NEWSBYMICHAEL BEAR

Michelle asked me for a guest post on Darfur -- I agreed. And now I'm doing something rather underhanded; the classic bait and switch. This guest post won't be about Darfur at all. Partially because I don't have anything particularly new or interesting to say about Darfur.

And mostly because there's something else I'd much rather say.

Namely, thank you. To Michelle. And hopefully, because this is my guest blog, she'll feel duty-bound to post it. No matter how embarrassed she might be.

I'm a google reader junkie --  I get more RSS feeds than I know what to do with. All the relevant humanitarian blogs, articles from Reliefweb and IRIN, and yet still I rely on Michelle for somewhere upwards of 90% of all my Darfur news in particular, and genocide news more broadly.

It's not easy to blog every day, especially when you're blogging about such a difficult topic. It's even harder to collate and aggregate a massive amount of information, and make it easily accessible. If that was all that Michelle did with Stop Genocide, it would be more than enough.

Even more, though, I'd like to take this rather public forum to thank Michelle for changing my mind -- about the power and potential of advocacy movements, about the importance of addressing justice when discussing peace.

We've rumbled, and I can't think of any blogging I've enjoyed more. She's also funnier than I am. Which is painful to admit, but true. (For instance, she came up with the vast majority of our joint e-cards to dictators. My contributions were somewhat lacking.)

So, here's to Michelle. The best damn genocide-mass atrocity-crimes against humanity-Darfur blogger around.

Stories about conflicts are often framed as stories about perpetrators and victims. Rhetorically, morally, these distinctions often make sense.

Yet these distinctions are also brutal simplifications. Perpetrators act, whereas victims are denied any equivalent agency. They are simply people to whom things are done, or people to whom help must be given.

Reality is never quite so straight-forward.  There's a grey zone between victim and perpetrator; individuals in positions of power, individuals who bear some responsibility for the suffering they bring on themselves and others.

This grey zone exists in all conflicts, including Darfur.

The conflict erupted in 2003, when rebel groups drawn primarily from the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa tribes attacked Sudanese military bases in the region.  In response, the Sudanese military began a brutal counter-insurgency campaign, including the use of Janjaweed militias.

The Janjaweed - drawn primarily from nomadic tribes - were unleashed against the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa, hundreds of thousands of whom were killed, millions of whom were displaced. Many of the displaced person camps, in turn, became highly politicized.

What responsibility do individual Fur, Masalit or Zaghawa leaders who originally supported the rebel groups bear for what happened afterwards? What risk calculations did they make when they decided to support the SLA or JEM?

And, when we talk about the importance of community participation in any Darfur peace process, are we empowering those same leaders to once again speak for their communities?

I know, I know - this could easily shade into a morally reprehensible, blame-the-victim sort of justification for atrocities.  But unless we understand these dynamics, and how these dynamics impact the calculations of other actors like the Sudanese Government, our analysis - and the solutions we propose - will be fatally limited, no matter how strong our rhetoric.

Or, at least, to tell the Inter-Agency Standing Committee -- or, as I like to think of it, the Bilderberg group of the humanitarian world -- what you think about their various publications. IASC has just launched a survey to determine how many people within the humanitarian community know about their various policy statements, guidelines and manuals, whether they're useful, and how they can be made more accessible.

(Because, admit it, you loved reading the IASC report on humanitarian action and older persons.)

The survey takes about five minutes, and is available here in English, French and Spanish.

[A video from the Environmental Change and Security Program]

In an excellent post over at Stop Genocide, my co-blogger Michelle looks at Conflict in the Age of Climate Change.  As Michelle points out, climate change effects access to natural resources -- desertification and drought, for instance, reduce the amount of usable land available -- which in turn exacerbates conflict, a situation made even worse when not-so-nice regimes "play favorites" or manipulate these conflicts to serve political ends.

(Hello, Darfur.)

All of which got me wondering about the broader, historical connection between climate change and conflict.

Conveniently enough, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently ran an article entitled a brief history of climate change and conflict, mapping the connection between climate change and conflict in terms of sustained trends, intervening variables, and specific conflict triggers.

According to our scientific friends: "[T]he issue isn't one of surviving an especially fierce rain or harsh winter, but the cumulative effects of many fierce rains and many harsh winters. Next, climate change alone won't cause conflict but, along with other factors, will contribute to and shape it. It's one variable among many others, such as cultural, economic, or demographic factors. Last, unless a society learns to adapt to sustained climate change, its wealth will decline and its social fabric will weaken with each passing year. But even if a society faces these environmental challenges, a trigger--such as an assassination, extreme natural event, or random act of group violence--is usually required to ignite violent conflict."

The International Crisis Group has also analyzed the various ways in which climate change contributes to violent conflict.

As ICG explains, there are three main typologies of climate-related conflict: 1) long term environmental deterioration leads to competition over increasingly scarce resources; 2) long term environmental deterioration leads to migration, which in turn destabilizes neighboring regions; or 3) increased climate variability -- droughts, etc. -- leads to economic crises, which in turn spark violence.

To get a sense of where these conflict might play out, there's a great map from International Alert showing those countries most at risk of violent conflict stemming from conflict change. (Hat tip again to Michelle.)

For more information, see this resource page on the humanitarian impact of climate change.

[Sexual violence in the DRC - video from Human Rights Watch]

Earlier this week, the Congo Action Coalition released a statement highlighting the "unacceptable cost for the civilian population" of the ongoing Congolese army offensive against rebels in North and South Kivu provinces.

The UN-supported offensive is aimed at neutralizing the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (French-acronymized to FDLR), a particularly vicious rebel group operating in eastern Congo.

