Desperate Darfuris, Frustrated Americans

American Human Rights Activists Turn to Canada to Stop This Century’s First Genocide

The Star-Spangled Banner features prominently at Canada’s Parliament Hill in Ottawa. | ASG / TL

Andrew Garib, Turn Left | Link | Early in August, a group of American activists made a grand statement in protest of this nation’s lackluster efforts to end mass slaughter in the most desperate corner of the most embattled continent. These women and men were outraged at the brutal apathy and damnable naiveté this government has shown when dealing with Sudan’s bloodthirsty Khartoum regime, guilty of a startling three genocides since it swept away that country’s last near-democracy in 1989. Led by John Weiss, associate professor of history at Cornell, the activists bicycled 900 kilometers from Ithaca, New York to the nation’s capital; and at the footsteps of the national symbol of democracy, Weiss proclaimed to the hundreds of citizens present that “the only political leader who can do anything to stop the genocide is your Prime Minister, Paul Martin.”

This nation is Canada. The Capital is Ottawa, and in Canada’s gothic Parliament buildings on the Ottawa River, Weiss’s Darfur Action Coalition sees the last best hope to end the two-year old genocide of so-called Africans by the Arab-dominated government in war-torn Sudan. These frustrated Americans have ditched their efforts to pressure, enrage, and shame the Bush administration into action to stop the twenty-first century’s first genocide, leaving their hopes for military and moral leadership not with the mighty liberators of Buchenwald and Dachau, but with the scrappy Canuck middle power whose military prowess is the butt of many Yankee jokes.

The 27 days of the Ride Against Genocide that culminated in a rally on the steps of Canada’s Parliament Hill exuded frustration: the Ride party left Cornell’s Ithaca campus on July 11th, the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia; leaders of Ottawa’s Rwandan, Bosnian and Jewish communities took part in the rally, driven by their people’s history of ‘ethnic cleansing.’ Indeed, the August 7th rally was tinged with outrage that the international community, including both Canada and the United States, was yet again turning its back on the victims of genocide.

But the crowning resentment, that of the diverse Sudanese community, was matched only by the desperation reflected in the change in focus of American efforts to end the crisis in Darfur. The Ride Against Genocide ended its last leg in Ottawa and not at the Capital Building in Washington because many Americans human rights activists are convinced that there is not the slightest hope of progress with their own government. They have given up on America.

The Moral Superpower There are good reasons for mobilization north of the 49th parallel. Canada is widely accepted as a ’moral superpower’, a middle power with no imperial pretensions and a history of public support for human rights around the world. In late 2001, Canada’s longstanding Liberal Party government published The Responsibility to Protect, an answer to United Nations General Secretary Kofi Annan’s 2000 challenge for the international community to produce consistent guidelines for the implementation of the so-called ’right of humanitarian intervention’. When governments are unwilling or unable to protect their own citizens from catastrophe, Responsibility concludes, other nations have the obligation to provide that protection. The Darfur Action Coalition (or DAC, a transnational alliance of religious, ethnic and human rights organizations led by Weiss’ Darfur Action Group) has picked a fine champion for their cause. Andrew Sniderman, a Canadian student at Swarthmore College and Vice President of DAC coalition member the Genocide Intervention Fund is encouraged by Prime Minister Paul Martin’s vocal support for the spirit of the responsibility to protect doctrine. “We want Canada to be a leader, to get Canadian personnel on the ground,” Sniderman told me during the DAC rally in Ottawa. “Canada is the optimal country to initiate effective action on this,” Richard Sribnick, one of a handful of participants in the Ride, told me as he straddled a mountain bike and donned his bicycle helmet on Parliament Hill. The doctor from South Carolina was one of the many American Ride participants more enthusiastic about appealing to the Prime Minister’s Office than the Oval one in Washington. “Paul Martin’s gotta realize that he now has that opportunity to do something that no leader has ever done, that is to intervene based solely on halting a genocide,” Sribnick said. Sribnick, Sniderman, and others also cited Canada’s sterling reputation abroad. For whatever reasons, among those gathered at the Ottawa rally there was a general consensus, unthinkable in any other context, that Canada and not the United States was the best bet for supporting a final military solution in Darfur. Hands Tied...

Certainly Canada may be a good candidate for action in Darfur, but why is the traditional principal of the free world, the United States, not bearing the burden of leadership?

Many Ride participants and supporters insisted on toning down criticism of America’s less than inspiring stand against the Darfur genocide, perhaps to avoid distraction from the focus on Canada’s government. “I think there’s sincerity in what they’ve done,” said Member of Parliament David Kilgour, referring to the American administration. Kilgour made a name for himself in Canada by defecting from the ruling Liberal party, in part due to its recalcitrance over Darfur. “I think that it’s excellent that Condoleeza Rice went [to Sudan on July 21st]. It got the media’s attention.”

Yet little action is behind that sincerity. The American government has done much to end a separate two-decade struggle in Sudan between the central government and Southern rebels, but next to nothing to stop the acute violence in Darfur.

The DAC activists focused on Canada because America’s hands are tied, Sribnick said. “The United States is judged with a fine toothed comb. Any initiating event will be judged as some sort of selfinterest.” Anti-Americanism means that the US can’t be the initiator, Sribnick argued, “But we can be a major silent partner.”

