by Anthony Foreman

Created on: June 15, 2008

Many people working on Darfur may have been encouraged by the amount of interest that has been displayed by the various groups and organisations in the West and interested in the impact that celebrities might be able to have on a political situation by attaching their name to it. However, with Darfur becoming, quite literally, "the word on the street", campaigns have demonstrated a worrying amount of ignorance and political naivety - so much, in fact, that even apparently sophisticated political operators such as John Prendergast seem to have put all the power of their righteousness to campaign for "what is right" rather than for what might actually help the victims.

Calls for robust intervention in Darfur seem to be particularly anachronistic in the context of the failure to carry out an effective and efficient intervention in Iraq. Lest we forget, the territory of Sudan is several times larger than that of Iraq and its population much more radicalised (Sudan considers itself to be the leader of the global Sunni Islamic movement - a tradition that dates back to the time of the Mahdi in the 19th century and kept going to this day by the original ideologues behind the "Salvation Revolution" that put the present government in power). It is clear that the West has neither the hunger nor the muscle to undertake an intervention under such testing conditions.

This does not mean, however, that there is nothing that can be done in the United States to have some impact on Darfur. The black magic of international diplomacy has been going on behind the scenes and this DOES make a difference, though its secret nature puts such work very much in a "domaine rserv" that domestic lobbies will find it hard to penetrate. Lobbying, therefore, should focus not on what we should get Sudan to do, but what we should get the United States to do. With the chaos in Iraq, and the legal uncertainty that preceded it, the United States' credibility is shot not only in the areas of military commitment and capacity, but also -and more imporantly - in its moral authority. Indeed, buoyed by America's difficulties the Sudanese government is extremely happy (and not altogether wrong) when talking about the daily misery in Iraq, and there is no question of international law making a great impression when there was no legal sanction for invading Iraq (and not even the discovery of any weapons that might have given the enterprise some retroactive legitimacy). The audacity of the United States to support

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>