of a meaningful UN intervention, and Rieff is right to caution against any US/NATO intervention. I don’t, however, buy Rieff’s argument that the interventionists are guilty of over-simplification:
My own view is that the main culprit here is human rightsism, a worldview that is based, as John Gray has put it, “on the moral intuitions of the liberal academy … a legalistic edifice from which politics has been excluded.” Were politics present in their thinking, pro-Darfuri intervention activists would not use the reductionist dichotomy of victims and abusers that has been the staple myth of humanitarian intervention. The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. So do the extended families of the Janjaweed themselves, who, lest we forget, are also Darfuris. To describe the former simply as victims deprives them of any agency. To describe the latter simply as killers precludes actually understanding the conflict as anything other than an eruption of human wickedness, rather like a volcano or an earthquake.
Yes, the Janjaweed have homes and families, and are probably kind to their dogs too, but it’s a false
sophistication to make out that the situation is really too complex for a one-sided approach. To describe the former [the people being killed] simply as victims deprives them of any agency. What does that mean? Does he think the women from Darfur are somehow asking to be raped, their menfolk complicit in their own slaughter? Sometimes the reductionist dichotomy of victims and abusers is a pretty fair description of what’s happening.
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