The U.S. needs to engage in open and public discussion on the conflict in Darfur in order to understand and form foreign policy around it, a scholar from a Portuguese university said Tuesday.
Mathias Thaler, senior researcher at the Centro de Estudos Sociais of Universidade de Coimbra in Portugal, said this is necessary because most of the public information concerning Darfur is subjective interpretation of the conflict, rather than all the objective facts.
One of these groups has been the media, Thaler said, which has presented the conflict as a simple struggle between victims and perpetrators.
“That actually freezes the understanding of the violence in Darfur by starting from the assumption that genocide is happening,” he said. “I’m not saying that genocide is not happening, but for a public debate to be fully inclusive and democratically legitimate, the people who make a case for genocide would have to engage the people who say that the situation is much more complex.”
It is important to talk about the conflict, but equally important to make a decision and act on it — something many scholars worldwide have not done, Thaler said.
“We need to describe and evaluate the situation,” he said. “We need to act upon the outcome of this description and evaluation. If you simply call for more background knowledge of the conflict … something like paralysis can happen.”
The debate between scholars is whether the conflict is a civil war or genocide, Thaler said, partly because the range of death estimates is so wide.
A contradiction in the definition of genocide provided by the Geneva Declaration leaves it open to interpretation. He said the definition says genocide is to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
“We need to find out what this means ‘In whole or in part,’” he said.
“How many people need to be killed so as to qualify as a genocide? It sounds cruel and definitely not responsible, but for the definition of genocide to be successfully made, I think you need to answer this question.”
The event’s organizer, Amit Ron, assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, said he agreed that the public has not been presented with all of the information in the Darfur conflict.
“Political organizations, interest groups, powerful groups and the media … aren’t shaping the decisions, but shaping the terms of how we reach the decisions that are being made,” he said. “There’s not enough venues for the public to be involved in the shaping of the discussion.”
Carrie Wallinger, a social justice and human rights graduate student, said she was glad Thaler spoke at the West campus because everything she knows about the conflict has been from the standpoint of Save Darfur, a U.S. advocacy group that calls for international intervention in the conflict.
“I’m aware that there are always many points of view in every situation, but I don’t think that I’d heard those points of view (that the conflict in Darfur might not be a genocide,) so I hadn’t given a lot of reflection to it,” she said. “To hear some different perspectives is really helpful to better understand what’s really going on.”
Reach the reporter at salvador.rodriguez@asu.edu.
