Genocide as a Disease?

From what we are told by many recent media reports, the violence that has spawned from the genocide in Darfur is now "spilling over" across the border into Chad. Besides the fact that "Darfur's" (the quotation marks are meant to question the implied possessive quality of the violence, as if it belongs to Darfur) violence has affected Chad since early in the conflict, evidenced by the Janjaweed's persisently demonstrated willingness both to chase victims into Chad (the majority of today's Darfurian refugees in Chad (over 200,000) in fact arrived in the first 18 months of the terror) and to initiate new raids on Chadian villages, such reports are deceptive in how exactly they treat the phenomenon of genocide. I do not mean to question the boon of any press attention at all to this under-reported area, but much of this press is unfortunately tailored in a way that will likely have the long-term harmful effect of perpetuating a common myth about the very nature of genocide. Reports highlighting the "spill-over" of violence from Darfur into Chad imply, as stated above, that this violence was previously (almost "meant to be" it seems at times) confined to Darfur, that the violence was thus Darfur's, and that any appearance of the violence outside of Darfur represents a spreading of the violence. Again, I will reserve commentary on a typically misunderstood issue of the Chad-Darfur relationship, the importance of overcoming our traditional conception of a "border" between two well-defined states and seeing the ambiguous territory of eastern Chad and western Sudan for what it is - a porous and essentially nonexistent "boundary" (simply a line drawn by colonialists, we must remember) onto which are transposed the same peoples, living in similar fashion - and which has historically served as a breeding ground for rebels and foreign interference (think Qaddafi) and a launching pad for coups (for which the string of Chadian dictators is certainly grateful), and instead focus on what strikes me as the deeper problem, which will likely have a greater and longer lasting impact through its historical and theoretical inertia. By portraying genocidal violence as something that spreads or spills over, we de-emphasize the fact that the violence is not "spreading" of its own volition; rather it is being spread, it is being used by its perpetrators against a wider population. Herein lies the media's likely unintentional obfuscation of the nature of genocide; it is a tool, wielded by human actors, and does not have its own agency.

I was thus maddeningly infuriated to hear the well-intentioned Jonathan Miller of the UK's More4 News, in his 16 May 2006 special report, "Echoes of Horror" (can be found here: http://www.channel4.com/news/special-reports/special-reports-storypage.jsp?id=2377), describe "Chad's dangerous borderlands, where the contagion that's affected Darfur has now spread" and opine that "the [only] certainty [is] that, like a virus, ethnic cleansing is poisoning the borderland." I would like to point out two elements of the construction of these seemingly innocuous (at least as innocuous as genocide can be) characterizations of the horror in Darfur and Chad. The first is that Mr. Miller provides a perfect example of the grave error described above, as, through the verb phrases "has now spread" and "is poisoning," he accords the processes of genocide and ethnic cleansing their own self-propelling agency. Though this may seem like a minor grammatical squabble, and one that certainly should not detract from More4 News' attempts to provide coverage and commentary on the repercussions of the genocide in Darfur, it is emblematic of, and subtly reinforces, our relatively well-entrenched idea of the pathological quality of genocide, whose crippling effect has been to take what is fundamentally a human crime - perpetrated by human beings on other human beings - out of our hands and depict it as an uncontrollable tornado of unstoppable wrath, which relieves us of the burden of even explaining the seemingly organic momentum of this unthinkable atrocity.

Samantha Power would criticize this relinquishing of explicative power and moral responsibility as tactfully sidestepping the cold, hard, human-produced reality of genocide by labelling it "a problem from hell." Such characterization, and the hands-in-the-air helplessness that it engenders, Power argues, has been the prevailing tactic of the international community in hedging, skirting, dithering, and otherwise withholding meaningful action to deal with genocides from the Holocaust to Rwanda. It effectively plays on an undisputed pillar of common moral thinking - that genocide is in theory a horrible and inhumane act - to justify an immoral conclusion - that no human action, no matter how concentrated, good-willed, or pragmatic, can possibly affect such pure evil. We have seen this pattern time and time again; after each strategic, well-orchestrated campaign of violence that we (belatedly) qualify as genocidal, we lament our lack of action, but expend a far greater amount of moral capital bemoaning the unspeakable horrors inherent in such human atrocity. We cannot reconcile the cognitive dissonance of our own moral paralysis with the acknowledged fundamental evil before us, so we absolve ourselves of (the possibility of) assuming responsibility by depicting what has just occurred as something not from our world, something we can not possibly grapple with, something by whose very nature transcends any hope of containment or defeat. Thus genocide, we declare, is something "from hell;" the very idea of this confounds human sensibility and renders us prostrate on the floor before the embodiment of the greatest conceivable evil. The More4 News report commits this evasive tactic by describing the genocidal violence of Darfur and Chad as a "contagion" and "a virus." While these are certainly accurate descriptors - and probably even understatements - of the level of horror to which innocent Darfurians and Chadians are victim, they imply that ethnic cleansing and genocide are pathological - and by implication nearly incurable - phenomena, and that we can only wait (with prayers) until they run their course of "spreading" and eventually - hopefully - weakening. We can patch concience-appeasing band-aids onto the problem area (the AU) and throw bags of rice at the suffering victims (though only half of what they need to live), attempting to ease their immediate pain, but what can we expect to accomplish in the face of an epidemic, a many-headed atrocious beast of pure evil (especially without investing anywhere near sufficient political capital or even centering the issue on the popular radar screen)? We are left with merely words. More4 News is not the only one complicit in this abdication in the face of genocide; perhaps every media outlet, nearly all political leaders, and practically everyone who comments on the heart-wrenching situation plaguing (this verb, as an example, subtly implies both genocidal self-propulsion and the unstoppable, disease-like pathology of genocide) Darfur unintentionally give credence to the theory this is something we can complain about, empathize (to a very limited extent) with, wave signs and take token action against, but are ultimately powerless to stop. The two world leaders' whose inaction history will judge the most harshly, the UN's Kofi Annan and the US's George W. Bush are guilty of this erroneous conception of the roots of genocide. Thus when Annan describes Darfur as "little short of hell on earth," he is certainly making an accurate plea for the dire nature of the humanitarian situation there, but, by bringing the unearthly "hell" into his characterization, he also likely furthers our distance from the reality of what is happening in western Sudan.

How can we possibly combat this? There is little hope of changing the dominant vocabulary and phraseology of dealing with genocide when it has been etched into our ignonimous history, according to which regret and remorse cyclically follow death and destruction as soon as we are clear of the frame in which meaningful intervention would have been possible. Though in Darfur we have been experiencing the unprecedented drama of watching something unfold that we have, during its lifetime, acknowledged as genocide, this has not resulted in any revision of the predominant strategical attribute of watching. We have more information, more photographs, and more evidence of genocidal intent and consequences than any previous genocide (including the more publicized reporting of the Armenian genocide and others), yet it does not stop us from limiting our action to peppering the crisis with words of sympathy and lamentations. The only solution is to remember - and focus on - what we do know. This is a genocide committed by individuals - members of an Arab supremacist, power-hungry, unscrupulous NIF regime who have actively and thoughtfully planned and carried out this strategic campaign - and which victimizes other individuals - innocent civilians of certain tribes of Darfur and Chad labelled as "non-Arab." Only after we acknowledge this and truly internalize it will we be able to see the genocide in Darfur as something very real and very human, which, as such, can be stopped by real human methods.