The Language of the State: Who Decides It's Genocide?

[Jcrowley]

The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency
by Mahmood Mamdani

March 09, 2007
London Review of Books


The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?

The most powerful mobilisation in New York City is in relation to Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect the reverse, for no other reason than that most New Yorkers are American citizens and so should feel directly responsible for the violence in occupied Iraq. But Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy politics. Americans worry about what their government should do in Iraq. Should it withdraw? What would happen if it did? In contrast, there is nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as ‘Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable as ‘Africans’.

A full-page advertisement has appeared several times a week in the New York Times calling for intervention in Darfur now. It wants the intervening forces to be placed under ‘a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel’. That intervention in Darfur should not be subject to ‘political or civilian’ considerations and that the intervening forces should have the right to shoot – to kill – without permission from distant places: these are said to be ‘humanitarian’ demands. In the same vein, a New Republic editorial on Darfur has called for ‘force as a first-resort response’. What makes the situation even more puzzling is that some of those who are calling for an end to intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur; as the slogan goes, ‘Out of Iraq and into Darfur.’

What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics – a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? Why should an intervention in Darfur not turn out to be a trigger that escalates rather than reduces the level of violence as intervention in Iraq has done? Why might it not create the actual possibility of genocide, not just rhetorically but in reality? Morally, there is no doubt about the horrific nature of the violence against civilians in Darfur. The ambiguity lies in the politics of the violence, whose sources include both a state-connected counter-insurgency and an organised insurgency, very much like the violence in Iraq.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12299

Are you using the language of the oppressor?

Agenda Inc.

[oblivious]

1. Some very interesting background. Thanks for posting.

His critique of Kristof's coverage was particularly interesting.

[cali]

2. This is a shockingly ignorant or deliberately misleading

piece. First of all, the numbers are in not roughly the same. Even the highest estimates of the Iraq death toll are no where near the 400,000 killed in Darfur. Not to mention that it's not Arab against African; both groups are Africans and Muslims. As far as the comment about NY activism, the author gives no evidence whatsover that more New Yorkers are involved in working against the genocide in Darfur than are working against the Iraq War. I could go on, but why bother?

Why people fall for a piece as badly written and documented as this is beyond me.

[Sybil_23mist]

3. You are right

1.5 million dead in Iraq? as admitted by Madeleine Albright isn't the same as died in Darfur? And then the recent figure of 655,000-900,000 Iraqi deaths related to Bush junior doesn't suffice to be genocide?

The real figures ARE MUCH HIGHER

Not as deadly as the Congo yes but still a few million brown people slaughtered without a sound.

The numbers are not the same at all. Of course once you get into the millions of deaths who's counting?

[TheConstantGardener]

4. "Even the highest estimates of the Iraq death toll are no where near the 400,000 killed in Darfur."

Do you not read the Lancet?

Also, this almost sexual obsession with Darfur has isolated the rest of Sudan which is still under a very long civil war.

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

5. Indeed.

[oblivious]

6. Your post is shockingly ignorant or deliberately misleading

You claim: Even the highest estimates of the Iraq death toll are no where near the 400,000 killed in Darfur.


Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 11, 2006; Page A12

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

...Of the total 655,000 estimated "excess deaths," 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country.

The survey was done by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. The findings are being published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet.

The same group in 2004 published an estimate of roughly 100,000 deaths in the first 18 months after the invasion. That figure was much higher than expected, and was controversial. The new study estimates that about 500,000 more Iraqis, both civilian and military, have died since then -- a finding likely to be equally controversial.

Both this and the earlier study are the only ones to estimate mortality in Iraq using scientific methods. The technique, called "cluster sampling," is used to estimate mortality in famines and after natural disasters.

While acknowledging that the estimate is large, the researchers believe it is sound for numerous reasons. The recent survey got the same estimate for immediate post-invasion deaths as the early survey, which gives the researchers confidence in the methods. The great majority of deaths were also substantiated by death certificates.

"We're very confident with the results," said Gilbert Burnham, a Johns Hopkins physician and epidemiologist.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442.html

Enormous death toll of Iraq invasion revealed
Around 655,000 people have died in Iraq as a result of the US-led coalition invasion, according to the largest scientific analysis yet. That is 2.5% of the country's entire population.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10276?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=dn10276

'655,000 Iraqis killed since invasion
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1892888,00.html

[mahmoud al_hazen]

9. Do you have figures and links to butress your assertions?

The depredations of the United States vs. Humanity are well known. The United States smiles upon Darfur as it did Rwanda.

[oblivious]

7. Good conclusion to the article

The camp of peace needs to come to a second realisation: that peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised – sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan, unravelling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror.

[mahmoud al_hazen]

8. Very interesting exercise in framing,

thanks for the link.