According to the Congo Action Coalition -- comprising 84 international and Congolese NGOs -- things haven't gone exactly as planned: "Since the start of military operations against the FDLR militia in January 2009, more than 1,000 civilians have been killed, 7,000 women and girls have been raped, and over 6,000 homes have been burned down in the eastern provinces of North and South Kivu. Nearly 900,000 people have been forced to flee their homes and live in desperate conditions with host families, in forest areas, or in squalid displacement camps with limited access to food and medicine."

Overall, 1,071 rebels have been disarmed. As the Coalition points out, this leads to some uncomfortable arithmetic: "for every rebel combatant disarmed during the operation, one civilian has been killed, seven women and girls have been raped, six houses burned and destroyed, and 900 people have been forced to flee their homes."

Yay. Victory.

Overall, the UN has spent over $6 million so far supporting the Kimia II offensive.  Which, in turn, leads Texas in Africa to levy a rather damning indictment against the UN: "What I don't get is why you insisted on persisting with this operation even when it was clear that Kimia II was causing massive human suffering. We knew within six months of the operation's launch that it was a disaster. And yet you continued. Why?"

For satellite imagry of the devastation, see here.

Of course, the Congolese army (FARDC) is hardly blameless, as the above video shows.

I laughed. Which might make me a horrible person, but I did laugh.

And, ummmmm, goes without saying - if you're easily offended, you might want to pass on this.

1. Would you take advice on how to fix some of the structural issues facing the States -- say income inequality, or the debt -- from a Congolese man who has spent a grand total of twelve months in the country? You might listen politely, even nod, but chances are you wouldn't find his analysis particularly illuminating.

So, why, exactly, are we qualified to offer governance and economic advice to the Congolese? Or, really, to anyone else?

Most answers seem a variation on the theme of "our system works better than theirs; ergo I'm qualified to dispense advice" -- but, unless you wrote the Federalist Papers or helped establish the European Coal and Steel Community, it's hard to take much personal credit.

2. We are not the first to propose long-term solutions. Current crises rest on the geological layers of previous  comprehensive solutions. Anytime someone criticizes a solution by saying that it only addresses an immediate crisis while leaving the fundamental, long-term problems unresolved is guilty of either a) incredible arrogance or b) stunning naivete.

3. Which is not to say we should talk about long-term solutions. We should do so, however, with an appropriate sense of just how staggeringly difficult it is to achieve said solutions. Or, as I like to think of it, the "peace for our time" corollary.

N.B. -- not quite sure why I'm feeling cynical tonight. Hopefully the mood will pass.

[Photo of an NGO landcruiser in the Congo from Julien Harneis' photostream on flickr]

The best links from the past week:

- Reliefweb explains how to rescue people trapped in a collapsed building.

- On a similar note, first person accounts from CARE about the recent earthquake in Indonesia.

- Tales from the Hood looks into what we mean when we talk about the number confirmed dead in a disaster: "We sit in our cubicles in DC or Canberra or Bangkok or even Da Nang and quickly assess and rank the disaster zones on the basis of a few drops of ink on paper. We make sweeping decisions about where the resources go based on numbers. Out of context it’s too easy to let those number seem small. Only 20 dead…"

- Texas in Africa has a great graphic showing Africa's size in comparison to Europe, the States and China.

- And now for something a little different: the best flag ever. (Hat tip from Texas in Africa.)

[Image of a rescue worker at the World Trade Center from mashleymorgan's photostream on flickr]

On August 31st, President Obama signed a Presidential Study Directive (PSD) authorizing a whole-of-government review of US development policy. Recently, the PSD team has sent out two questions to various NGO-folk, requesting feedback to help inform the process.

The two questions are:

1. What is the vision / agenda for US development policy for the next 10-15 years? If the agenda of the last decade was increasing resources for social programs, what for the next decade:

2. Where should the USG invest its resources? What is the US niche -- alternative visions? Where can the US be catalytic, have the highest impact? Acknowledging that the US is one player amongst many and cannot solve the world's problems alone, what is the discrete role for the US government? How do we leverage US leadership?

A "whole-of-government approach" seems to imply -- if nothing else -- that the recent trend to align US development policy more closely with broader strategic interests will only continue. And I don't think that's such a bad thing.

Someone once told me that there's nothing cheaper than expertise. Apparently what she meant was that it's always possible to hire an expert. I understood her words of wisdom somewhat differently -- that whereas real expertise might be a rare commodity, sounding like an expert isn't all that difficult.

To that end, three simple rules for sounding like an expert on the poverty-stricken, war-torn country of your choice:*

1. Memorize the names of various tribes and semi-obscure towns. Ask questions like: "But what do the [insert name of random tribal group] think?" Or "What about the situation in [semi-obscure town]?"

Both of which are best said with a thoughtful expression, verging on concerned. There's nothing like seeming to agree with your interlocutor while subtly pointing out that his or her analysis is rather facile for ignoring said tribe or district.

2. Memorize the date of one significant or semi-significant event in the country's history. Tie all current political and / or military developments back to that date: "You make an interesting point about Liberian politics, but it's all really just an outgrowth of what happened on September 9th, 1990."

Don't deign to explain further; instead, act as tho of course everyone should know what happened in Liberia on September 9th, 1990.

3. Acronyms, acronyms, acronyms. Saying you dislike the Sudanese Government is one thing, but doesn't really separate you from the crowd. Saying you dislike the NCP is better. Extra points if you can work NCP, SPLM, GNU and HAC into one semi-coherent sentence.

*It goes without saying that the appearance of expertise is quite different from, say, actual knowledge.

[Photo from alancleaver_2000's photostream on flickr]