Chris Blattman

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Where can you find the best debates on Sudan?

Alex de Waal hosts the Making Sense of Darfur blog at SSRC. Alex is a long time scholar of Sudan and wrote an excellent op-ed in The Guardian this weekend criticizing the indictment of President Bashir. (Thanks to Elliot Green for the reminder.)

Contributors to the blog include former diplomats to the region, peacekeepers, and prominent scholars and journalists. Included are several Sudanese. From academic Abdalbasit Saeed:

The Sudanese opposition has been patient for the two decades al-Bashir has been in power. The opposition would want to see al-Bashir’s defeat through the ballot-box, if fair elections are administered.

Why, then, would Ocampo want to disallow a long awaited moment of history for a peaceful transfer of power in 2009? Why would Ocampo want to commit a political blunder, by making a bid for indictment of al-Bashir?

If Ocampo does that, then he would pre-empt what the Southerners do see as a victory to both ‘have’ the CPA and ‘eat it too’ in a successful terminal referendum that would lead to independence of Southern Sudan.

This post by Ethiopian writer Beshir Gedda is also quite good.

But the best quote I’ve heard so far comes not from de Waal’s blog, but a Reuters interview:

“This is a classic case of confrontation between justice and stability – both of them are right,” said Mariam al-Mahdi, an opposition politician and daughter of the last democratically elected Sudanese leader.

“So we are very much trying to reconcile a way to avoid in our country this direct clash between two rights . . . justice and peace,”

When a writer comes down hard on one side or another, it is simply a question of their ideology or their interests.

2 Responses

  1. Chris,

    have you heard Goldstone speak to these objections? He talks about how this same debate played out w.r.t. Liberia and Serbia before that. His claim is that each time the indictments helped long term stability rather than hurt it.

    Thanks for the links though, I’ve been wanting to read some intelligent commentary on this subject.

  2. Mr. Blattman,
    There’s one thing that puzzles me most in the debate on Sudan. As I’ve argued on Monday (http://codrinarsene.com/2008/07/the-african-union-wants-the-warrant-on-al-bashir-dropped/), so far, absolutely no politician, government official or diplomat has defended Mr. al-Bashir’s innocence. Everyone talks about peace, stability, UN peacekeepers, but no one takes a stand to argue that the accusations are false. Is this a way to operate on double standards? Something like the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership? Why awarding someone for doing exactly what he was supposed to do? Same here: why talking about things that are only corollaries to the main point: is he guilty or not?

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