Michael Gerson is both precisely wrong and contradictory when he writes that “the Darfur genocide is closer to Rwanda than Somalia. It requires the urgent establishment of security first.”

Responding to Rwanda did not require the establishment of security first. It required the defeat of an organized military and paramilitary campaign of killing, which is what the Rwandese Patriotic Front achieved.

Let us recall that Somalia’s war and humanitarian crisis were no less genocidal than Darfur’s. The 1988 destruction of Hargaisa by a combination of the Somali army, airforce and clan militia was a crime that was worse, in terms of loss of life and abuses against the population, than any single incident in Darfur. When that campaign was over, there was not a single building in Hargaisa with a roof and the city was completely abandoned. Destruction on only a slightly smaller scale accompanied the military campaigns in southern Somalia in 1990-92, including forcible starvation and the systematic ethnic cleansing of minorities from the Jubba valley, parts of the Shebelle valley and some towns. (See Catherine Besteman’s article in the SSRC webforum “How Genocides End.”)

The aftermath of these military campaigns was a series of shattered societies, in which proxy militias turned on their former patrons, millions regrouped in displaced camps and cities, and there was a war of all against all. Because world opinion was only awakened when the humanitarian crisis reached famine proportions, the narrative was defined as anarchy and famine. But the causal factors are remarkably similar to those at work in Darfur.

Each society is of course unique and the best parallels for Darfur are those closest to home, namely Chad, southern Sudan, Kordofan and of course Darfur’s own time of turmoil and bloodshed after the fall of the Sultanate in 1874. Somalia is closer but inexact.

The Rwanda comparison misleads again and again. Enough of these simplistic parallels.

I wrote a chapter of Alex de Waal’s book War in Darfur and the Search
for Peace about media coverage of Darfur in 2004 in the U.S. Rwanda
was by far the most frequent analogy for Darfur, for which little
reason was offered other than that both were genocides, that the
international community had failed to stop both, and that this failure
was caused by a lack of political will. The war in southern Sudan was
scarcely mentioned. The predominant narrative for Darfur implied that
only the international community could end the conflict, by credibly
threatening Khartoum.

Coverage of Darfur has grown more nuanced since 2004, but I think
overall there is not much change from the initial depiction of the
conflict. It’s understandable that journalists and activists who want
to change the policies of Western governments are attracted to a
narrative that gives preeminence to those governments’ actions. But
it can preclude the consideration of other solutions, and leaves
little room to take into account the ways in which Darfur is distinct
or how the conflict has changed over time.

War in Darfur and the Search for Peace