Last Tuesday, we cringed when, as she read the headlines, Amy Goodman announced that "The White House plans to renew tough economic sanctions against the African nation while promising broad engagement with Khartoum in an effort to end the genocide in Darfur." Our immediate reaction was to contact Democracy Now! and tell them to get in touch with Mahmood Mamdani, author of Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror. As Mamdani writes in his Introduction: "Rwanda was the site of genocide. Darfur is not. It is, rather, the site where the language of genocide has been turned into an instrument. It is where genocide has become ideological." Those wielding the 'instrument' are known as the 'Save Darfur Lobby,' (a close counterpart to the R2P Lobby, to be sure), which Mamdani has brilliantly dissected and contextualized.
No sooner had we made a mental note to contact DN! when we tuned in on Friday to hear Mamdani interviewed by Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. Mercifully, it seems Amy was corrected and Mamdani was given the space to critique both the Obama administration's new policy, and put the Lobby in its proper place. During the interview, Amy did not refer to the conflict as "genocide," and we hope that she will refrain from doing so in the future. Listen to/read the interview here.
Goodman's comment raised our hackles not the least of which because the show has uncritically hosted Save Darfur lobbyists in the past, namely Don Cheadle and John Prendergrast. Mamdani wrote this about the Save Darfur Coalition:
"The Save Darfur Coalition represents a new age organization that joins the voluntary effort of foot soldiers characteristic of classic cause-driven movements (such as the Vietnam-era antiwar movement) with advertising skills honed by highly paid professional advertising firms, all under the tight supervision of a select and small, politically driven and charged, executive committee. Save Darfur is undoubtedly the most successful organized popular movement in the United States since the movement against the Vietnam War. But whereas the organized opposition to the Vietnam War was clearly antiwar, the same cannot be said of Save Darfur."
This passage came to mind as we were pondering what will become of a marginalized and discredited Save Darfur Lobby. Prendergast's presence at the launch of the 'Will to Intervene' project's report last month at USIP may be an indication that they'll simply fold their efforts into the general humanitarian imperialist movement, something they've already done to an extent (Prendergast's 'Enough' project, for example, is premised on "helping to build a permanent constituency to prevent genocide and crimes against humanity.") Mamdani's description of Prendergast as being "considered by many a neocon in the Democratic Party," accorded well with his comments during the panel's discussion, especially his reference to the need for continuing "elite-based advocacy," and his later assertion (a la the Straussian "enlightened elite") that liberal imperialist advocacy "requires leadership...which requires your leaders to actually be out ahead of the citizenry's understanding of the evolution of global affairs and the requirements of our international relations, our projection into the world."
So we'll keep track of the potential for the Save Darfur lobby to morph completely into a broader R2P/humanitarian imperialist movement and hope, in the coming weeks, to write up a piece on the existing ties/interlocks between the Darfur and R2P Lobby's.