MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Richard Just and Marisa Katz, editors at the New Republic, share their thoughts on the failure of the United States and the West to stop the genocide in Darfur. They discuss what led the New Republic to devote its May 15th issue to Darfur and the unique perspective they believe the magazine brings to bear.
TRANSCRIPT:
NARRATOR: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Your host is Jerry Fowler, Director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience.
JERRY FOWLER: Our guests today are Richard Just and Marisa Katz, editors at the New Republic. The New Republic recently devoted its May 15th issue to the crisis in Darfur. Richard and Marisa, welcome to the program.
MARISA KATZ: Thank you Jerry.
RICHARD JUST: Thanks for having us.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me ask you Richard, the crisis in Darfur has been going on now for over two years, and I know the New Republic has covered it from time to time, but why did you pick now to devote an issue to the crisis?
RICHARD JUST: I wish we had done much sooner, and I think everyone at the magazine wishes we had done more sooner. I think that there was a sense at the magazine that we had actually shirked our responsibility to make a major statement about Darfur for a little bit too long. We have done, as you said, articles here and there, and Eric Reeves has been—Eric is a Darfur expert at Smith College—sort of our point man for Darfur; he has written a lot for us, but I think in the last few months there was just this sense at the magazine that this was something that TNR could make sort of a unique contribution to the debate over, and we felt like it was just time to make a big statement by doing a whole issue rather than just continuing to do a few articles here and there.
JERRY FOWLER: Not to belabor the point, but I think it is in some ways reflective of a lot of institutions dealing with an issue like Darfur; what is it that causes you to go from week to week to week and not really be focused on it as severe as it is?
RICHARD JUST: I think that it is the really unfortunate sense that there is always—Darfur occasionally as you know penetrates onto the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post, but by in large it has just sort of been something that has taken place sort of within public view and outside of public view at the same time because it is rarely been topic A; it has rarely been the most important story in any given week, and I think Washington can easily become very consumed and TNR is no exception with whatever topic A is, with whatever the story of the week is, and Darfur has never been that, and the really unfortunate upshot is that it makes it easy to not focus on it in as serious a way as it should have been focused on, and certainly much earlier.
JERRY FOWLER: I wanted to pick up on one of the things you said before about feeling that TNR had a special contribution to make. What did you mean by that?
RICHARD JUST: What I meant is that I think one of the problems with humanitarian intervention—which is what TNR is calling for in Darfur—one of the problems of preventing genocide is that there is no natural political constituency for it. You have certain political groups that are more or less sympathetic to such interventions, but obviously President Bush has not—and the Republicans who control Washington have not—taken this as seriously as it needed to be taken on the one hand. On the other hand, you have liberals who I think in general make up a really large component of the movement of people who care about Darfur but who since 9/11 I think are very wary of American power, and certainly since Iraq are very wary of American power. The New Republic occupies a sort of unique position within the political spectrum. We certainly consider ourselves liberals, but we are liberals who embrace the use of American power for liberal ends, and so I do not think there are many other liberal publications—there may not be many other liberals out there, liberal groups—that would feel quite as comfortable calling for the use of American force to stop the Darfur genocide as the New Republic feels comfortable calling. It is an issue that I think—the issue of humanitarian intervention in general—is an issue that I think TNR brings a unique perspective to.
JERRY FOWLER: I want to come back to the editorial position that the New Republic took in terms of using American power, but first let me ask Marisa, you wrote kind of the anchor article in the issue about the history over the last couple of years of the United States response, and it had the very provocative subtitle of “Bush channels Neville Chamberlain.” What did you mean by that?
MARISA KATZ: The writers at our magazine do not always write the headlines as well, but it is supposed to be about this idea of appeasement, and the distinction between our avoidance of action in Rwanda because there was a perceived lack of strategic interest there. In Sudan, we have directly engaged this government—intentionally engaged this government—and missed a number of opportunities where we could have taken a harder line, and instead, gave them several baskets of carrots and no sticks over the last three years. It was about this idea of choosing not just to avoid to action, but to actively appease the government.
JERRY FOWLER: What was behind making those choices to use carrots rather than sticks?
