The Lives We’re Used To
Why we should not dismiss Darfur.
Sores and sun-chafed skin rippling across sunken infant ribcages. Indifferent flies buzzing around weeping eye-corners. Brittle, breakable wrists and distended stomachs. Listlessness and food aid.
It’s what we’re used to when we think about Africa — a succession of harrowing images lined up like child-soldiers, smudged into cinematic blurs of Idi Amin’s infantile rage or Leonardo DiCaprio’s diamond-spangled death tears; a swift juxtaposition of history, fiction, and morality that gives us a difficult and painful view of the daily hell of the “Dark Continent.”
Hunger, displacement, death.
But Ashta Adam, watching her 18-month-old son waste away inside a roofless hut in a Chadian refugee camp, has a message for us:
It’s not what she’s used to.
Ashta is one of the two and a half million people who have been displaced by the violence in Sudan’s Darfur region and in eastern Chad. The Washington Post recounts her unbelievable story: Forced from her village by violent attacks, she fled to a barren, under-supplied camp where the only food she can give her son Izzedine is a kind of millet that is usually reserved for animals. Izzedine is starving — half the weight of a typical boy his age — and Ashta takes him to receive a high-caloric food supplement that may get him through the next week or so. After that, it is anyone’s guess.
Wait, did I say “unbelievable” story? That doesn’t quite apply here, does it? For us, stories like this — in their endless repetition and cinematic interpretation — have become completely believable. Years of superficial reportage and Sally Struthers telling us we can save Africa for the price of a cup of coffee have left us with the notion that starvation is normal, natural, and immutable for poor, helpless Africans.
Their stories are familiar. Tiresome, almost.
But if we listen to Ashta talk about what she is going through, this is what we hear: “Deep inside, I’m very sad about this situation we’re living in. This is not the kind of life we’re used to living.”
She goes on: “We’ve never eaten this kind of food, but now we are here and we have nothing except this.” Referring to Izzedine, she says “Usually he eats so much, but this food is no good, so he stops eating.”
Starvation is when the body begins to eat itself in an effort to stay alive. It is characterized by constant physical and psychological pain. It is not normal or natural for anyone, including Ashta — who, in her own words, almost always had enough to eat before she became a refugee. She lived in a stable community where neighbors and extended family supported one another. Her child was a healthy, if not to say discriminating, eater.
Ashta’s present life isn’t some darker variation of her past — it is patently different from anything she has known. For her, it isn’t believable, or familiar, or tiresome.
It’s terrifying and painful, and she is unprepared and afraid.
To draw a parallel: it’s as if a group of government-sponsored fanatics came into your house in Baltimore or Silver Spring or Cambridge and stole everything you had. They beat your neighbors to death and burnt your house so that you and the remains of your family were forced to flee to a field in western Ohio where there is nothing to eat so you feed your son low-grade dog food while you watch him slowly starve. Everything you have — your job, your belongings, watching ‘Lost’ on Wednesday nights — is gone, probably forever.
Unbelievable?
It was for Ashta Adam, too; and so it should be for us.
To learn more about the crisis in Darfur, or to or get involved with ending it, check out these links:
The Save Darfur Coalition (includes petitions urging President Bush and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to take immediate steps to stop the killing in Darfur)
UN Watch (human rights watchdog group that monitors the United Nations)
Darfurgenocide.org (a movement pressing to end the genocide in Darfur and indict the Sudanese leaders who are responsible)
United Nations Children’s Fund (accepts donations to help fund aid work)
Dennis Wilson lived in rural Mozambique for more than four years while working as a teacher.
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Comments
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Writing anecdotes about one person’s suffering is a common journalistic technique used to personalize a larger issue, and make it feel more immediate to the reader.
It’s also misleading here. I’m about as moved by Ashta Adam’s plight as I was by the mentally deranged people I used to work with, because my power to help either of them is about the same. Is what happens/happened in Darfur a tragedy? Sure it is. But even the ending of this piece points out that it was a man-made one. What is OUR responsibility when Africans choose to attack and kill each other? From where I sit, it often sounds like the Western world gets blamed when it doesn’t prevent such things, then gets accused of imperialism when it does try to do so.
That doesn’t mean we should always sit by and let innocent people get slaughtered, but it does point out the limits of foreign intervention. Somalia is a good example of the outcome of uninformed good intentions. What if, for all the suffering in Darfur, three times as many Sudanese DON’T want our help, or don’t want us in their country?
Africa is vast, filled with nations or people who may/may not hate their neighbors, who may/may not want a country for their own ethnic group, who may/may not be teetering on the edge of instability. It’s a mess, and like Europe right up through the 20th century, it is going to go through a long, bloody sorting process that will still be going on in during our grandchildrens’ lives. Nothing can prevent it, because the Africans themselves are the only ones who can stop attacking and killing each other.
Remember the campaign to “Free Tibet”? Or “Free Mumia Abu-Jamal”? That’s about the niche Darfur will end up occupying in the Western mind. When the fire is already huge, adding one more log makes little difference.
