or the veracity of the attacks on John Kerry’s war record.

Acts of naming

After the unforgivable inaction in Rwanda in 1994, both the media and U.S. government have been quick to utter the ‘G’ word — genocide — but even such a declaration has not compelled us to act in any significant way. The political malfeasance of the Clinton administration should not be forgotten. After the decision was made to classify the brutal slaying of Tutsi Rwandans as acts of genocide rather than genocide — a critical semantic distinction since use of the latter term obliges international intervention under the 1951 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,  the Clinton administration actively blocked international action both through the United States’ privileged position in the United Nations via the Security Council and through less formal diplomatic channels.

After the deaths of 800,000 Tutsis, the United Nations was left to apply ad–hoc peacekeeping efforts in the form of refugee assistance and humanitarian aid. Where this was possible, many of those helped were members of the Hutu power militias that orchestrated and carried out the genocide. Regrouping in the camps in Goma, Hutu power militias led killings and attacks using the camps and assistance in the aid of such atrocities. The horrors that continue in Burundi and the Congo today cannot be disentangled from the sordid past of purposeful ignorance that characterized the Clinton administration’s lackadaisical response.

The first time as tragedy, the second as farce

The Bush administration’s version of willful ignorance in the case of Sudan has been to substitute directionless condemnation for action. An administration too committed to “global democracy” to wait for the United Nations to enter Iraq is now content to obey and wait for direction from those same painfully slow U.N. channels. The diplomatic sclerosis of the U.N. Security Council has yet to be condemned by the short-tempered Bush foreign affairs team — in this case. Even the decision to omit the explicit threat of sanctions from a Security Council resolution directed at Khartoum’s involvement in the Darfur region of Sudan was met with little more than disappointment.

Unfortunately, given the rhetorical power behind the Left’s critique of the Iraqi intervention, it is difficult to muster the intellectual consistency to decry this wait-and-see approach. The Democratic and moderate Left demand for a measured multilateral response in Iraq is being heeded in the case of Darfur. What we find at the heart of this deadlock is a strange double bind that has plagued Leftist politics at least since Vietnam: the opposition to empire lacks an alternative strategy and language for intervention.

Years of developing an anti-colonial critique of economic and military intervention have left most of the nations under the siege of violence without the basic resources necessary for defense or survival. Countries ravaged by both structural and military violence face a world of decreasing aid and attention. Some have accused the West of using half-hearted attempts at peacekeeping as an alibi for insufficient financial and infrastructure assistance.

Supporting minimal peacekeeping efforts to contain the fires started by post-colonial economic exploitation, Western nations are willing to commit just enough resources to create a kind of negative peace. That is, just enough stability to extract necessary resources, such as oil or cheap, expendable labor, but not a peace that allows for basic inequities — including organized sexual violence, debilitating diseases, or illiteracy — to be addressed in a comprehensive manner. It is this increasingly common vulnerability for which the anti-globalization, anti-empire Left has no answer.

Those who doubt this dark thesis should only ask why the invasion of Iraq inspired massive popular protest against the Bush administration for taking out a dictator while the daily murder, rape, dislocation, and terrorizing of as many as two million in Darfur has not inspired so much as a witty ad campaign from MoveOn.org (save the courageous acts by Danny Glover and a few others arrested outside the Sudanese embassy).

There is a selective silence, in that there is reporting on Darfur but inadequate political response regarding violence in southern Sudan — demonstrating a kind of bizarre narcissism in which only atrocities committed by the United States or other western nations matter. The failure of this fascination with our own destructive capability is that it obscures often more devastating and systemic levels of violence in what Bernard-Henri Levy calls the “forgotten wars” of planet Earth.

Even as the Bush administration and CNN grouse over the word genocide, vital elements of the conflict are omitted from the explanation of conflict in Darfur. The description of bloodthirsty Arabs on horseback now ubiquitously known as the Janjaweed in news cycles fits nicely into the current lexicon of Arab stereotypes. The blaming of internal ethnic divisions belies the fact that Western and Chinese oil development has played a fatally significant part in the massacres beyond the Darfur region, such as the Nuba mountains, Dinka villages, and Nuer populations throughout southern Sudan. Although described as a recent flare-up in ethnic tensions between Arab Muslims and Christian and Animist black Africans, the organized displacement and outright slaughter of villages in southern Sudan predates the narrow timeline cited in CNN’s coverage of the Darfur crisis.

