60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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286 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness lects; who don’t produce art, but handicrafts; who don’t have culture, but folklore. Pope and king are implicated. Yet there were and are priests who insist that Christianity meant accompanying the indigenous peoples in their struggles to conserve their spiritual and cultural identity, and to regain their land and resources stolen by the new landed elite and by huge corporations. This is a struggle that continues, since governments and corporations seem bent on fi nishing the job of genocide begun by the fi rst European conquerors 500 years ago. 6 Gordon Brown, during a visit in 2005 to Tanzania, said, ‘The days of Britain having to apologize for the British Empire are over. We should celebrate.’ 7 Like Blair, like Clinton, like Bush, Brown believes in the liberal truth that the battle for history has been won; that the millions who died in British-imposed famines in British imperial India will be forgotten – just as the millions who have died in the American empire will be forgotten. And like Blair, his successor is confi dent that professional journalism is on his side. This may very well be the most powerful and dangerous ideology we have ever known because it is open-ended. This is liberalism – liberal imperialist genocide. Journalism and the depoliticisation of genocide and violence Mamdami poses a critical question: What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics – a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? Why should an intervention in Darfur not turn out to be a trigger that escalates rather than reduces the level of violence as intervention in Iraq has done? Why might it not create the actual possibility of genocide, not just rhetorically but in reality? Morally, there is no doubt about the horrifi c nature of the violence against civilians in Darfur. The ambiguity lies in the politics of the violence, whose sources include both a stateconnected counter-insurgency and an organised insurgency, very much like the violence in Iraq. 8 6 Benadava, Daniel E. (2005), ‘Mas de 500 anos de “Genocidio Indigena” en America’, ADITAL, 13/07/07 7 Daily Mail, 15 January 2005..,. 8 Mamdani, Mahmood (2007), ‘The Politics of Naming; Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency’, London Review of Books, no. 8, March.
is there a south perspective on genocide? 287 That is a line of thinking you will not see in the mainstream press. It is too subversive – what is worse, the media is heavily responsible for the confused thinking. You can’t really accuse journalists of being misinformed; the problem my have more to do with corporate power and the old saying that it is diffi cult to understand a problem if your salary depends on not understanding it. Mamdami goes on to remind us of some important facts about journalism: Journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of perpetrators face a group of victims, but where neither history nor motivation is thinkable because both are outside history and context. Even when newspapers highlight violence as a social phenomenon, they fail to understand the forces that shape the agency of the perpetrator. Instead, they look for a clear and uncomplicated moral that describes the victim as untainted and the perpetrator as simply evil. Where yesterday’s victims are today’s perpetrators, where victims have turned perpetrators, this attempt to fi nd an African replay of the Holocaust not only does not work but also has perverse consequences. Whatever its analytical weaknesses, the depolitisation of violence has given its proponents distinct political advantages. 9 One of the oldest clichés of war is that truth is the fi rst casualty. No it’s not, says Pilger: journalism is the fi rst casualty. He argues that in Iraq the Pentagon invented the embedded journalist because it believed that critical reporting had lost Vietnam. This is what Saul Landau calls ‘the mind-altering glue inherent in imperial memory’. We choose not to speak the unspeakable. It never happened! Harold Pinter’s subversive truth, I believe, was that he made the connection between imperialism and fascism, and described a battle for history that is almost never reported. This is the great silence of the media age. We see the same phenomenon with the scale of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. And the enduring tragedy of Palestine is due in great part to the silence and compliance of the so-called liberal left. Hamas is described repeatedly as being intent on the destruction of Israel. The New York Times, the Associated Press, and the Boston Globe all use this line as a standard disclaimer, and it is false. That Hamas has called for a 10-year ceasefi re is almost never reported. Even more important, that Hamas has undergone a historic ideological shift in the last few 9 Ibid.
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no. 50 | december 2008 Revisiting t
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Revisiting the heart of darkness -
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Acknowledgements The larger part of
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Dennis Brutus, born 1924 in then Rh
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60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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