Debate became heated Tuesday evening as students, faculty, and locals gathered for a heated debate about the role of international cooperation in the Darfur genocides.
The event, sponsored by the Institute of African Studies and was moderated by Law School faculty Co-Director Peter Rosenblum, Herbert Lehman Professor of Government Mahmood Mamdani, and John Prendergast, co-chair of the Enough Project and member of the board of Save Darfur Coalition. They debated divisive issues such as the number of deaths in the region, whether the genocide should be approached politically, economically, or militarily, and who should implement peace and how it should be done.
Prendergast, who had been held in a Darfur camp, recounted the harsh conditions he had endured.
“Unless there is peace we have nowhere to go,” he said. “It is shameful that we are reduced to hoping for some kind of help from faraway people that have mercy on us.” He said that, after a meeting with President Obama, he was certain that a peace deal could be on its way.
Mamdani implicated the West, in part, as one of the causes of the genocide.
“Darfur seemed globalized,” Mamdani said. “Darfur is a charity, Iraq is a tax. The assumption is that the problem is internal and the solution is external ... the United States has to learn to live in the world, not occupy it.”
Mamdani also gave credit to the African Union for bringing about the dramatic decline in deaths since January 2007.
The African Union is, according to Mamdani, “the only group which has begun with the assumption and stuck with assumption that the solution cannot be an external intervention from the outside.”
According to a United Nations report on Darfur in 2007, more than 200,000 people are estimated to have died and at least 2 million displaced from their homes since fighting 2003.
But Prendergast questioned this assertion of improvement in death rates and fighting, saying that mortalities in some areas have been almost impossible to track.
Conflict between the two candidates continued when Mamdani questioned the accountability of those who supposedly implementing justice.
“To whom is the ICC International Criminal Court] accountable?” he asked. “Global justice requires a reform of the political system.”
Mamdani’s argument captured the attention of Nancy Elshami, BC ’10, who said, “Mamdani’s research and critical approach was illuminating, not only of the situation in Darfur, but of the disparities within the ICC.”
But Prendergast defended the ICC, arguing that they put aside the case until further evidence was provided. Mamdani insisted that they threw away the case.
Mamdani also spoke out against international non-governmental organizations like Save Darfur.
“Save Darfur is not a peace movement ... Save Darfur is a war mobilization,” he said, adding that, “it employs an advertising agency ... putting out the figures which you read, none of which are credible. It is a pornography of violence, a form of voyeurism.”
“As long as these problems remain unaddressed then we are going to continue to have forums like this [one],” he added.
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