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Do authors respond to comments, or is that generally un-crunchable? Chris brings up a number of salient points that deserve a response, but I don’t want to break any rules… -
I certainly have no objections. I would prefer a response. Paper-and-ink journals such as Atlantic Monthly allow it; why not here? -
Dennis — you’re welcome to respond. Let’s just keep it civil, everyone.Another thought: Chris, I don’t think all of your points are mutually exclusive with Dennis’s. Our response when Africans systematically kill each other should be the same as when we see Europeans systematically kill each other: revulsion and horror, prompting efforts to save lives. At the same time, Chris, you’re absolutely right that whatever solution emerges, it can’t merely be slapped on by the international community: the Sudanese (in this case) need to agree to and help to create their own solution.
In my view, Dennis’s main point was not that we all need to parachute in to Darfur, but that we all (including myself) are far too used to thinking of war and famine as the status quo for all Africans, when that’s patently false.
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I apologize in advance for the gratuitous length of this comment. I kind of got lost in the moment.I’m glad Chris took the time to respond to my article. He brings up a number of thoughtful and on-the-mark points that I think a lot of people share. By design or by fault I didn’t address them in my article – which was, as Mike said, intended simply to dispute the catharsis that tends to reside in the minds of those who believe that Darfur is simply business as usual for the African continent.
Beyond that basic argument there is a healthy divergence of views about what, exactly, we can and should do about this situation, which is so far removed from our daily lives. In a world where politicians on all sides of the spectrum seem to be behaving like children, Chris is right to ask: ‘what is OUR responsibility when Africans choose to attack and kill each other?’
First of all, I would like to clarify that what is happening in Darfur is not some kind of organic, unavoidable conflict between ethnicities, but a politically-motivated and calculated campaign of repression, dispossession, and fear. It started when the Sudanese government, rather than seek a peaceful solution, ‘outsourced’ the Janjaweed militia to eliminate rebel groups who claimed that their region was being left out of the political dispensation. With the sometimes passive, sometimes active support of the government, the Janjaweed and its allies have gone on to target not only the rebels but the civilian populations from which they sprang. As is often the case in these situations, the violence has spiraled out of control. Rape is a common weapon. Between two and four hundred thousand people have been killed and two and a half million have lost their houses.
At this point, the Sudanese government can still play a major role in stopping the violence, by calling in the Janjaweed and allowing peacekeeping troops into their country. The problem is that they refuse to acknowledge that the problem even exists. “Justice is taking its course in Darfur,†they say to the UN, wildly underestimating the number of people affected by the violence that they unleashed (“The number of the persons who lost their lives in the Darfur conflict is estimated at 9000,” “there is no systematic problem—only ‘isolated incidents.’â€). If no action is taken, the danger is that the conflict will pull in more groups and become increasingly difficult to stop; indeed, the neighboring country of Chad is being quickly drawn in.
Damn, I’ve gone off on a tangent. My point here was to say that it would be mistaken to view the conflict as a popular dispute between ethnicities that is merely playing itself out to its logical conclusion (more on this later); all over Africa, different ethnicities live side-by-side in peace and goodwill.
Having said this, as Chris expresses, Darfur can be a troublesome case for concerned Americans, who often find their avenues of response leading to nowhere.
As Chris points out, America is not to blame to what is happening in Darfur. On the contrary, the current administration has arguably been the most outspoken against what is happening there. The United States has given nearly $2 billion to improve the situation in refugee camps. It provides as much as half of the food aid that the UN channels to Darfur. It has called what is happening there genocide, and has spoken up against the situation before the UN; Bush even gave it a shout-out in his last State of the Union Address.
The good news is that much of this has come about because of the organized efforts of activist groups and individuals that have kept Darfur in the spotlight; that is an empowering reality, and should encourage us to continue to support those organizations that speak out for the often voiceless victims of politically motivated violence in Africa.
The bad news is that, in spite of this, the violence continues. This is partly because America has lost nearly all of its street cred with the Arab world. Rightly or wrongly we blew our righteous wad on Iraq and the War on Terror (and, as Chris highlighted, Somalia. I would add that the Clinton administration’s 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum probably didn’t win us any friends in the Sudan, either). Any criticism that we level now against an Arab country is easily deflected by both well-meaning activists and self-serving politicians.
However, the situation worsens mostly on behalf of the enduring complicity of those countries that DO have sway over the Sudanese government, namely the Organization of the Islamic Conference (the union of 57 states whose stated objective is ‘to safeguard the interest and ensure the progress and well-being of their peoples and those of other Muslims in the world over’) along with China (Sudan’s largest investor, with a 40 percent stake in Sudanese oil) and, to a lesser degree, the African Union.
These countries, to one degree or another, have consistently blocked international and UN efforts to ameliorate the situation in Darfur, and have played politics with a violence that is increasingly unable to distinguish between so called ‘black Africans’ and those Muslims that the OIC has sworn to protect. As long as these countries continue to put politics and business ahead of humanitarian concern, there is seemingly little that we average Americans can do to stop the situation. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel a twang of futility myself while marching for Darfur in front of the White House in January, or when I wrote a letter to my representative concerning Darfur after the mid-term elections.