Part memoir, part philosophical reflection on ethnic conflict, Bernard-Henri Levy’s recently published War, Evil, and the End of History relays accounts of southern Sudan identical to  “recent” events dating as far back as 1985, when, as a recent Human Rights Watch report argues, the Chevron Corporation began negotiating with Khartoum to gain rights to oil rich areas in southern Sudan. In a chapter dramatically entitled “The Pharaoh and the Nuba,” Levy recounts the aerial views of southern Sudan in 2001:

We have actually come upon the oil complex, in principle a no-fly zone, of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, the consortium that includes the Canadian firm Talisman Energy, Chinese and Malaysian interests, and the Sudanese national company Sudapet. And now we’ve had confirmed what the NGO’s, Amnesty International, [and] the Canadian government itself, have suspected for years but which the oil companies and the state fiercely deny: namely that the government is systematically “cleaning” the land, in a perimeter of 30, 50, sometimes 100 kilometers, around oil wells; that the least oil concession means villagers harassed, bombed, razed, and columns of poor people chased away from their homes; in short, that wherever oil is gushing, wherever black gold is supposed to bring happiness and prosperity, the desert increases.

Levy goes on to chastise Carl Bildt, former U.N. emissary in the Balkans, for championing the oil companies’ building of roads and air-strips, which says Levy, are now used for bombing runs.

A 2003 Human Rights Watch report entitled “Sudan, Oil, and Human Rights” confirms the consensus cited by Levy with eyewitness testimony. According to a 1990 account of one Nuer villager, the army drove his family out of their town.

“What happened is the jallaba [Arab, but also the word used for slave trader] just walked into the village and opened fire so everybody just ran … The jallaba are wanting the oil,” he said.

When asked in an interview why he joined the rebellion, another young Nuer responded that Arabs had displaced his family. In return he asked, “Why do people disturb those who do not have guns?”  He answered his own question with one word: “Oil.”

Forgetting politics, forgetting genocide

What we find just behind the quick accusation of genocide by the Bush administration and others repeating shortsighted explanations in the popular media is the pursuit of another strategy of willful ignorance no less reprehensible than the Clinton administration’s denial of the Rwandan genocide. The overly simplistic, but seemingly progressive (at least compared to denial), decision to label the Darfur crisis genocide is hiding the disquieting details of its cause.

Is it possible in an age of almost total worldwide security surveillance that the Bush administration could have overlooked the direct correlation between the building of oil wells and the destruction of villages?

One could simply claim that this is an area outside the United States’ strategic (satellite and human intelligence) purview. But is that really possible given Sudan was one of the first sites of conflict with Al Qaeda?  Would the United States really ignore an Islamic government thought to have ties to the bombings of American embassies?

This seems unlikely. What is more likely is that U.S. involvement in the Sudanese peace process and the heavy investments of BP/Amoco in the Chinese oil companies that are dependent on Sudanese oil has created an incentive for stability at the price of genocide.

In an attempt to give voice to these forgotten or ignored histories, Levy’s book diagnoses the Sudanese conflict as an event outside of history. He refers to the people of southern Sudan as “the Damned.” That is not to say in his critique of Hegel’s and more recently Francis Fukuyama’s grand optimism for the “end of history” that Levy repeats the racist claim that Africa lacks the Anglo-European aptitude to experience and drive history’s dialectical progression. Rather, he suggests the United States and European states and businesses are stripping African events of their historic significance, leaving the living remainder of these “directionless” genocidal equations little more than their suffering to provide content to their existence. And even this we steal and sell to the merchants of 24-hour news feed.

