Sammy, get the axe!
Our Modern Day Carrie Nations are having a bit of problem. If bad news comes in threes, it's most likely good news only comes in ones so be sure to check out Stephanie Strom and Lydia Polgreen's "Advocacy Group's Publicity Campaign on Darfur Angers Relief Organizations" (New York Times) which tells you that Save Darfur -- the noblest of all nobles, if you believe the hype -- spent $15 million last year . . . on advertising and expenses. How much went to aid groups in Darfur? Not a single dime. Not one blood penny.
$15 million to promote themselves -- there have been blockbuster films in the last few years that had smaller advertising budgets. But when your rallies still aren't picking up steam, when even your most vocal and repeated champion Nicky K has taken to whining about how the cause just needs a photo of a tortured puppy to take off, $15 million in self-promotion does buy you a little attention from big (and small) media.
It also bought full page ads in The New York Times. And, the thing there, Strom and Polgreen inform you, is that aid agencies quoted as being on board with the nonsense of "wage a war to bring peace!" weren't on board. They not only weren't on board, they oppose the notion that military action is needed. InterAction's president states, "I am deeply concerned by the inability of Save Darfur to be informed by the realities on the ground and to understand the consequences of your proposed actions." Did you absorb that? Action Against Hunger declares that "a forced intervention by United Nations troops without the approval of the Sudanese government" (advocated by Save Darfur) could "risk triggering a further escalation of violence".
And yet Save Darfur took out an ad in which they LIED and, Strom and Polgreen tell you,
"some relief agencies said they were horrified when Save Darfur's ads in February reported that 'international relief organizations,' among others, had agreed that the time for negotiating with the Sudanese government had ended."
It's not a surprise that Save Darfur would be caught lying. They get caught all the time. For instance, they're fond of claiming that their April 2006 rally in DC turned out over 100,000 people. C.I. was there (as a favor to a friend) and says it was more like slightly less than 900. Of course, back in May of 2006, after the rally they now claim had 100,000 attendees, they were saying it was thousands with the maximum being 15,000. Funny how their claim of 15,000 tops (a huge inflation, says C.I.) became 100,000.
It's sort of like the way their numbers change on how many are dead. In December 2006, they were citing (in their unity statement) USAID "estimates that 350,000 people or more could die in the coming months." When will those months be coming? How many years? Strom and Polgreen estimate (June 2006) that "at least 200,000" have been killed thus far, since the start. All these years later. But English professor Eric Reeves, as Keith Harmon Snow has pointed out on Guns and Butter, isn't so good with the math.
It's not like people haven't tried to warn you. Mahmood Mandani wrote an essay (London Review of Books) that should have been required reading. From his essay:
The most powerful mobilisation in New York City is in relation to Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect the reverse, for no other reason than that most New Yorkers are American citizens and so should feel directly responsible for the violence in occupied Iraq. But Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy politics. Americans worry about what their government should do in Iraq. Should it withdraw? What would happen if it did? In contrast, there is nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as 'Arabs' confront victims clearly identifiable as 'Africans'.
A full-page advertisement has appeared several times a week in the New York Times calling for intervention in Darfur now. It wants the intervening forces to be placed under 'a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel'. That intervention in Darfur should not be subject to 'political or civilian' considerations and that the intervening forces should have the right to shoot -- to kill -- without permission from distant places: these are said to be 'humanitarian' demands. In the same vein, a New Republic editorial on Darfur has called for 'force as a first-resort response'. What makes the situation even more puzzling is that some of those who are calling for an end to intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur; as the slogan goes, 'Out of Iraq and into Darfur.'
Since some of us (Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess and Ava) left NY and came out West just to get away from the Modern Day Carrie Nations, let us grab a moment to say Mandani is correct, the mood is very up on Darfur. The zombies march around with Samantha Powers groupies chanting "Darfur! Darfur! Darfur!" Now when we're talking about a group that could and did meet with the Bully Boy in April of 2006 (he sure as hell didn't meet with citizens calling for an end to the war in Iraq), when we're talking about a war that The New Republic(an) is cheering on, alarms should have gone off. But they haven't for many.
Jonathan Steele attempted to clear things up with "Sorry George Clooney, but the last thing Darfur needs is western troops" (Guardian of London):
An air of unreality, if not cant, surrounds the latest upsurge of calls for UN troops to go into Sudan's western region of Darfur. The actor George Clooney takes to the stage at the UN security council, pleading for action. Tony Blair seizes on the issue to write letters to fellow EU leaders. In cities around the world protesters hold a "global day for Darfur" to warn of looming genocide. Is it really possible that western governments, in spite of being burned by their interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, would use force against another Muslim state?
Groups in the west have long campaigned to have the government in Khartoum replaced. In the US the Christian right and some of Israel's friends portray it as an Islamic fundamentalist regime. Human rights activists raise the issue of slavery to suggest that Arab raiders, supported by the government, are routinely abducting Africans from the south to use as human chattel. The Clinton administration listed Sudan as a terrorist-supporting state because Osama bin Laden once lived there.
Against this background it was always going to be hard to expect fair reporting when civil war broke out in Darfur three years ago. The complex grievances that set farmers against nomads was covered with a simplistic template of Arab versus African, even though the region was crisscrossed with tribal and local rivalries that put some villages on the government's side and others against it.
The more generous say that Save Darfur "oversimplified" the realities. We're not overly generous so we'll just say that they flat out lie repeatedly.
They got caught out in their lie, in The New York Times, but somehow we doubt many of the left and 'left' sites that have repeatedly pushed our Modern Day Carrie Nations will rush to link that article. $15 million dollars, spent in one year, on themselves. And they want anyone to believe they intend to save Darfur?
