your comment is appreciated. The point of my response was chiefly to point out that behind every label is a more complicated reality. The label “child soldier” invokes an image of a the kids sent by Charles Taylor into the front line, the brutalized and often deliberately crazed killers. Many of the NRA young fighters were very different: volunteers, selfless, idealistic. They also suffered trauma but their stories are more complicated.

It is not for me to explain what Mahmood had in mind when he used the phrase.

It is also true that behind any label such as the volunteers and activists of the Save Darfur movement lies a complicated reality, a mix of motives and aims, a mix of expertise and emotion.

Furthermore, the child soldiers of Uganda, like you said, are not representative of most child soldiers. So why did Mr. Mamdani not refer to them directly if he had them in mind when he made the comment?

Mahmood Mamdani, as a Ugandan, must know that the NRA which captured Kampala in 1986 was composed to a significant degree of child soldiers. The majority of these were teenagers who had joined the movement because there were no other options, and out of a precocious political maturity brought on by the experiences of Uganda in the 1970s and ’80s. While in the movement, the best of their commanders were mentors, protectors and teachers. Museveni himself ran long seminars on politics and sociology for his child soldiers. Some of them later went on to university education and rose to high positions in government, parliament and the army. Child soldiering in this sense was liberating. It is a far cry from the drugged up, brainwashed kids sent in to battle in Liberia, or the cannon fodder of the trenches in the Iran-Iraq war.

My experience with the young activists in America has been that they are extraordinarily hungry to learn, driven both by a passionate sense of ethics and also a reflectiveness and determination to explore how their personal commitment can make a difference in the modern world. Activism and reflection are not incompatible and this, I think, is one of the most positive and defining features of the school and college based campaigns. (There are other campaigns that have been far less reflective, and other components of the Save Darfur campaign that are far less thoughtful). And these young people are learning a vast amount through their activism. “Child soldiers” in the sense of young people committed to liberation through action, may not be so far off the mark.

As a high school teacher who advises a STAND chapter in Massachusetts, I’ve been rather confounded by the criticisms of Mr. Mamdani against the movement.

Given that he seems to have no idea what student activists do, I thought I’d list some of our activities.
–My students do things like raise money for the civilian protection program run by the Genocide-Intervention Network.
–We have supported aid agencies, such as Doctors Without Borders, with fund-raising concerts.
–Our students decorated a tent with messages of hope, which was eventually shipped to Chad by the Darfur Peace and Development Organization to serve as a school room in a refugee camp.
–We met with representatives from Senator Kennedy’s office in Washington, D.C. to express our concern for the people of Darfur and all of Sudan.
–We have emailed or written our local Congressman William Delahunt to support a variety of initiatives related to Darfur, ranging from appropriation bills for US aid to the region to the Sudan Divestment Act.

On the education side, I’ve piled kids into my car and driven a couple of hours to listen to Eric Reeves or Samantha Powers or Karen Hirschfield or Alex DeWaal or Gloria White Hammond or John Prendergast. Afterwards we discuss what we hear, see what we can do to learn more, share books to read like Samantha’s or Alex’s or Eric’s or John’s, then plan fund raisers to figure out what little we can do to help.

Some of the criticisms leveled by Mr. Mamdani, such as the oversimplification of the conflict, may be true at the most basic entry point to understanding for students. The vast majority of students may not get past that entry point, but it certainly isn’t the intent of myself or others to lead some naive army off on a bellicose mission.

STAND, which started in 2004 as Students Taking Action Now: Darfur, amended its mission by 2006, emphasized in its name change to STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition. Preempting today’s critics who wonder why no one pays attention to other pressing conflicts, STAND uses a conflict barometer with such indicators as percentage of civilian death to pick out focal points for the upcoming semester projects. Currently, campaigns for Darfur, Burma and Congo are ongoing, with individual chapters (now number over 800 in high school and college) selecting their schools area of focus.

The kids involved are typically the brightest, most idealistic youth around. My job, and the job of other adults involved in STAND as faculty advisors, is to focus their remarkable drive to best serve the anti-genocide cause. Not one of these kids is a child soldier.

