OurPledge

Why We’re Activists

From Bec Hamilton’s September 3, 2009 Newsweek article “Mission Not Accomplished”:

“Many critical humanitarian services that Darfuri civilians relied on have been cut back or halted since the Sudanese government expelled key aid agencies after the president was indicted by the International Criminal Court in March this year. For women and girls, the situation is particularly dire. The organizations expelled were the ones that provided medical care, and psychosocial and legal services to women and girls who had been raped—something that happens with depressing regularity whenever they try to leave the outskirts of the camps.”

The fierce urgency of now.

The Obama administration has released a new policy on Sudan. While comprehensive on paper, this policy must be implemented immediately. Here’s our take on the news.

What You Say and What You Do

By now many of you know that the Obama administration will release its long-awaited Sudan policy review this Monday.

Much will be said about whether or not the administration’s on-paper plan is too soft on the Sudanese government. No matter what comes out on Monday, though, the Sudan movement should not try to turn the news into its own red herring.

Ultimately, execution will be EVERYTHING during this next year. A Sudan planning document and statements of intentions are no substitute for action. If the Obama administration wishes to sit at negotiating tables with Khartoum, then the Sudan advocacy movement has no issue with this. But we do have a problem with General Gration’s actions so far, which have been motivated by his belief that diplomatic prodding alone can move the universe. Such an approach might work with other political actors and other problems. In this case, though, the historical record points starkly to one truth: Omar al-Bashir and his regime, who are responsible for killing or else destroying the livelihoods of millions of Sudanese, have never changed their behavior absent concerted pressure from the U.S. and its allies.

A must-read

We’ll be posting a longer comment about it here soon, but for now please read Bec Hamilton’s article in The New Republic about the collapse of aid for Darfuri rape survivors. An important, important article.

Engagement or alienation?

Still, at the end of the visit, Gration maintained a strikingly different perspective. He had seen signs of goodwill from the government of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, he said, and viewed many of the complaints as understandable yet knee-jerk reactions to a government he trusts is ready to change.

“We’ve got to think about giving out cookies,” said Gration, who was appointed in March. “Kids, countries — they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement.”

-Stephanie McCrummen in the September 29, 2009 Washington Post

The shocking conclusion of Special Envoy to Sudan Scott Gration — i.e, that the U.S. needs to use diplomatic “gold stars” and “smiley faces” in order to change the Sudanese government’s behavior — has already generated a lot of incisive criticism and anger within the Sudan activist community. We won’t repeat the whole of these criticisms here. If you want to get up to speed, please see the following:

- The original Washington Post article, “U.S. Envoy’s Outreach to Sudan Is Criticized as Naive”
- The official reaction from Enough, Save Darfur Coalition, and Genocide Intervention Network.
- Some very thoughtful commentary by Rebecca Hamilton.

We’ll only add a few thoughts.

Recently, we’ve come across some instances of a theory that goes like this: In public, General Gration has been sending conciliatory signals to Khartoum, based on his sincere belief that a talking-without-sticks approach will change the behavior of the Sudanese government. In private, however, the Obama administration has pegged an end-date for experimenting with this strategy: if it doesn’t work, it is ready to bring down the hammer (through multilateral condemnation, sanctions, and military action).

There’s no way to definitively confirm if the Obama administration has really committed itself to the above path. That said, it’s clear that the U.S. Sudan Envoy is headed in the wrong direction. At the very least, General Gration’s external diplomacy has alienated an entire community of stakeholders.

Based on our conversations with Darfuri leaders and our reading of first-hand sources, it’s clear that General Gration’s public statements so far — untouched by media or activist coloring — have already eroded his position within Sudanese civil society and the Sudanese diaspora. And arguably, this is no surprise. If the U.S. is serious about securing the buy-in of a long-suffering Darfuri people for a real Darfur peace process, then it needs to stop emphasizing its use of “smiley faces” (read: negotiating without economic and military pressures) in its courtship of an International Criminal Court-indicted genocidaire.

Samantha Power: “We’ve got to cut through the red tape.”

On Sept. 23, 2009, National Security Council Director Samantha Power briefed the press on a meeting that same day between President Obama and representatives of a number of UN peacekeeping-contributing countries.

Power is arguably best known as the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. The book, incidentally, was and still is a vital guide for the Sudan movement. By meticulously cataloging and analyzing a long history of U.S. political and moral failure, A Problem from Hell reveals what needs to be changed in our country’s strategic and tactical game plans for combating genocide and other mass atrocities.

When President Obama took office, Power put on a new hat. Formally speaking, she is now the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights at the National Security Council. A perhaps excessively long title, yes, but the practical importance of having this particular person in this particular position should be clear to anyone. Power knows very well the different shades of political expediency, negligence, and wishful thinking that have undermined U.S. approaches to genocide in the past. Accordingly, she can apply (and hopefully already has applied) this encyclopedic knowledge to help create anti-genocide policy instruments, institutions, and norms that actually save and protect lives.