Levy says our language euphemizes this process of dehistoricization and depoliticization as “humanitarianism.” In a brutal description of aid and the purely biological or health approach of current relief efforts as the “forgetting of politics,” Levy writes:

The confusion of humanitarianism with the politics whose place it is taking more and more … How can you avoid the political and make it seem you’re not avoiding it?  How can you abandon the disinherited populations of the Third World to their fate and prevent public opinion, whose emotionalism is familiar to us, from having a sudden awakening of conscience and reproaching their governments? By humanitarianism. A strong presence of humanitarian aid. The transformation of the government itself into a giant humanitarian aid agency. And a media/humanitarian frenzy that will at least have the effect of masking the absence of vision, of aim, of will. Sometimes, though, it’s not so bad; sometimes the humanitarians are the last ones, as I said, to carry the colors of Europe, to defend a certain idea of humanity and human honor and to remember, consequently, the time when it was through politics that one resisted oppression; I have known these kinds of humanitarians; I have seen their work, here, in the Sudan … But sometimes aid is catastrophic; and, without giving in to the temptation of pessimism, it is difficult not to reflect that the whole of the humanitarian apparatus serves to anaesthetize public opinion, to disarm its protests, and above all to discourage the initiatives of those who could be tempted to do more … That is the case here in the Sudan, where the humanitarian machinery has as its prime effect the prolonging of a war that the West has, if it wanted, the financial, hence political, means to stop.

It is this “humanitarian machinery,” as Levy calls it, on which the Bush administration is focusing its efforts. For whatever reason, the resolve to cross the line into the realm of political choices and military options is not present. The decision to do little more than think about the threatening of sanctions or offer to outsource our responsibility to intervene to groups such as the African Union maintains what Levy refers to in a June 24, 2004, interview with Charlie Rose as “a Western belief in two humanities.” One of dignity and one of sub-human suffering.

When Rose asked Levy why he wrote this book, Levy responded, ”No one else did it.” Levy went on to explain that he believes, “It may be because we believe in two Mankinds that Abu Ghraib happens.”  

Engaged journalism, or politics as usual?

Despite, at times, a very Eurocentric account of universal human value, what Levy contributes to the complexity of formulating a new Left response to genocide is a model of engaged journalism. In a moving description of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s brief stint as a journalist covering the Iranian revolutions, Levy describes a form of intellectual intervention in hopes of militating against the voyeurism of modern media atrocity coverage while also fulfilling what he calls the “responsibility of a writer traveling through the black holes.” This act of professional witnessing is for Levy what is truly to be done as an act of conscience.

Although Levy’s attempt to “be there” for the damned of Sudan and other forgotten wars should not be scoffed at, it is not entirely consistent with his nostalgia for the anti-fascist fighters of Andre Malraux and George Orwell, whom Levy would like to in some sense join. Not unlike the troubled — and at times confused — ethical inquiry of Christopher Hedges’ War is the Force that Gives Us Meaning, Levy declares that he is “sick of hearing talk of courage and heroism” in relation to the wars of which up-close seem to lose all meaning. He lambastes the “non-interventionists” of Bosnia and the opponents to the war on terrorism, going so far as to say, “There is one single objective: to stop burying our heads in the sand, to take responsibility of naming the adversary, and provide ourselves with the means to conquer him.” Levy is much more careful than the Bush administration in providing a precise definition of democracy’s enemy so as to distance himself from the Samuel Huntington-inspired Clash of Civilizations theory. But for those who wholesale dismiss the war on terrorism, there is a faint but discernable echo of great ideological — if not religious — war in Levy’s thesis. At his best, Levy contextualizes his definition of militant Islam in terms of a certain connection to a morbid desire for death over social change. In the introduction to War, Evil, and the End of History, Levy writes:

I knew enough about Islam, in other words, to suspect that, at the very least, two Islams exist. The new war, if there had to be a war, would be waged between these two Islams as well as between Islam and the West; and that to accept [Huntington’s] idea of an Islam entirely set against a Satanized West was truly too handsome a gift to give bin Laden and those who resemble him, and for whom he was perhaps only the front man.

Levy goes on to describe the role of an ahistorical interpretation of Jihad that has been politically hijacked by leaders such as Osama bin Laden. It is along these lines Levy is willing to locate his call to action.

However, it is such a call to action that creates Levy’s diametrically opposed theoretical positions: Heroic anti-fascist war and the anti-polemical commitment to witness, which are an aporia that not even Levy’s powers of literary flare and imagination can hide and at times clearly he does not want to hide. What is important about this book and its relationship to the current genocide in Sudan is the very schizophrenic impulse toward these two impossible goals that so aptly demonstrates the current ambivalence of the Left (particularly the anti-empire Left). Those of us who are troubled by the forgotten wars of Darfur and elsewhere are being torn in two by the increasing inconsistency and inadequacy of our anti-imperialist protest against intervention and the visceral call to respond to the Others who must not remain faceless and nameless.