Sniderman agreed: “Since the US is still mired in Iraq, a middle power like Canada can put pressure on the Sudanese government and can deploy in Darfur more easily than the United States.” Sniderman and Sribnick hope Canadian leadership will trigger US cooperation and support as a silent partner to a military solution, ending the mass slaughter. The activists are simply interested in “What is most likely to work, what is most likely to be effective.” But as Sribnick puts it, initiation of the effort “is just not going to happen in America.”

… Or Ties Ignored?

Whether some of its members believe it or not, the DAC’s plan to ‘internationalize’ the campaign is a desperate statement made out of both necessity and protest. The Iraq war and worldwide anti- Americanism are elements of the same equation: American mismanagement of foreign policy, at minimum a lapse of competence in American government that has allowed the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the past three years, including nearly four hundred thousand in Darfur. An American foreign policy apparatus traditionally obsessed with freedom of action abroad is now committed to Iraq for perhaps as many as four years, leaving the humanitarians in the Beltway powerless to end the greatest disaster since the Rwandan genocide. Yet, Iraq aside, Ride supporters had more to say about their reasons to doubt that reliance on American leadership will lead to peace in Darfur.

When it comes to genocide, the international community’s efforts are a paradigm of failure. The United Nations has never declared a finding of genocide, not even at the height of the fastest one in history, in Rwanda in 1994. Neither America nor its allies – noble Canada included – have ever effectively intervened to stop genocide.

Certainly the words of the US government with regards to Darfur were historic: former Secretary of State Colin Powell and the US Congress have denounced the Darfur conflict as genocide, and no government in history has ever called a genocide for what it was while the mass killings raged. But American words have hardly been followed by American action. Worse, the Bush Administration has backtracked on calling the forced starvation, mass rape, aerial bombings, terrorism, and cold-blooded murder of the non-Arab people of Darfur by the Khartoum government a true genocide. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick even had the gall to publicly low-ball the numbers killed in the conflict, and to prevaricate on the Government of Sudan’s central role in the atrocities.

As confusing as the Administration’s flip-flop on the ‘genocide’ designation are Colin Powell’s own remarks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In the speech, the former Secretary of State declared that the United States had found genocide in Darfur, and that the government of Sudan is responsible; but mixed in with these historic words is the claim that “no new action is dictated by this determination. We have been doing everything we can to get the Sudanese Government to act responsibly.” Powell incredibly insisted that Khartoum must work to end the violence and open diplomatic channels, and that in order to protect civilians, the international community must have the cooperation of those who moments before were named as genocidaires.

Condi’s Faustian Backpedaling

Washington’s history of inaction in situations of genocide, coupled with the bizarre behavior of the Bush administration since 2004 on Darfur, point to more cynical causes of the DAC’s shift of focus away from the US Capital than the practical realities of American power. John Pollard, a recent Cornell graduate from New York and a former Weiss student who consulted for the Ride, said that greater US involvement in Darfur is an issue of will power. “If [the United States] doesn’t deem it to be in our financial interest or security interests, we’re simply not going to [intervene],” said Mr. Pollard. Other political factors remove the possibility of US military intervention, perhaps essential to peace in Western Sudan. “I think it’s an issue politicians really don’t want to put their hands on,” he said. “We just had 14 troops from one regiment in Ohio killed in Iraq in one day ... From a [public relations] standpoint, it’s not something that politicians really want to dabble in.”

There’s a more sinister suspicion. Canadian activist Norman Epstein of DAC member organization Canadians Against Slavery and Torture in Sudan cited an April Los Angeles Times article which described for the first time Washington’s formerly covert relationship with the Government of Sudan in Khartoum. With a history of terrorist activity and representing a nation dominated by Islam and Arab culture, Sudan has become a key source of intelligence information and an active partner in Washington’s war on Islamist terror. Epstein suggests that this relationship has given the White House the impetus to tone down the rhetoric against Khartoum and further warm its relationship with the genocidal regime.

“The Khartoum regime is clearly the bad guy here,” Epstein said. “There has to come a time when you can’t go down the middle, you have to declare unequivocally that the Khartoum regime’s policy of genocide has to be stopped. If we don’t draw a line in the sand now, then there will be more genocide.” But the line in the sand has been swept away. In March, the Bush administration lifted restrictions on the movement of Sudanese diplomats, in place since 2004 because of the Darfur situation. In late August, Powell’s successor Condoleezza Rice declared that the United States was ready to begin further cooperation with the Government of Sudan and a general warming of relations.

Among the Ride Against Genocide organizers, there is the fear that by September, Rice and the Bush Administration will formally announce that the crisis in Darfur is largely over, and that there will be no need for any further US action. This, while the violence, destruction, mass rape, and forced displacement – Khartoum’s genocide program – continues unimpeded.

Frustrated Americans, Dying Darfuris

It’s not odd for American activists to partner with Canadians and other friends on the international stage for a great cause. But the perplexing movement of American focus to Canada on the issue of Darfur signals a moral vacancy in the foreign policy apparatus of the United States that should worry citizens south of the 49th.

The Ride Against Genocide may open a new world of possibilities for activists in an increasingly globalized world. International grassroots cooperation might be the key to initiating the change that’s most needed. But that does not remove the responsibility of our governments – American and Canadian alike – to do more to end the crisis in Western Sudan. While activists like John Weiss toil without pay, bureaucrats like Zoellick posture, mass murderers like Gosh flourish, and thousands like those in Darfur continue to suffer. End.