The Politics of Naming Genocide

I just turned in a final paper today for my Human Rights class. One of the essays in the paper answered (or at least attempted to address) the prompt, "Elaborate upon why the US declared events in Darfur a genocide and did not do so in Rwanda." Here is my response (aka tirade about how the United States has abandoned its moral mandate).

It seems fairly obvious to me that the reason the United States has so much invested in calling the current events in Darfur a genocide but not those of Rwanda in 1994 is for its own political reasons and not for any real concern about human rights violations or violence against innocents. What I mean is, Darfur is of such popular interest to the United States because it is seen through a “religious/cultural warfare” lens rather than an “African-on-African” lens. We, as Americans, and especially the United States government, finds it disturbingly simple and easy to ignore genocide or other human rights abuses in the continent of Africa (and other places where the “other” lives: where other brown, black, red, or yellow people are the majority) for the same reason it seems to ignore so many social problems here at home: namely, institutionalized racism. Part of the discourse of this racism includes such ideas as “blacks being blacks,” those violent savages that can’t help themselves slaughtering each other, et cetera. The general attitude that genocide or other human rights problems are things that happen to “the other”—which we discussed at length in class and which Makau Mutua discusses in his article “Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights”—is a form of Euro-ethnocentrism and racism, in the case of Rwanda.

Rwanda was a clear case of genocide, and, without getting into the problematic of ‘intent’ with regards to genocide, may I say that there was at least plenty of warning signs that a genocide could (and eventually did) occur. Yet the United States did not intervene. It continued to stay out of the genocide even after our then State Department spokesperson Mike McCurry himself described the events this way: “I think there was a strong disposition within the department here to view what has happened there [as a genocide]; certainly, constituting acts of genocide that have occurred....” Even though within 100 days some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered, the United States continued to turn a blind eye. In short, although the United States clearly knew that the right thing to do was to intervene, it actually demanded the removal of United Nations troops and then sat on the sidelines, since there was no public outcry or political reason compelling them to do so.

It would seem to make sense, then, at first glance, for the Western, Eurocentric, tactically rather than morally inclined United States to dismissively group the Sudan (Bilad-al-sudan, literally “country of the blacks” ) with all the other poor, black, African savages. But the Sudan has an interesting exception which proves politically advantageous for the United States: Arabs! So we see the tactical, political reason to condemn the perpetrators of the genocide, the Janjaweed: it paints Arabs as criminals (which is actually true in the case of the Janjaweed) and further bolsters the solidity of the United States’ inflammatory and condemnatory discourse against the Arab world, which it keeps up in order to further strategic goals in the Middle East.

In further evidence that the American label “genocide” on the Darfur situation is purely political is the reality that we have nothing to lose by doing so. Unlike the case of Rwanda, naming Darfur’s reality a genocide does not commit us to any action, but it is, as I said, a useful and powerful rhetorical tool in our “war on terror” and our other discursive campaigns in our quest to maintain hegemony.

The same political reasons as well as implications for responsibility are evident in our linguistic pussy-footing around the issue of Iraq. As Mahmood Mamdani argues in his article, the similarities between Darfur and Iraq are striking, yet we (American mouthpieces: the media, the military) constantly refer to Iraq as an “insurgency” while we call Darfur a “genocide.” This is further evidence that the naming of conflicts by the United States is done so with purely political aims in mind, rather than the aims of truth and human rights. Well, not purely political, because if Iraq was called a genocide, it would carry implicit responsibility for the United States with it. In Darfur, there is no implication of responsibility. While we invaded Iraq and created its current problems, Darfur’s problems conveniently (for American strategists and politicians) have no direct causation with the United States, yet they relate perfectly to our discourse on terror and our implicit war on the Muslim world (I do not say Arab world, because we are also trying to attack Iran).

In conclusion, it is only for political and strategic reasons that the United States focuses its supposed moral compass on Darfur. Any real humanitarian concern is belied by the fact that the United States commits to nothing by slinging terms around, but does gain significant political currency for its appearance of humanitarian concern. In short, the United States is not only disingenuous, but negligent. And it is, as a significant state actor, not unique in this way, although our hegemony in terms of weaponry and veto power on the world stage is.