While the Right’s ability to distract us from the greater global atrocities or “international escapades” under the preemptive doctrine can be addressed, what do we do once we possess the knowledge of who must be opposed and who must be joined in opposition? It is the transition away from the naïve politics of global retreat and non-intervention that poses one of the greatest challenges to the possibility of a global struggle for social justice. After all, the removal of the Bushes of the world without the removal of the bin Ladens from the helm of global agenda setting would simply shift the balance from one fatal ideology to another. Given the history of inaction on the part of the Democrats, including Kerry and John Edwards, even the hope of a new administration in the White House will do little to alter the trajectory of the conflict in Sudan and elsewhere. Change must happen domestically, but it must be real change, backed by a committed strategy to oppose the leaders that drive the other side of the conflict.

While Levy does an impressive job of describing the failures of current thinking on global conflict at the level of resolving the Left’s ambivalence, he offers very little. What seems overstated in his account of Sudan is the degree to which the “damned” are cut off from the knowledge of their own circumstances. Levy’s diagnosis of a loss of history may go too far, stripping those whom suffer of the human agency to resist and organize politically. This not only runs contrary to what Levy most admires about Foucault’s dictum, “Where there is power, there is resistance.” It also diminishes the capacity for cooperation between those in the West and the forgotten wars to work together against oppressive governments.

Another kind of European exceptionalism seeps in whereby only those in history can have the means to revolt. I do not believe this is what Levy intends, but intellectually, this is what the reader is left with. Contrary to Levy’s descriptions of hapless suffering, the Human Rights Watch report that seems to confirm many of Levy’s accounts of Sudan displays a slightly different picture of those who are the objects of genocide. In a pointedly self- and globally aware statement, one of the Nuer chiefs, Isaac Magok, responded caustically to a Human Rights Watch researcher in August 1999:

You are from America. We want you to see the location [in the fishing camp where we live]. I have seen on TV a village bombed in Kosovo … The U.N. brought camps and cooked food and then in little time everyone was laughing. Why do they not do the same to us?  Because we are black?  What is wrong with them?  You will see our conditions and then we will talk to you.

If our task, according to Levy, is to return to politics and escape the husbandry of humanitarian assistance, we must listen to the voices of those who suffer and insist on their rebellion. What is lost at times in the narratives contained by War, Evil, and the End of History is an attempt to find such political forces to align with seeing all acts of rebellions within the “black holes” of the planet as historically doomed. This seems to repeat the very forgetting of politics that Levy condemns. It forgets the politics outside the European tradition with which Levy so strongly identifies.

As this article goes to press, the Bush administration is supporting a U.N. envoy to Sudan. This envoy is predominantly an observation group. The question remains: How much more do we need to know? This is, of course, the paradox of Levy’s will to observe. To give names and faces to the Other is of little consequence to any except those who watch and survive at a safe distance. The near-heroic chances being taken by Levy and other journalists willing to break through what New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof calls the “information quarantine” of Darfur must be reinforced by more than food and clean water. Otherwise, those in the profession of watching will bear a special kind of damnation.

Like the angels of Wim Wenders’ classic 1987 film Wings of Desire, we will suffer a fate “to watch, record, and testify,” never knowing life or those that lived. To know and not respond with the full capacity of what we are capable as people is to sacrifice the very significance of our unique existence. The tempering of our commitment on the basis of national interest and pragmatic economic calculations reduces us to national packs of clever animals. The name of humanity and what it represents must carry a much greater weight than that of a charitable pastime.

STORY INDEX

ARTICLES >

“Sudan: Janjaweed Camps Still Active”
URL:  http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/08/27/darfur9268.htm

“Crisis in Darfur”
URL:  http://www.hrw.org/doc?t=africa&c=darfur

BOOKS >
Purchase these books through Powells.com and a portion of the proceeds benefit InTheFray

War, Evil, and the End of History by Bernard-Henri Levy
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0971865957

A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0060541644

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Jairus