Nesrine Malik in The Ideas Letter: Some 20 years ago, the Darfur region of Sudan was in the throes of a brutal war against rebel African groups protesting their economic and political marginalization. Arab militias known as the Janjaweed joined the central government to quell the rebellion, and the repression soon metastasized into ethnic cleansing—and, some say, genocide. Outrage abroad over the atrocities spurred a global advocacy campaign that came to be known as the Save Darfur movement. Two decades later, Darfur is burning once again, but the network that once heeded its cries is now dramatically diminished.
At its peak, Save Darfur drew a constellation of celebrities from Hollywood, sports and politics, and from across lobbying and activist groups. Advocates included the actors George Clooney, Don Cheadle and Ryan Gosling, the Olympic speed-skating champion Joey Cheek, and a charismatic, young U.S. senator named Barack Obama. Addressing a crowd gathered at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in April 2006, Obama said of the conflict in Darfur: “If we care, the world will care. If we act, then the world will follow.”
The movement began in 2004 with the Save Darfur coalition, which sprang from established Jewish anti-genocide networks in the U.S. In July that year, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish World Service organized the Darfur Emergency Summit in New York, featuring the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, to draw attention to events in Darfur and make the case for intervention. The coalition then grew to include some 190 religious and human rights organizations affiliated in cause and purpose. The most high-profile among them was the Enough Project, an advocacy group hoping to end mass atrocities in African conflicts co-founded in 2007 by Gayle Smith, a former journalist and U.S. government official, and John Prendergast, a human rights activist. The outcome was a powerful, well-funded network that successfully lobbied the U.S. government and international organizations such as the United Nations for attention, and raised private and public donations. Between 2003 and 2005, the United States provided more than $638 million in humanitarian aid for Darfur. In 2007, the UN approved the creation and mobilization of a peacekeeping mission in the region.
By 2006, Save Darfur had already grown into the sort of campaign that could draw so many influential people to the Mall. The shadow of mass atrocities in Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s loomed large over a guilty global conscience; the UN Security Council had established two ad hoc tribunals to judge those crimes. The International Criminal Court was established in 2002—and some years later would hand out Darfur-related indictments. The Responsibility to Protect, which calls on all states to protect all populations from genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity—and to prevent such acts “through appropriate and necessary means”—was adopted in 2005 at the UN World Summit.
According to Rebecca Hamilton’s book Fighting for Darfur:Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide, President George W. Bush declared that the Clinton administration’s failure to halt the massacres in Rwanda would not be repeated on his watch. His own administration had also heavily invested in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended a decades-long civil war between Sudan’s central government and rebel groups in the south, leading to South Sudan’s eventual independence in 2011. That effort drew on religious solidarity with the largely Christian South Sudanese—or on Bush’s faith.
But the Darfur conflict was more than a chance at redemption: It also coincided with the early years of the U.S. government’s war on terrorism. American troops spread into Afghanistan and Iraq. Washington was unapologetic about projecting power. It was trigger-happy about the application of sanctions.
To some, however, these overlapping agendas suggested that saving Darfur was less about Darfur than about the vanities of foreign policy interventionism. That the movement was not actually engaging with the deeper origins of the issue and the appropriate sources of possible solutions—namely, complicated structural challenges within Sudan and the disempowered local actors best placed to address them. Alex de Waal, the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, wrote in September 2009, “If ‘Save Darfur’ is interested in peace, the best it can do in the cause of peace is to fall silent.” Earlier that year, in a debate with Prendergast at Columbia University, Mahmoud Mamdani, a professor of government and anthropology, said that Save Darfur “has not created or even tried to create an informed movement, but a feel-good constituency.”
A little under two decades later, it is not only Darfur but all of Sudan that is engulfed in conflict. In April 2023, a military partnership fell apart and took the country with it. Fracturing swiftly followed. Today, there is looting and rape in the capital Khartoum, ethnic cleansing in the west, and a steady stream of refugees in the east. The specter of genocide looms once again over African peoples in Darfur. What there isn’t is the sort of global attention that some 20 years ago achieved the challenging task of capturing attention, advocacy, and funding for a complicated conflict in a remote part of Africa.
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