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The politics of misery

Jim Hoagland:

The humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan has usefully drawn the world's attention to the plight of a million or more refugees and to the lifesaving assistance many of them receive from relief organizations. It also spotlights the brutality of a weak national government fighting multiple local rebellions.

But the Darfur moment in global consciousness also raises troubling questions about Africa's tenuous relationship with the outside world. That relationship is now dominated by the politics of misery, a poor base on which to build a partnership or a future.

Europeans and Americans pay attention to the continent's massacres, famines, epidemics and other forms of vast suffering, but heed little else. Policy responses are dominated by emotion and temporary fixes that are left to wither until the next crisis demands fresh bursts of concern and action.

The pattern is unlikely to change until Africans themselves take the lead in preventing or resolving the continent's potential or festering Darfurs. Africa has for too long relied on the uncertain kindness and intentions of outside powers. The continent's organization of political leaders, the African Union, must take charge of any campaign of intervention or economic sanctions that are needed to protect the dispossessed of Darfur.

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I first directly encountered the politics of misery in the Biafran civil war in Nigeria about three decades ago. Relief organizations that helped the starving Biafrans were denounced and then openly threatened by Nigeria's central government. They were not accepted as independent, legitimate actors. The same was true of journalists who covered the Biafran cause.

Darfur is a measure of the constancy of Africa's problems. But it also measures the change in the international context of disaster relief. The reach and power of the media and humanitarian organizations have grown enormously. The invisible influence they exert is rarely challenged now, even though aid workers and journalists frequently work in an unacknowledged symbiosis that complicates the habits of diplomacy and statecraft.

This story demonstrates that there are some things worse than colonelism. The reason the African governemnts opposed the relief agencies is that the crisis either suits their political purpose are is a direct result of policies that were intended to cause the misery that is being relieved. In other words the famines are a cheap weapon of mass destruction. Stalin used a famine to great result in the Ukraine killing millions. African despots also find them useful, particularly Islamist like those ruling Sudan.