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Discussion Board in English Does “Save Darfur” Feed Darfur?
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Does “Save Darfur” Feed Darfur?

07-28-2009, 10:45 AM
فدوى الشريف
<aفدوى الشريف
Registered: 09-14-2006
Total Posts: 5390





Does “Save Darfur” Feed Darfur?

    The Save Darfur Coalition is five years old this month. A couple of weeks ago it put out this announcement on Facebook:

    “June is Save Darfur’s Anniversary Month. Five years ago, this organization was created help raise the awareness of the crisis in Darfur. Together with activists across the U.S. and around the world, we’ve saved lives by demanding funding and access for peacekeepers and humanitarian aid in Darfur. But there is still much more to be done to ensure peace in Darfur and all of Sudan.”

    “In honor of our Anniversary, we’ve set a goal to raise $5,000 by July 15. You can help, too! Consider making a contribution today. And if you have a Birthday in June or July, why not donate it to Save Darfur? Create a Birthday Wish and ask all of your friends to donate to Save Darfur. Facebook Causes makes it easy.”

    “You’ll help us continue to pressure President Obama to lead for peace in Sudan. And, all of your friends will see that you care about the situation in Darfur. Create your Birthday Wish now and help us end the Crisis in Darfur.”

    Some of Save Darfur’s claims are readily verifiable, such as “all of your friends will see that you care about the situation in Darfur.” Others are less so. Let’s examine the claim, “we’ve saved lives by demanding funding and access for humanitarian aid in Darfur.” (I will leave the peacekeepers and the issue of violent deaths for another occasion). Can the Save Darfur claim the credit for feeding Darfur? On balance, I argue, it cannot. There are three separate questions:

    1. Does Save Darfur fund humanitarian activities in Darfur?
    2. Did Save Darfur advocacy prompt the humanitarian operation in Darfur?
    3. Did Save Darfur advocacy sustain the humanitarian operation in Darfur?

    In short, the answer to (1) and (2) is no, and for (3) there are arguments on both sides.

    1. Does Save Darfur fund humanitarian activities in Darfur?

    The Save Darfur Coalition’s revenue for 2007 was reportedly $48,638,145. As much as three quarters may have been one single anonymous donation, paid on a monthly basis, a large, unreported sum of which was earmarked exclusively for advertising. The financial report indicates that $38,360,926 was spent on “Advertising and Marketing.” The prominent role of advertising is testified by the fact that the interim Executive Director was Bill Wasserman of M&R Strategic Services. But the balance of $10 million did not go to material aid for Darfur (see below).

    In 2008 the revenue was about $14.4 million, including carryover from 2007, but the final figure and the breakdown of expenditures has yet to be made public. For 2009 the estimated budget is closed to $6 million. Both the 2008 and 2009 budget figures are well down on the original estimates of the SDC leadership.

    Of this, only money that SDC raises that goes to humanitarian aid comes from a small programme called “Dollars for Darfur,” which gets kids involved in fundraising and advocacy. Half of the money that the children raise goes to humanitarian organizations and the other half goes to SDC. In 2008, they raised $150,000, so $75,000 went to a humanitarian aid organization, and this year they so far they have raised a little over $100,000, so about $50,000 will be going to aid. That is all. None of the remainder of the funds that SDC raises, from grants or individual donations, goes to humanitarian aid. This is the last year that SDC will be sponsoring the program (STAND is taking over) so that means that unless its policies change, it will not be giving any money to aid organizations.

    There is an argument that an organization that has taken such a strong public stand against the Sudan Government should not endanger any partners inside Sudan by being publicly associated with them. If SDC donated funds to an NGO doing humanitarian work, it might expose that agency to retribution from the Sudan government. I understand that there have been discussions on this inside SDC. It’s a fair point. If indeed this was considered, there are ways around this. GI-Net has combined its advocacy with support to operational activities in Sudan including protection activities. There are humanitarian needs in Chad and cross-border operations which do not need the cooperation of Khartoum. In comparable situations such as Ethiopia in the 1980s, NGOs have set up shell consortia to shield individual members involved in cross-border relief organizations. Perhaps SDC might consider these options.

    The Save Darfur Coalition is an advocacy organization and it can argue, with justification, that its purpose is not to fundraise for humanitarian organizations. If SDC rushed to the field and began assistance programmes it would probably fail due to inexperience and it would be rightly criticized for going outside its mandate and expertise. In the past I have criticized operational NGOs for neglecting advocacy and rights-based analysis, and have worked to redress this imbalance. Moreover, the $48 million SDC spent in 2007 is small in relation to the hundreds of millions of dollars that donor governments have pledged to aid Darfur, and if SDC unlocked those funds, then its dollars were well-spent. I have many criticisms of SDC: the fact that it does not provide its funds as material assistance to Darfur is not among them.

    Still: SDC should perhaps be more careful with some of its messaging. I just received the following:

    “Dear Alex, What if life in a displacement camp was all you’ve ever known? Five years of dependence on refugee rations and an inadequate water supply. Five years living with the threat of disease. …”

    It then appealed for my contribution to SDC to help end this. I’m not convinced.

    2. Did Save Darfur advocacy prompt the humanitarian operation in Darfur?

    Nick Kristof is one of many who argues, in line with the SDC announcement, that SDC can be credited with saving lives. In an article, “What to Do About Darfur,” in the New York Review of Books, he is uncharacteristically defensive about the Save Darfur campaign:

    “the movement is far from a complete failure. Those protests and ‘Save Darfur’ lawn signs prompted a vast relief effort that is keeping millions alive in Sudan, Chad, and the Central African Republic. …. For all the failures, hundreds of thousands of people are alive today because of those students, those churches and synagogues, and that’s not a shabby legacy.”

