More from ST. Imagine those cheeky French, suggesting that GOS solve the Darfur problem first. Everyone knows those rebels will stop at nothing, nothing. Well, they may stop when Nafi no longer has a job. Actually, I think they'd likely stop if SAF just withdrew. But if SAF withdrew, who would protect civilians from the janjawid? 
April 26, 2009 (PARIS) — The Sudanese presidential assistant and his delegation has been given a cool reception from the French Communist Party officials during his three day visit to Paris this week.
Nafi Ali Nafi held a series of meetings described as "unsuccessful" with French and British officials in Paris on Darfur conflict, the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).
The presidential assistant suggested to France ways to improve bilateral relations and to work together for the resolution of Darfur crisis as well as to ensure the democratic transition. However Paris said Khartoum should end Darfur conflict and cooperate with ICC first before dialogue on normalizing ties.
April 26, 2009 (WASHINGTON) – The United States of America is positioning itself to become “friends” with the Government of Sudan, seeing this approach as the best way to improve the situation in Darfur and reach a political settlement, according to a closed briefing given by Special Envoy Scott Gration at the US State Department on April 20, 2009.
- US special envoy to Sudan J. Scott Gration, left, arrives at the Sudanese foreign ministry for meetings with officials after his arrival in Khartoum, Sudan, Thursday, April 2, 2009 (AP)
According to someone who attended the briefing, which Gration gave to representatives of several non-governmental organizations, the envoy discussed rolling back sanctions imposed on the Khartoum government. “Some sanctions are doing more harm than good,” Gration reportedly said.
April 23, 2009 (JUBA) – Southern Sudan development partners have decided to form a platform to be known as Inter Donor Coordination Forum (IDCF) to improve aid efficiency and effectiveness in Southern Sudan.Can this really be true? The donors had no coordinating mechanism until now? What have they been doing in their tent cities?
# Eric Reeves:
April 24th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
“We should ask why leaders find if acceptable and meaningful to use words like ‘evil.’”
[Alex de Waal, April 2009]
“This [counter-insurgency in Darfur] is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.”
[Alex de Waal, August 2004]
I think it’s fair to ask why de Waal’s description of 2004 may not serve as an occasion to ask him the very question he poses in April 2009. I’m not sure there is necessarily any difference between “routine cruelty,” “withered humanity,” “genocide by force of habit” and what I and others mean by evil.
Speaking just for myself, I’ve spent the entirety of my careers, literary and in Sudan advocacy, reflecting on the issue of human evil. It is a word I use with extreme hesitation, but find unavoidable in speaking of the leadership of the National Islamic Front/National Congress Party. I don’t see why this should make me subject to the relentless homogenizing of Darfur advocacy and the caricatures that seem a staple method of dismissal (de Waal is in this post explicit about his initial caricaturing; elsewhere—a strategy he shares with Mamdani—this is not the case).
Until there is a frank acknowledgement that “Darfur advocacy,” or even “American Darfur advocacy,” is a more representative designation than “Save Darfur” (with its inevitable connections to the “Save Darfur Coalition”), it seems unlikely that there will be improvement in the discourse between what de Waal elsewhere refers to as “landscape painters” and the real experts, the “mountaineers.” The implicit assertion is of a trumping expertise, made endlessly with the dismissive use of the loaded phrase “Save Darfur.” This in turn depends upon an untenable account of American civil society efforts on behalf of Sudan, a number going back more than a decade. Such relentlessly invidious distinctions invite a harsh rhetoric of response.
Eric Reeves
# Alex de Waal:
April 24th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Dear Eric,
it is deeply unfortunate that your health has prevented you from visiting Darfur, and that you have never had the opportunity to visit Khartoum or to live in Sudanese society. It is also a shame that you have never had the chance to match your literary study of evil with first hand experience of countries and communities that are going through traumatic events. Were you to benefit from such chances, I am confident you would understand at once that the deductions and characterizations you make today would need to be revisited.
As I wrote, there are phenomenal strengths in the ‘Save Darfur’ movement (it’s an odd quibble for you to condemn that phrasing as ‘loaded’ or ‘invidious’). It has been phenomenally energetic and, at its best, reflective and effective. But one of its weaknesses has been its difficulty in acknowledging its own successes. The ‘Save Darfur’ movement (for me this label carries no derogatory baggage) contributed to a remarkably successful humanitarian operation. Without it, relief agencies would have struggled for funds. It helped deter the levels of violence seen in 2003 and 2004 from recurring. Other forms of engagement have helped keep the key provisions of the CPA more-or-less on track.
As the English say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Please show me that you are not a caricature, a standard formula that doesn’t change.
Eric Reeves the caricature will lose no chance to lambast any commentator or diplomat for any form of constructive engagement with Sudan. This caricature will predict doom, knowing that nine times out of ten he won’t be proven wrong.
But Eric Reeves the person who cares for Sudan and for mitigating its traumas will welcome the progress that is being made, week in and week out, and will nurture these small but real openings that will, once or twice out of ten tries, bring a real transformation in the lives of the Sudanese. Which one is it to be, Eric?
with best wishes for your rapid recovery.
Alex
Bashir has challenged the arrest warrant by make foreign trips to countries in the region. All the states he visited however are not legally obliged to apprehend them.
One African ambassador at the airport described to VOA the turnout as “an ironic show of solidarity” for a man facing war crimes charges.
The envoy, who asked not to be named, said it is ironic because many Africa leaders fear that if President Bashir can be prosecuted, they could be next.