MARISA KATZ: I think that Sudan is a complicated country for us, and often people will talk about Africa, and we do not care about Africa, but Sudan is the largest country in Africa, it is right below our ally Egypt, across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia, it has an abundant supply of oil, a history of support for terrorism, close ties to the Middle East, and also this significant Christian population that American Evangelicals have identified with over the course of the years, so all those interests complicated the way our government thought about Darfur in Western Sudan, and it made the decision making more difficult, I think.
JERRY FOWLER: Could you just play that out a little bit more in terms of the reporting that you did? I know you talked to a lot of people who were involved in making the policy, as well as advocates on the outside. What were the factors that were basically ultimately driving the decisions that were made over the course of 2004-2005?
MARISA KATZ: One of the primary factors was this idea that they did not want to upset the possibility of ending the civil war in Sudan between the government in the North and the Christian animists in the South Sudan. That is a separate conflict than the Darfur conflict, though it has a lot of similarities. Both are about marginalized people within Sudan against the central government which is not good about sharing power or resources, and the United States government had been quite invested in solving the North-South conflict, largely because there was a very organized American Evangelical political group that pushed President Bush, that pushed members of Congress to take an interest in this, and they really wanted to make sure that that happened to be what was delivered to that constituency so during the course of the conflict in Darfur, they could have at various points taken a harder stance vis-à-vis the Sudanese government, but that would have also put that North-South agreement at risk and they did not necessarily want to do that.
JERRY FOWLER: That was the perception anyway.
MARISA KATZ: Yes.
JERRY FOWLER: That would have been the perception. What about one thing that is often brought up, the assistance that the government in Sudan provided both before, but especially after September 11th in terms of combating terrorism. What factor did your research find that that played in policy decisions?
MARISA KATZ: You know Jerry; it is a little bit hard to tell. If you ask members of Congress, “Why has our government bent over backwards in trying to be nice to Sudan?” the first thing they will say is, “Cooperation on counter-terrorism.” They cannot tell you exactly what Sudan has done to cooperate. Certainly our State Department annual reports say that they seem to be cooperating more, but no one is convinced that there are no longer mechanisms to support terrorism within Sudan still existent. At the same time, it is not entirely clear that the information that they are giving us at this point in time is particularly helpful in our account of terrorism and operation. They may have given us some information earlier on, up closer to the time right after September 11th, when they were afraid that they might actually be the next target in the war on terrorism. People say they were quite cooperative then as far as sharing intelligence and cracking down on potential terrorists within their territories, but at this point in time, they are not necessarily that important in our strategy to combat terrorism.
JERRY FOWLER: One of the issues that is brought up in a separate article in the issue by Samantha Power, and I think it is reflected both in the House editorial and in your article, Marisa, is the response of other countries has not been that strong, and in some ways, the United States has been the strongest, the governmental response. To what extent has that really defined the international response--the active assistance that the Chinese government has given to Khartoum, and the relative indifference of Europe?
MARISA KATZ: Currently, Richard and I are in Germany this week, and it something we have been asking various German government officials about, and it really not an issue that has resonated much within Europe. They have talked about that they are sending some troops to support peacekeeping in Congo this week, but Darfur for them is really not a central issue. In the United States it was more of an issue, in part because over the course of three years there was a constituency that began to pressure our government—that is Evangelical groups, Jewish groups, various members of the African American community—but those groups were not necessarily pressuring in Europe, and as well, China certainly has been an obstacle. They get a significant amount of their oil from Sudan. Sudan gets a significant of its oil revenue from China, and it was just a relationship that the United States could have complicated a little more but we did not seem to be willing to put our full diplomatic weight behind that.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me turn Richard back to you and to the position that the editors of the New Republic adopted. The editorial was quite strongly worded but in some ways it was a little difficult to actually at the end of the day understand what it was that the editors were calling for. You kind of referred to it, I think, earlier, but are they calling for unilateral American intervention if some other multilateral or international intervention is not forthcoming?