***
Power’s September 23rd Q&A press briefing included this important back-and-forth:

QUESTION: Thank you. My name is Laolu Akande. I work for the Guardian of Nigeria. I just have two really quick questions, specifically on the UNAMID situation in Darfur. For a long while, the generals of the troops there, I believe it was General Agwai, stressed the need that they needed about 18 helicopters. And all through [inaudible] there for about two years, I don’t think they got up to four. Did the President make any commitment to ensure that this kind of situation does not repeat itself?…

MS. POWER: …On the helicopters, you raise an excellent point. And it’s not just the last few years where we’ve had the helicopter Darfur issue. Of course, one only has to go back to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 to remember all of the painstaking effort that was made just to try to get armored personnel carriers to the peacekeepers in Rwanda while the genocide was underway. There are issues of red tape that I think this Administration is committing — it has committed itself and is engaged in trying to cut through. That is in other countries, and of course, as well in our collective effort in every country, we’ve got to cut through the red tape.

And then there is — really the message again that the President delivered today in the General Assembly is how can we get countries — each of us to ask ourselves where can we add value here. Maybe we’re not a country that’s going to send troops to South Sudan or to Haiti or to Liberia — this is any country — but maybe we have helicopters or maybe we have helicopter pilots. And that’s why I closed with the quote that the President gave at the end of his press conference saying respect, support, and thanks, and him saying that we’re going to work bilaterally and multilaterally.

Here, we think Power is absolutely right to connect Darfur and 1994 Rwanda. The international community’s failure (so far) to secure eighteen helicopters for the UN’s struggling Darfur force should draw comparisons to the U.S.’s monumental failures in acting materially against the Rwandan genocide. With millions of Darfuris in need of adequate protection right now, there’s simply no excuse for delay, just as there was no excuse to not provide the firepower, interventionist mandate, and troop numbers necessary to stop the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis.

Power states that “we’ve got to cut through the red tape” in regards to Darfur protection issues. As watchful advocates, we should mark this down as a kind of promise on the part of the Obama administration. Securing, deploying, and maintaining eighteen helicopters is no small feat, but in the universe of U.S. military capacity and U.S.-ally military capacity, such a task is infinitely manageable and involves no huge cost. So why not now?

The Sudan movement should continue to press the Obama administration on this and other protection priorities. If A Problem from Hell taught us anything, it’s this: assumptions often breed tragedy. Samantha Power has provided a signal that the U.S. intends to cut through bureaucracy, but we can’t take anything for granted. The building of political will through relentless citizen pressure is what changes words like Power’s into action.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS: “The U.S. can afford no illusions…”

This is the first in a new series of posts. We’re going to be highlighting the past public statements of different key players in the Obama administration, in an effort to shed light on the current gap between U.S. rhetoric and policy.

First up: United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice.

(Read more…)

The President’s First UN General Assembly Speech: Where Does the Buck Stop?

A good summary of President Obama’s speech over at Enough. John Norris writes: “Most of [the speech] remained at the 30,000 foot level without getting into specifics.”

That’s exactly right. Regarding Sudan, we weren’t expecting the President to lay out the nitty-gritty of his Administration’s Sudan policy. We accept that a UN General Assembly stage demands a kind of higher-level presentation. Nonetheless, you can take a look at President Obama’s words on Sudan and judge for yourself:

“That is why we will strengthen our support for effective peacekeeping, while energizing our efforts to prevent conflicts before they take hold. We will pursue a lasting peace in Sudan through support for the people of Darfur, and the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, so that we secure the peace that the Sudanese people deserve.”

With so many heads of state and other world leaders in the UN gallery, we were hoping that the President would express forthrightly what we all know: the Sudanese government continues to commit genocide against its own people. Such language would not have been cowboy talk. Rather, it would have sent Omar al-Bashir and his inner circle an appropriate warning of “stop-or-else”: stop disabling the humanitarian system in Darfur, stop your continued violence against civilians; and stop reneging on the Comprehensive Peace Agreement — or else you will face severe consequences, including targeted multilateral sanctions.

Of course, President Obama has a team to speak for him. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, and Sudan Special Envoy Scott Gration can all speak about Sudan’s tragedies and what the U.S. must do to end these tragedies. However, when the issue is ongoing genocide, the bullhorn should reside with the person who can change everything. The people of Sudan deserve as much. The people of Sudan need the President to lead now.

BREAKING: New Sudanese government attacks in North Darfur

If this isn’t grounds for targeted sanctions, we don’t know what is:

Reuters is reporting that the Sudanese government has launched a new campaign of aerial and ground attacks in North Darfur, backed by its proxy militias.

The UN has received verification of the attacks from non-rebel sources. Read more here.

Worth quoting

“[T]here are probably grains of truth to any thoughtful critique of the Darfur movement. It is far from perfect, and an accurate accounting of its strengths and weaknesses is long overdue. But such calls to declare defunct efforts to save the war-torn Sudanese region miss the point. Millions of activists around the world remain committed to the cause of peace in Sudan. It’s just that no one is telling them that now is the moment they are needed most.” -Randy Newcomb, President and CEO of Humanity United, from his July 2009 Foreign Policy article “Save Darfur Must Save Itself.”