President Bashir at the press conference dismissed the notion that the arrest warrant by ICC could restrict his travel and create negative influence in his country.
“We went to this summit to show those who said we couldn’t travel out side Sudan that we can travel outside Sudan” he said adding “nothing can intermediate us into stopping traveling”
Bashir believes that the ICC decision has actually brought positive contribution to his country.
“Unlike what people might think the issued arrest warrant has rather strengthen our bond with countries of African Union (AU), Arab league and also with international organizations” he said.
“It also has strengthened the unity of the Sudanese people” Bashir underscored
Read more at Sudan Tribune...
In his new book Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror, Mahmood Mamdani claims that, “in its present form, the call for justice is really a slogan that masks a big power agenda to recolonize Africa.” There is more than a grain of truth to that; I think my friend Tony Anghie’s seminal work Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law should be required reading not only for all students of international law, but for all law students period. That said, I find claims like Mamdani’s to be woefully overbroad — and ultimately counterproductive, because they delegitimize all attempts to do justice in Africa, no matter by whom, against whom, or for what.
Consider the International Criminal Court. I have been exceptionally critical of the ICC’s exclusive focus on Africa, both in my published work and in lectures — including one I gave at the ICC. But I think it is completely absurd to claim that the ICC’s regrettable focus on Africa somehow reflects racism or “masks a big power agenda to recolonize Africa.” The ICC has many flaws, but being a puppet of the big powers isn’t one of them. Three of the permanent members of the Security Council are not members of the Court: the US, Russia, and China. And of the 108 members of the Court, approximately 65 are from the Global South,16 are from Eastern Europe, and only 23 are from Western Europe or North America (and that includes such traditional imperialist powers like San Marino, Andorra, Ireland, and Malta).
That is a remarkable degree of geographic diversity — and it is reflected in the diversity of the Court’s personnel…
[list of personnel]
Not exactly a big-power lineup. Indeed, it takes one hand to count the number of colonial powers represented among the Court’s leadership.
To be sure, neither the geographic nor individual diversity of the Court guarantees that it will not serve the interests of the big powers. The structural interests of international organizations all too often trump the personal interests of their members. But I think the Court’s diversity problematizes claims like “in its present form, the call for justice is really a slogan that masks a big power agenda to recolonize Africa.” At the very least, it would seem to obligate those who make such overbroad claims to explain why, despite the fact that it is very much a global project, the ICC is nothing more than a colonial tool.
I agree, Kevin, and would add that Pres. Al Bashir denounced the ICC as a “white man’s tribunal” even though the 3-judge Pre-Trial Chamber issuing the arrest warrant had no men, and the Presiding Judge was an African woman.
Explaining Oslo
I William Zartman
Three approaches are tested as explanations of the outcome of the Oslo negotiations. Ripeness theory explains the onset of the Madrid negotiations, which then talked themselves into a mutually hurting stalemate, but it accounts only for the beginning of Oslo, not its outcome. Process analysis shows neither a formula-detail nor a concession-convergence process but a hybrid constructed substantive process with two turning points of toughness, alongside a two-phased procedural process created by the need to officialize the proceedings. This approach explains rather well the nature of the constructed outcome. Contending theories of mediation bring out the importance of seeking a settlement rather than a resolution, of turning track two into track one diplomacy, and of using a powerless rather than a muscled mediator. But they also show how the type of outcome reached at Oslo prepared its own undoing when brought back home.
HARARE, Zimbabwe — President Robert Mugabe’s top lieutenants are trying to force the political opposition into granting them amnesty for their past crimes by abducting, detaining and torturing opposition officials and activists, according to senior members of Mr. Mugabe’s party.
Mr. Mugabe’s generals and politicians have organized campaigns of terror for decades to keep him and his party in power. But now that the opposition has a place in the nation’s new government, these strongmen worry that they are suddenly vulnerable to prosecution, especially for crimes committed during last year’s election campaign as the world watched.
Against my better judgment, yesterday I bought Mamdani’s book on Darfur, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror. Anyone who knows me knows that I have very little patience for the oeuvre of Mamdani, so I knew that I was going to hate this book, but I had no idea how bad it was actually going to be. I’m about a quarter of the way in, and so far, he’s attacked by name Save Darfur, Eric Reeves, Gérard Prunier, Philip Gourevitch, Nicholas Kristof, John Prendergast, Harold Pinter, Brad Pitt, Steven Spielberg, George Bush and Tony Blair, just to name a few, but strangely Omar al-Bashir is mentioned only once in the first 192 pages, and only to attack the ICC for focusing on “the consequences of the violence [in Darfur], not its context.” (Emphasis his - p. 5.) So, with the exception of two or three canned adjectives to slap Khartoum on the wrist (”brutal counterinsurgency”), Mamdani seems to have more of a problem with Save Darfur and Eric Reeves than he does with the Sudanese regime’s violence.
JOEL ADECHI (Benin) said the vote was a major event in the context of the international community’s attempts to ensure there was no impunity for violations of international humanitarian law in the past decade. Benin had voted in favour of the resolution because it was party to the Rome Statute and also because the worsening of the situation in Darfur meant that the Council must take action to end the suffering of the civilians, ending impunity by providing impartial justice. Benin had also voted in favour out of respect for human dignity and the right to life. The African Union recognized that the international community had a responsibility to protect civilians when they were not protected by their own governments. The resolution must help them to achieve their legitimate dream of an end to their suffering and enable them to look ahead to the future with serenity.
