Ready to Rumble, Indeed: In Defense of Save Darfur

Alternate Title #1: I am Activist, Hear Me Roar

Alternate Title #2: Don't Judge a Movement by its Poster

A few days ago, my fellow Changester Michael Kleinman "threw down the gauntlet" with a post on the International Criminal Court, followed by one on UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes' scathing criticism of the Save Darfur Coalition.

Consider the gauntlet picked up.

John Holmes seems to base his criticism --- or, as Michael said it best, "sweeping condemnation" --- of the entire Save Darfur movement on the content of a few posters, from a publicity campaign conducted three years ago. This amounts not just to a snap judgment, but a huge slap in the face to thousands of dedicated activists, boiling down their efforts to an ill-conceived slogan, and tossing them aside like last week's garbage.

Humanitarian aid workers deserve the utmost respect for their resilience and determination, for entering and enduring the world's worst places in order to extend life-saving assistance to those caught in the middle of chaos and conflict. But advocates back home have a role in this, too. By the very nature of their work, humanitarian workers cannot be the ones fighting to end the conflict itself --- in order to remain in a country, humanitarian organizations must maintain political neutrality. International activists, however, are under no such obligation.

The political will to end genocide and mass atrocity is not organic --- it must be demanded. While Save Darfur clearly exaggerated the death toll in Darfur in its 2006 poster campaign, the collective efforts of a million activists that year put Darfur on the political radar in this country, and have kept it there ever since.

Would states, cities, universities, and private companies have divested their holdings from Sudan without the work of the Sudan Divestment Task Force? Without GI-Net's "Ask the Candidates" Campaign, would Obama, Clinton, and McCain have made such strong statements about Darfur during their presidential campaigns? Did Gwen Ifill devote time during a tight presidential debate to Darfur just because she cared? Would media coverage of Darfur, the ICC, and so on in 2008 have been so substantial if it weren't for Team Darfur and Dream for Darfur's media blitzes in the run up to the Beijing Olympics? We can never truly know the answer, but I think it's fair to say that Darfur gets significant attention now because of thousands of advocates kicking up the dust, shouting to sky, grabbing everyone who will listen (and even some who won't) and saying, "This must end NOW."

The Save Darfur Coalition, along with partners such as GI-Net, ENOUGH, STAND, and Stop Genocide Now are more than an email list with occasional activist alerts. The collective voice of anti-genocide advocates is channeled through high level, behind-the-scenes advocacy by the organizations' government relations teams, and --- yes --- international teams, including networks of researchers and informants on the ground in Darfur.

True, we have not yet reached the tipping point, where we can exert the precise amount of pressure needed to motivate the change we seek. But these things do not happen overnight --- social movements develop in fits and starts, leaps forward followed by missteps and stumbles. But we have made progress, and each small victory gets us closer to the ultimate goal: The end of hostilities and the restoration of peace and stability for the people of Darfur.

I think that the crux of Holmes' frustration is this: Khartoum tends not to react nicely to the demands for change levied by international advocates, and humanitarian workers and the people they serve often bear the brunt of the regime's frustration. However, to blame advocates for this is misguided. The Save Darfur movement cannot be blamed for the fact that humanitarian aid has become another pawn in Khartoum's genocidal game.

And even more, to venture back into the land of hypotheticals, who's to say that the situation would be any better without the activist movement?

What would John Holmes have us do? Remain silent? Because that's been such a successful tactic in the past?