Concerning the Save Darfur claims of similarities between South Sudan and Darfur situations. In the sense of center/periphery problems in Sudan they are right. There are several regions in Sudan apart from the South and Darfur with political marginalized periphery problems in Sudan: the Red Sea Hills and the Northern Region (in connection with the construction of the new hydro-electrical Dam) for example. So, there is nothing wrong in comparing the South with Darfur from this perspective. But of course there are differences between the different regions. This is obvious.

I agree with most of this rebuttal, and most of the last one, and understand the surface-logic behind equating the mindset of the Save Darfur Coalition (SDC) to the mindset of the War on Terror, but I don’t agree with the analogy between young SDC volunteers and child soldiers. Comments like these, in my opinion, seem to serve the purpose of provocation more than providing to the substantive debate. Using this analogy sensationalizes the SDC in the same way the SDC sensationalized the conflict in Darfur.

Despite this stylistic quibble, I do have a few suggestions that may act as a supplement to your rebuttal and may make the case that the activist campaigns are more of an “unofficial agency of the US” than you suggest.

1) You write: “The second tendency that Save Darfur incorporated as its mobilization grew comprised activists whose formative experience lay in solidarity work with the insurgency in the South of Sudan” – This is an important part of the evolution of the activist movement for Darfur that I believe could have received more attention in your book. For example, the involvement of the Sudan Campaign Coalition (SCC) and its tendency to mix issues of Southern Sudan with issues of Darfur (see transcripts from Joe Madison’s national radio show and the protests organized by the SCC leaders in the summer of 2004) is part of the reason why the war was mischaracterized. Furthermore, the influence of the SCC in Congress during the summer of 2004 is also of importance because the coalition likely provided pressure on Colin Powell to declare (even after he said it had not occurred) that genocide had occurred in Darfur. The SCC also played a role in drafting the House and Senate resolutions on genocide. In fact, Donald Payne and Sam Brownback, two key board members of the Sudan Campaign, were the respective drafters of each bill. Lastly, the SCC also helped give the SDC inroads into shaping US government legislation, which leads me to my next point.

2) It can be shown that the SDC not only mischaracterized the Darfur conflict, like you argue, but it also shaped legislation in Congress in ways that have been detrimental to the victims of the Darfur conflict. In 2006, when, according to IRS statements, the SDC hired lobbyists in Washington to help shape the debate (and legislation), bills, which supported the aims of the activist campaigns, were drafted and passed. For my dissertation, I’ve been looking at how the SDC and other activist groups were able to shape legislation in Congress. For example, an analysis of US resolutions passed between 2006 and 2009 highlight the influence of the activist movement and demonstrate how disconnected the US/activists were from the situation on the ground. In these US bills, three patterns are obvious:

a) There is almost no mention of the rebel groups in Darfur or any prescribed effort to curb their violent behaviour, but there are continuous condemnations and sanctions against the Government of Sudan; this mirrors the literature, email newsletters and the advertisements of the activist campaigns.
b) There is an overemphasis on reducing the rate of violent deaths, even after the violent death-rate had dropped dramatically – as you rightly pointed out (although I would argue that the death rate dropped dramatically after the April 8th ceasefire of 2004 and not as late as September).
c) There is very little mention of the peace process in Abuja in the US resolutions or in the discussions at congressional hearings. This also mirrors the literature, email newsletters and the advertisements of the activist campaigns. Perhaps this is why Salim Ahmed Salim, the AU mediator at the Abuja Talks, wrote a letter to the UN on January 13, 2006 stating that “the funding situation of the Talks remains extremely precarious,” despite the fact that the US had contributed almost $2 billion by that point to stopping the violence in Darfur.

3) Lastly, the cooperation between the different activist campaigns, while shaping legislation on Darfur, was remarkably effective and evidence of this cooperation can be used to demonstrate that the activist movement is more unitary than most people think, which partly addresses a criticism put forward by Eric Reeves after your first post. Furthermore, an assessment of publically available IRS reports and activist websites also demonstrate how much the different activist groups have in common. Board members are shared. Contributions are given from one campaign to the next and the statements of intent are remarkably similar.

Finally, in case there is anyone out there interested in yet another review of Mr. Mamdanis book, feel free to read my review in the Oxonian. It was just published yesterday and addresses some of the points made here in more detail. http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/