That being said, I do not wholly agree with the assertion that ‘Africa…like Europe right up through the 20th century…is going to go through a long, bloody sorting process that will still be going on in our grandchildren’s lives,’ and that ‘nothing can prevent it.’
Highlighting the often violent path that led Europe to modernity does indeed show us that Africa is not somehow more inherently prone to violence than the ‘civilized’ Western world. But it should not be used to argue the ‘inevitability’ of present and future conflict in Africa or anywhere else in the world. Indeed, there was nothing ‘inevitable’ about the ‘bloody process’ in Europe, nothing inevitable about World Wars One or Two, or the Holocaust, or the Inquisition(s), etc, ad naseum, just as there is nothing natural or inevitable about what is happening in Darfur. If violence were the only natural outcome of disagreement, then the world probably would have ended in October of 1962, if not sooner. Instead, our father’s children are free to dance the night away in a Moscovian discotheque and sip Trung Nguyen in Saigon.
Also, while I concur that foreign intervention has its limits and that the Sudanese government and rebel groups are principally responsible for cleaning up their own house, I do not believe that ‘Africans themselves are the only ones who can stop attacking and killing each other.’ Diplomacy, sanctions, peace-keeping, positive incentives and aid all have their place to play here, as they have in other conflicts. Here, I will defer to Desmond Tutu’s recent comments about Zimbabwe, which could also be applied to the Sudan:
“The crisis in Zimbabwe raises familiar questions about the responsibilities of the international community. Some argue that the world has no business interfering with, or even commenting on, the internal affairs of a sovereign state. This principle is exceptionally convenient for dictators and for people who do not wish to be bothered about the well-being of others. It is a principle that paved the way for the rise of Hitler and Stalin and for the murders ordered by Idi Amin. It is a principle that, if consistently observed, would have shielded the apartheid government in South Africa from external criticism and from the economic sanctions and political pressure that forced it to change. It is a principle that would have prevented racist Rhodesia from becoming Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe from ever coming to power.â€
There’s no simple solution, and it is easy for us as Americans to feel powerless to stop what is happening in the Sudan; very few of us are in a position to convince China or the OIC or the Sudanese government itself to care about the foolish wasting of lives that is going on. We see governments and organizations resorting to (and benefiting from) violence at every turn and we are tempted to say ‘fuck it’ and write it off as the way things are.
But perceived powerlessness is never an adequate excuse for inaction or, worse, indifference. The very least we can do is care, even if caring sucks and makes us feel frustrated or angry. From caring, we can move on to conversation, debate, letter-writing, lobbying, and a million other tiny things that just might make a difference.
Otherwise, the ‘western mind’ will indeed remember Darfur, not like Tibet or the imprisonment of Mumia Abu-Jamal, but for what it was – the failure of the international community to respond to the widespread murder of countless human beings.
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whoa, my comment got messed up. Damn ya, devilish crunchable imps! -
I took care of the formatting problem, Dennis. -
Dennis,Thank you for responding. Clearly, our paradigms on some of these issues differ, and your overall understanding of the situation in Darfur is deeper than my own. (And thanks for the paragrah explaining how this all came about; it was new information to me.)
You and Mike D. both mentioned my comparison between Europe and Africa. He said our reactions to violence in both should be the same, and you said (if I understand you correctly) that the comparison is not entirely apt because I treat what happened in Europe as inevitable.
In response to Duck’s comment, I would just say that shock and horror have indeed been our response when Europeans slaughtered each other … followed not long after by picking a side and joining the fight. This is what we did in both world wars. Obviously, this is not going to happen in Sudan.
And this brings me to Dennis’ comment about how there was nothing inevitable about European conflict and atrocities. If I may digress a little bit, the history of Europe is mostly the history of warfare. The continent spent the fall of the Roman Empire to the 20th century fighting several major wars every century. As the Industrial Revolution took hold, these wars built in ferocity in direct proportion to the development of military technology, culminating in both World Wars.
In short, I believe the only reason Europe is mostly peaceful now is because war has has become too costly, not because Europeans have “seen the light.”
Compare this to Africa, where most armies have only small arms. Wars in Africa involve little firepower, by the standards of modern armies. Their destruction is spread out over years. There is no real threat of nuclear weapons being used, no bombing raids destroying entire cities. Warfare there is costly, but apparently not costly enough to make anyone want to stop doing it.
Maybe there is nothing inevitable about violence, but the history of mankind shows that it’s a better than average possibility. We can try and intercede as best we can, but ultimately it takes powerful motivation to lay down the gun. In Europe it took the possibility of mutual annihilation. Why should Africa be different?This is all a bit beside your main point though, which is the place Africa occupies in the Western mind. I think the two are somewhat connected though. Why do Africans have to starve to death or slaughter each other en masse before we notice them? I think it’s for the same reason that they can afford to kill each other in low-level wars that will never escalate to a conclusion for the foreseeable future: poverty. The poor get ignored.
I don’t want to be flip, but maybe the best way to help Africans is to make them rich.I have no real grand ideas beyond this (if what I’ve said is even an idea). I have enjoyed this exchange, and learned something too. Hope it was the same all around.
Chris