CURRENT AFFAIRS: ED O'LOUGHLINreviews Saving Darfur: Everyone's Favourite African War, By Rob Crilly, Reportage Press, 256pp, £12.99
ROB CRILLY lays his cards on the table from the start. “I never came to Africa to change the world or even to save Darfur,” he writes in the introduction to his new book. “It was the search for adventure that brought me and my notebook to El Fasher.”
A stringer for the Irish Times, the Timesof London and others, Crilly worked out of Nairobi during the latter half of the noughties, when media interest in Africa focused on the war in western Sudan.
Few foreign journalists can have invested more time, sweat or courage in this inaccessible conflict. It is to his credit, therefore, that rather than “talk-up” his story he instead sets about deconstructing the myths which have made Darfur, as his subtitle has it, “Everyone’s Favourite African War”.
Put simply – and it always was, by celebrity advocates such as Mia Farrow and George Clooney – the war in Darfur is a racial genocide perpetrated against “black, African” tribesmen by the Arab and Islamist government in Khartoum. A government which, moreover, hosted Osama Bin Laden before he became a world-class villain.
A spin-off from the “war on terror” and the Arab-Israeli conflict, this narrative provided a news hook which other African wars sadly lacked. In the US, evangelical Christians and Jewish organisations were the early movers behind a push for urgent military intervention in Sudan to prevent a “second Rwanda”.
Reporting from the ground inside Darfur, Crilly discovered that stories of a concerted campaign of rape, murder and ethnic cleansing by Arab janjaweed (“devils on horseback”) militias, supported by government troops and planes, were indeed true. General Omar al-Bashir’s junta was waging a dirty war against its own citizens.
But there was more to it than that. The “Arabs” of Darfur, he found, were just as black, just as African, just as Darfuri and just as poor as their ethnic rivals, and had some legitimate grievances of their own. The “African tribes”, meanwhile, were just as Muslim as the Arabs. And the fragmented “African” rebel groups were far from blameless themselves.
Nor was there any sign of the kind of concerted mass slaughter seen in Armenia, the Holocaust or Rwanda. Instead, what Crilly discovered was an all-too-typical African “low intensity” conflict, in which the armed men on both sides find it prudent to avoid each other where possible, and attack the civilians instead.
As he points out, the ongoing civil wars/societal collapses in the Congo and Somalia have been going on for much longer and have killed more people than the inflated figure of 400,000 dead Darfuris claimed by the US-based Save Darfur Coalition in 2006. So did the five decades of war which devastated the south of Sudan, until a shaky peace was brokered in 2005.
Fellow foreign correspondents will sympathise with Crilly’s frustration as he tries to get funding to report on less sexed-up conflicts, or to place stories detailing the complex realities of Darfur.
"'It's all a bit Inside Baseball'," his editors would tell him, "suggesting it was the sort of esoteric detail of interest only to Darfur aficionados. Stories of the latest Janjaweed massacre, on the other hand, were lapped up."
Simplification can of course have its benefits. In Darfur’s case it led to diplomatic, humanitarian and UN intervention on a scale not seen in Africa since the Cold War. But skewed analysis meant that much of this energy was misdirected, Crilly says.
Having turned Darfur into a black and white war of good versus evil, the Save Darfur Coalition seemed fixated on regime change, and successfully pushed to make Bashir the first sitting head of state to be indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
Within minutes of the ICC’s decision, Bashir’s government, predictably, ordered the expulsion of 13 of the largest western aid agencies helping Darfur’s three million internally displaced, a savage blow to the people whom the lobbyists were supposedly trying to help.
Similarly, the obsession with military intervention produced a 26,000-strong UN-African Union peace-keeping force which, despite its huge size, still lacks the manpower, equipment and logistics needed to enforce a peace deal – if there were one. But – thanks at least in part to the diversion of diplomatic energy into punishment and confrontation – there is still no comprehensive peace plan to enforce.
Crilly’s conclusion is that – as experience elsewhere in Africa has shown – if you want to protect the ordinary people you have to hold your nose and talk with the warlords, despots and bandits. Indicting Bashir, says a western diplomat, was like “arresting Martin McGuinness during the Good Friday negotiations”.
Saving Darfuris a colourful and compelling work of first-hand journalism by a reporter who has clearly done his leg-work. Its shortcomings are, in the balance, minor. The narrative straddles the line between personal memoir and hard-nosed polemic, sometimes clumsily. The newsman's prose is also unhandy at times, particularly when it has a purple tinge.
There is not enough historical or geographical background for my own personal taste, and the book sorely misses a chapter on China’s growing role in Sudan and the rest of Africa. There really ought to be an index. In other words, this book feels too short, and does not do justice to itself as a source of reference. But these criticisms can also be taken as back-handed compliments.
Ed O'Loughlin is a former Africa correspondent for the The Irish Timesand former Middle East Correspondent for the Sydney Morning Heraldand the Ageof Melbourne. His first novel, Not Untrue and Not Unkind, is out now in Penguin paperback
