Is it about human rights?

Darfur may not be a race war, but that hasn't stopped the US Congress from calling it genocide. George W. Bush has called for NATO to intervene. Dallaire says we screwed up last time in Africa; this time, we'll get it right. So it's worth looking at what the west has actually done in Africa recently, and the record isn't good. The 1992 Somalia intervention led to peacekeepers roasting children alive; Clinton ordered the bombing of Sudan's only medicine factory in 1998; western companies are arming factions in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Add in Sudan's potential oil reserves of over 800 million barrels, with China, the U.S. and India all wanting a stake, and the humanitarian case looks pretty weak. As Iraq shows us, occupiers don't give a damn about human rights when resources like oil are involved. And there's always resources involved.

The backdrop to all this is the increasing immiseration of Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa in particular. Per capita income has dropped 13% since 1981; half a billion Africans live on less than $2 a day.

This is the direct result of imperialism, both the systematic draining of African resources and the shutting out of Africa from the global economy - except as a source of cheap raw materials. When there's a ready source of wealth nearby, desperate people are going to get more desperate. And this lets the west pontificate about those poor, savage Africans, as the Socialist Party argues: "The crisis in Darfur is providing another opportunity for the Western media to present Africa as a continent in chaos where Africans themselves are helpless and need Western aid."

The language of Darfur

That's how people talk about Darfur. The umbrella coalition for intervention is Save Darfur. The Canadian group's slogan is Time To Protect. Underneath this rhetoric is a more sinister racism: the Africans are helpless because of Arabs. As I've suggested before, it's no accident that Hillel, the Zionist student group, is taking up Darfur as an issue. It lets them cast Arabs - and by extension, Palestinians - as aggressors. It's a wedge to split the liberal from the radical left. Zionists can accuse the left of hypocrisy and anti-semitism, for only caring about human rights when it's Jews doing the oppressing.


Now you know it's a good cause - George Clooney saves Darfur

What must be done?

First of all, the Left has to answer the charge that it's picking and choosing its battles. In fact, it's the Right that's being selective. 4 million people have died in the Congo; Uganda has interned 80% of the population in its northern provinces. Many governments have proxy militias in the Congo; Uganda lets the Lords Redemption Army terrorize the interned. The difference is that these governments are onside with the 'War On Terror'; Sudan is not.

It's not a question of "you say Palestine; I say Darfur"; the Left condemns imperialism as a whole. The hypocrites are the ones discovering Darfur's suffering, while remaining silent on the suffering - military, political and economic - of the continent as a whole.


Less important? - child soldiers from the Lord's Resistance Army

Secondly, we don't stand aside from the immediate problems. Darfur should receive massive emergency humanitarian aid, while those responsible for ordering and perpetrating the genocide should be brought to justice - even the imperfect capitalist justice of the International Criminal Court (ICC). But what matters is how justice happens; as Mamdani explains,

We should work against a US intervention, whether direct or by proxy, and however disguised - as humanitarian or whatever. We should work against punitive sanctions. The lesson of Iraq sanctions is that you target individuals, not governments. Sanctions feed into a culture of terror, of collective punishment. Its victims are seldom its target. Both military intervention and sanctions are undesirable and ineffective.

There is a contradiction: police action to arrest the perpetrators will never happen when factions of the government itself are responsible. Possibly there's a role for the African Union here, to intervene in the meantime until Sudanese popular movements are strong enough to do so on their own. That's a hypothesis, not a position. What is clear, however, is that a UN "proxy" occupation won't help the people of Darfur. The fact that the U.S. has refused to ratify the ICC, and its record in Iraq (for which it would most certainly be tried), shows its priorities are control, not saving lives.


Uh, guys, you lost

Finally, Africa needs revolution, not charity. Despite its being starved into submission, the continent has a vibrant revolutionary tradition. As the Socialist Party argues,

Up until the 1970s Sudan itself had one of the largest Communist Parties in Africa and the Middle East. Tragically, its leaders did not rely on mobilising their supporters in a struggle for socialism. Instead they made alliances with different groups of army officers, a policy which resulted in them suffering massive repression after a military coup they supported failed in 1971.

While African socialist movements were attacked from the outside, and tragically compromised inside by Stalinism, there remain vital movements that deserve our solidarity. In the long run, it is only these socialist movements that can overturn the political structures keeping Africa in such desperate straits.

Darfur is a political tragedy; it needs a political solution. What it does not need is imperialism under the guise of human rights. Armed intervention by the west will cause more, not less suffering. If people want to help Darfur, they should support local democratic movements; resist the war on terror; hold the oil companies to account for their resource-stripping; and fight against the imperialist, capitalist system that created the suffering in Darfur.