Mick Hartley

A debate at Newsweek on Darfur and the role that activists have played, between Alex de Waal and John Prendergast. De Waal, broadly speaking, feels that campaigners like the Save Darfur Coalition do more harm than good. Prendergast, who sits on the board of the Save Darfur Campaign, disagrees. It’s an interesting contrast: the academic for whom talk of Arabs and Africans in the context of Darfur is a gross oversimplification, for whom accusations of “genocide” are counter-productive (see his LRB essay), and the activist who can spot a murderous regime when he sees one and wants to do something about it. On the whole there’s more heat than light, but I’d have to say my sympathies are with Prendergast. De Waal seems a little too keen to demonstrate his own superior expertise, and has that familiar habit of believing that no true understanding can be reached without acknowledging that somewhere, somehow, we in the West must be messing things up.

Here’s a key passage, from Prendergast, responding to De Waal:

You write: “Could the Darfur campaign have driven the Bush administration to adopt hard-line rhetoric that made Khartoum less cooperative, while at the same time encouraging the rebels to believe that they could win a military intervention if they held out long enough? Could it in fact have impeded the search for a compromise between government and rebels?” What compromise? When has the government of Sudan shown any willingness to compromise when they were not under intense international pressure? At the 2006 peace talks you were part of, the USG [US Government] put more pressure on the rebels than it did on Khartoum, and ended up with a stillborn agreement. Is this the fault of rebel-coddling activists?

That seems right to me. De Waal’s belief in a Khartoum regime ready to compromise but forced into intransigence because of the rhetoric coming from the West is not, to put it mildly, born out by events.