When Shouting Doesn’t Seem to Stop War

After attending two American rallies to ‘Save Darfur’ back in 2006, I decided I would not attend another.

I had been to Darfur some months earlier and I wanted to make a difference. I wanted my voice to count. But as I swarmed with the masses on the DC Mall and later in New York’s Central Park, I found something a bit hollow in the emcee-induced shouting of “Hey-ho, hey-ho, Al-Bashir has got to go.” I was left wondering what the amassed voices were changing or accomplishing.

To be fair, I do believe that awareness and advocacy efforts in the U.S. have slowly made a little known regional obscurity like Darfur close to a household name. But I still ask: Have most displaced Darfurians returned to their homes? Is there widespread security for civilians? Do humanitarian aid groups not get massively kicked out of the country as a repercussion of International Criminal Court arrest warrants issued for its leaders? Was Sudan not the chair of the G77 body at the Copenhagen climate summit, while these same arrest warrants sit idle?

Sudan expert and academic, Alex de Waal, argues that American advocacy on Darfur has actually caused harm. He suggests that the advocacy undertaken could have emboldened Darfuri rebel commanders to continue to fight to increase their stranglehold on power and territory –- and made Khartoum less cooperative. He asks, “Could it in fact have impeded the search for a compromise between government and rebels?”

At the same time, others could argue that there will always be collateral damage and an unintended cost to advocacy in such a complex political and economic situation. In addition, maybe solidarity with oppressed people is inherently valuable to the struggle despite the potential costs? And there is also a cost to be measured with inaction and a refusal to engage.

In response to De Waal, John Prendergast with the Enough Project, states that “the Khartoum regime figured out the U.S. Government (USG) was willing to bark but not bite.” So maybe my frustration is less with seemingly impotent advocacy and more with the lack of influence (or the will to act) that the world has over its remaining dictators.

I’d like to believe that the key rests with the people themselves who live in these difficult circumstances. I’d like to believe that if oppressed people organize themselves, then they can rise up and change the power structures that marginalize them. But that potentially only works when the oppressed can exercise control over the economics of their situation -- and unfortunately that is rarely the case. Because conflict-affected Sudanese in all regions of their country will continue to be afflicted by string-less Chinese aid that flows to their government as semi-powerless American and European Union sanctions continue.

So instead of just shouting at a Western rally or joining a Facebook cause, let’s try getting smarter at addressing the economics of what preserves war and stifles peace. And at the same time lend our support to (or start) groups and campaigns that empower affected people to fight for their own rights in their own country and context, rather than only yelling at our country to do it for them.

Photo credit: holisticmonkey