RICHARD JUST: We are calling for Western intervention, and the reason we are calling for that is because the African Union has simply not been able to stop the genocide, and while United Nations troops ultimately, while United Nations peacekeepers can ultimately play a role in stopping the genocide, the United Nations has moved slowly over the last two years to. The ability of the United Nations to move quickly to deploy troops to stop the genocide immediately is certainly in question, so what we are calling for is a western military intervention to disarm the Janjaweed and end the killing—and we are vague about exactly what that means—but what that means to us is not necessarily United States, unilateral intervention; it could mean NATO intervening, and I think that is probably the most likely model; NATO intervening along the lines that it did in Kosovo, but obviously, what we did in Kosovo—while a NATO operation was led by the United States—and what Marisa just said, I think, points to why whatever solution there could be Darfur is ultimately something that would have to be led by the United States. It is the United States that—and the United States’ record on this genocide has not been what all of us would like it to be, but the United States has shown more interest than the rest of the West in trying to put an end to this—ultimately, it is TNR’s feeling, that it is up to President Bush to take on the responsibility of United States moral leadership in the world and say to our NATO allies, “The African Union cannot end this on their own, the United Nations cannot end this on their own, it is going to take NATO leadership to do this,” and what NATO leadership ultimately means is that the United States, is President Bush, rallying NATO to do something.
JERRY FOWLER: In some ways the argument could be made that that now is what he has been doing for the last couple of months, and one could say perhaps it should have been done last year or the year before, and the response from NATO has, by all accounts, been less than enthusiastic, either because they feel that they are overstretched in Afghanistan and in the British case, Iraq, or other things they are doing with their military, or just to resistance to getting involved on the ground in a place like Sudan.
RICHARD JUST: It is true, and it is a shame that our allies feel this way, and I think that the reasons that other NATO countries are to varying degrees reluctant to do something about Darfur, I think there are a lot of reasons, and they are complex, but I think that ultimately the genocide has to be stopped. That is sort of the bottom line. I think President Bush has certainly not done all that he can do to rally NATO to the cause. I think that if he were to go to Brussels, to give a major speech in which he said to NATO leaders, “We are going to do this, and we are going intervene, and these are the number of troops we need, and this is the timeframe for doing it, and we are going to do it quickly, and the United States is going to lead but we want this to be a multilateral effort that includes all NATO countries,” and if he said that we recognize that we had differences with our allies on Iraq, and we recognize that we have had differences with our allies on other foreign policy questions for the last few years, but this is not Iraq, this is a genocide and we all need to agree that whatever our other disagreements are in the world, stopping genocide, there can be no disagreement that this is something that we absolutely have to do. I think if President Bush sort of took a much harder stance, a more public stance in that way and made clear that this is a priority, I think we could see some action.
JERRY FOWLER: One other factor that has been invoked as a reason for NATO reticence has been the reluctance of the African Union to embrace a NATO involvement, and I think as Marisa said, for a long time there was this mantra of “African solutions for African problems, but at least, even recently as there has been a greater awareness that the African Union force just cannot protect civilians, there has been sort of a counter-offensive by Sudan to generate political opposition, especially among African nations, to a NATO involvement. Would it be your position that NATO should go in anyway even if there was opposition from the African Union.
RICHARD JUST: Yes, absolutely. In the 90s, people use to say that Bosnia was a European problem, and now we hear the same argument that the Darfur genocide is an African problem. But genocide is never a regional problem; it is never a problem for a particular ethnic group, or for a particular race, or for a particular geographical location; it is a human problem, and if 20th century history teaches anything, I think that is one of the most important lessons of the 20th century. Look, having a strong African Union in the long-run is obviously good for Africa, it is obviously for the African Union to be an organization that can police its own continent, but we are talking about hundreds of thousands of lives at stake in Darfur. This is not—and I do not think this is an appropriate time—basically if you are talking about waiting for the African Union to get its act together, it is using the hundreds of thousand of lives that are at stake in Darfur as a sort of testing ground for an untested organization, and I think there may be plenty of testing grounds for the African Union in the future, places where the African Union can gradually build up to doing what it needs to do to police its own continent, but when you are talking about genocide, you are talking about the lives of human beings that are at stake, and I do not think that waiting for the African Union to get its act together to solve this problem simply to allow them to maintain some sense of organizational pride; you are talking about sacrificing a lot of lives to do that and I just do not think that it is appropriate; I do not think that argument holds a lot of water.
