Darfur Book Interview
By Mahmood Mamdani
Source: Guernica

In his latest book, Mamdani attacks the Save Darfur Coalition as ahistorical and dishonest, and argues that the conflict in Darfur is more about land, power, and the environment than it is directly about race.

"The Save Darfur movement claims to have learned from Rwanda," writes Mahmood Mamdani in his new book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the56. "But what is the lesson of Rwanda? For many of those mobilized to save Darfur, the lesson is to rescue before it is too late, to act before seeking to understand." His book is an argument "against those who substitute moral certainty for knowledge, and who feel virtuous even when acting on the basis of total ignorance." Americans think Darfur is a tragic genocide. Mamdani thinks the reality is more complex. His ideas should be taken seriously for a number of reasons, especially because he provides a road map to a workable peace settlement.

Mamdani rewrites the crisis by putting it in context. He notes that violent deaths in Iraq during the U.S. invasion and occupation far surpass death rates in Darfur. If death rates are higher, why all the attention on Darfur, rather than Iraq? he wondered. Is the killing racially motivated? To answer that, he examines the history of Sudan.

The people of Darfur have long treated "racial" identities as fairly fluid, he writes, welcoming intermarriage as a means of transferring between groups. Why does this matter? The designation of "Arab" versus "African" upon which the genocide claim is based was given a particularly virulent, and unprecedented, authority under a land system set up by the colonial British—but never before that. After the British, land previously shared was now assigned a more rigid "native" group who oversaw its use, and non-native groups who had to pay tribute. This was one potential source of conflict; it will have to be dealt with to forge a lasting peace in Darfur, Mamdani insists.

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The Iranian People Speak

By Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty

The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin — greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday’s election.

While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad’s principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran’s provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.

Independent and uncensored nationwide surveys of Iran are rare. Typically, preelection polls there are either conducted or monitored by the government and are notoriously untrustworthy. By contrast, the poll undertaken by our nonprofit organizations from May 11 to May 20 was the third in a series over the past two years. Conducted by telephone from a neighboring country, field work was carried out in Farsi by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award. Our polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The breadth of Ahmadinejad’s support was apparent in our preelection survey. During the campaign, for instance, Mousavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over Mousavi.

Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.

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