    The key word is “prompted.” Did the campaigners actually initiate the operation or enable it to succeed in those critical months of late 2003 and early 2004?

    The facts are that the humanitarian effort began with the efforts of civil servants within USAID, notably Andrew Natsios, Roger Winter and Kate Almquist, in August 2003. For about six months they were consistently blocked by the Sudan Government and only succeeded in getting a major relief operation underway during March 2004. It then expanded rapidly. By June 2004 it had reached the maximum humanitarian access in terms of geographical accessibility for relief (insecurity subsequently restricted the areas of operation).

    All the data show that the number of killings dropped precipitously in April 2004 and fell again in January 2005. The death rate from hunger and disease fell in September-October 2004. This famine-related mortality curve is our concern here. It shows the characteristic peak-and-decline of humanitarian crises: it would have come down anyway but its fall was much accelerated by the relief efforts set in motion six months earlier. While killing can be stopped overnight, it takes time for a relief operation to have its impact, especially in a place as hard to reach as Darfur. It’s clear that the humanitarian success was either achieved or well underway before Save Darfur became active.

    The Americans who should be given credit for saving hundreds of thousands of lives in Darfur they should be the three individuals named and the hundreds of humanitarian workers who toiled away in support of one of the most difficult, but nonetheless successful, live-saving enterprises of recent times.

    3. Did Save Darfur advocacy sustain the humanitarian operation in Darfur?

    The main thrust of SDC campaigning has not been on humanitarian needs, but there is no doubt that Save Darfur advocacy helped sustain funding for international humanitarian operations in Darfur from mid-2004 onwards. A Word Food Program representative in Washington DC said that whenever they needed U.S. support for Darfur it was not difficult: all they had to do was to go to Congress and the phone calls would be made and the Administration would deliver. Getting resources for other relief efforts was far harder, he said.

    The principal U.S. contribution to the Darfur aid effort is food and funds to transport it. This has meant that the huge and costly international food aid effort has rarely run short of resources. It has also made it easier for international NGOs which provide health, water, sanitation and community development to obtain the funds they need. There is no doubt that this operation has been important in sustaining lives in Darfur, and insofar as its funding has been assisted by SDC publicity and lobbying, SDC can claim part of the credit.

    There is a downside to the ready availability of funds: it has meant that humanitarians have been slow to address structural aspects of the crisis. In other complex emergencies, thinking about how to operate more effectively with smaller resource envelopes has led to longer-term thinking and more creative approaches. But this is an oblique criticism, better posed as a challenge: when the situation changes and the task becomes rehabilitation, it’s important that the Darfur campaign doesn’t lose interest. It would be ironic if funds were available for the humanitarian phase but not for reconstruction afterwards.

    The major downside is that international advocacy around the ICC was the reason why the Sudan Government expelled international NGOs in March. If advocacy organizations want to claim the credit for prompting a donor to fund an operation, or a host government to permit one, they should also consider taking a measure of responsibility when their actions prompt a government to close one down.

    In March, Khartoum did not expel the UN agencies. WFP continued its operations and carried on using local committees as its principal intermediaries for food distribution, which is one reason why there has not been a significant food crisis subsequently. And it is rare for the running down of humanitarian assistance, on its own, to create a population-wide humanitarian crisis—it usually takes something like a natural disaster, military assault or a forced displacement to generate such a crisis. Ironically, the modest nature of the crisis of the last few months suggests that advocacy for humanitarian funding may have been less essential than many had believed (and by the same token, less negative side effects from humanitarian expulsions). Perhaps there were options for lessening relief-based advocacy in favor of pressure for other actions.

    The tension between advocating for coercive actions against the Sudan Government and maintaining humanitarian programmes—something highlighted when the operational U.S. NGOs objected to the Save Darfur advertising campaign at the end of 2007—generates genuine dilemmas. If the U.S. government were to announce the imposition of a no-fly zone over Darfur, the risks to humanitarian activities would be far greater. Should this deter advocates? Not necessarily: there are times when relief operations can help sustain a crisis and impede its resolution. But at least it should make them pause for thought. Perhaps, when an organization like SDC campaigns for actions which may have negative humanitarian repercussions, it should also consider humanitarian options, including putting aside some of its resources to help fill any humanitarian gaps its actions may prompt.

    Should “Save Darfur” Feed Darfur?

    The final question is not, does SDC feed Darfur? (it doesn’t) but whether it should consider humanitarian operations, directly or indirectly, as part of its mandate. There are real dilemmas here which cannot be easily resolved. To some extent, they are the mirror image of the dilemmas that preoccupied the humanitarian agencies in the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide of 1994. Now, as then, there is not a simple answer. We need both advocacy and humanitarian assistance.

    The focus of the question then shifts to what the specific situation demands. Some complex emergencies demand that non-political humanitarian assistance be the priority, while others demand that political action be the urgent task. Most require a mixture of the two. Did SDC get its analysis right? What sort of complex emergency is Darfur now? And what sort of political action is required now? In the most recent message, I’m encouraged by the line: “another under-reported tragedy in the wake of genocide.” Readers of this blog will not be surprised to know that I think any attempt to claim “ongoing genocide” is far off the reality. I’m watching to see when SDC abandons its tag line “to end the ongoing genocide in Darfur.”

    So, there is no compelling reason to criticize SDC for not feeding Darfur. But I do think that SDC’s messages should be clearer that funds donated are not in fact going directly to improve the humanitarian situation in Darfur. And I also have some sharp differences with SDC’s analysis of what is needed politically. Watch this space.
                  

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