JERRY FOWLER: You made the point actually, in the article that you have in the issue that nonintervention is actually the imperialist or the colonial option rather than intervention.
RICHARD JUST: Yes; my argument is that there is obviously one thing, like Marisa said, we have been in Germany all week, and one thing you see in Germany, but also among Americans—particularly American liberals—is a real wariness of the use of Western power because whenever the sense that American action abroad is often of an imperial or a colonial nature, and when you talk about Africa, that is a particularly sensitive issue because there is a really ugly history of Western colonialism and Western abuse in Africa, and more often than not in the last hundred and fifty years when the West went into Africa, it was ultimately for bad purposes, not for good ones. I think that that history casts a problematic shadow over the current debate because it sort of inclines people—and including maybe in some cases people of good will—towards not wanting to repeat the mistakes of the past. What I argue in my article is that there were a lot of things that define colonialism, but one of the key characteristics of the colonial mentality was an indifference, a fundamental indifference to the humanity of others, so the point being, and I sort of drawn Sudanese history and some of the colonial British history in Darfur particularly to argue this, but in order to colonize people, in order to exploit their natural resources, in order to maintain their sense of living, in order to maintain their livelihoods in a very undeveloped way which the British did as a matter of policy in Sudan. In order to imprison massive numbers of people in gulag, imprisoned at the British did in Kenya, in order to do all these sort of awful, colonial things to people, you have to be fundamentally indifferent to their humanity, so indifference becomes a very important part of the colonial instincts, and I think what we are seeing in Darfur, in the West’s failure to intervene, is that the West is once again acting on a fundamental indifference towards Africans. It is sort of reverses the traditional way that you might think of the colonial instinct. You normally think of the colonial instinct as being people from the West going to other places to do things, but I think there is a real way in which the West can act on a very ugly part of the colonial instinct by not going to other places to do things, and I draw on this idea that there was a quote in one of the books that I reviewed in which a Sudanese author had described the British attitude toward the Sudanese during colonial times, as they treated Sudan as if it were a human zoo. I think by not going to Darfur now, we are showing an indifference that suggests that we really think of the people of Darfur as living in a zoo, a place that we can afford to be indifferent.
JERRY FOWLER: We are nearing the end of our time. Marisa, let me just come back to you. You have charted in your article the trajectory of American response to Darfur. We have reached a point where an apparent peace agreement has been signed, the African Union has said that they expect to transition to a United Nations force by the end of September, and the United Nations Security Council now has adopted a resolution at least inching in that direction. Where do you think things are going from here?
MARISA KATZ: I think that is going to depend a lot on a continued interest by the international community in this issue. There is the peace agreement on paper, but there have been a lot of things on paper before, and we cannot necessarily count on the parties following this agreement. Certainly the Sudanese government has—a number of times already—promised to disarm the Janjaweed and reign in its militias, and has not followed through on that. The United Nations resolution passed this week talks about sanctions; it does not actually use the word sanctions; it talks about measures. If this agreement violated there have been multiple United Nations resolutions threatening measures, and over and over again, Khartoum has been allowed to miss the deadlines set by the Security Council, without any negative consequences. It is going to be a matter of the international community seeing this through, through the end. Also, as far as the United Nations force, which can take over a—I guess as soon as it is ready—September could be the latest that they hope. It is going to depend on the numbers there and the mandate they can arrange. One of the problems so far is that there have not been enough troops on the ground in an area that large. They have not had the logistical support that they needed. All along the African Union has been happy to take on a challenge of policing its own continent, but it needed the logistics. Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo pleaded to the United Nations, “Let me lead when solving African problems, but please give me the tools,” and he did not get the tools; he did not get the mandate he needed to actually protect civilians. These are still sort of unanswered questions, and it is going to need continued energy on the part of Western nations, on the part of the United States, on the part of the Security Council to make sure that this happens.
JERRY FOWLER: Richard Just and Marisa Katz are editors at the New Republic. They joined us from Germany. Richard and Marisa, thanks for being with us.
MARISA KATZ: Thank you Jerry.
RICHARD JUST: Thanks for having us.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, visit our website at www.committeeonconscience.org.
