The History Librarian

The Media Line reports that the International Criminal Court (ICC) “announced on May 2 it found reasonable grounds to believe that former Sudanese minister of Darfur Affairs Ahmad Haroun, and leader of the Janjaweed Arab fighters, ‘Ali Qusheib, were responsible for a series of crimes against humanity in Darfur, western Sudan.” You can look at the ICC documentation regarding Darfur online: http://www.icc-cpi.int/cases/Darfur.html; the warrants for Haroun and Qusheib, as well as the decision to issue the warrants, are available as part of the documentation for Case ICC-01/04-01/06.

There’s been a conference on campus this weekend, Witnessing Genocide: Representation and Responsibility, and I went to a few of the events (unfortunately work got in the away of attending the whole thing). It was enlightening and worthwhile, so I thought I’d share a few reflections here. The three keynotes that I saw were by Samantha Power, Barbie Zelizer, and Nicholas Kristof (Jerry Fowler was the fourth main speaker, and I was sorry that I missed it). To get the snark out of the way, Prof. Zelizer’s talk wasn’t so hot, in part (and this is petty, but it really bothered me) because she repeatedly misused “less” and “fewer”, but mainly because it was an academic talk that seemed more about how she could say things about photographs than it was about conveying to her audience something important regarding images of genocide. I’m hardly a shrinking flower when it comes to academic-speak, but she talked for an hour about slippage and synecdoche without really going anywhere. I think she was getting at the way photojournalists have adopted visual tropes when dealing with genocide that date to the Holocaust, and that these tropes are limiting journalism’s ability to bear witness to genocide.

Samantha Power spoke on Saturday and I’m very sorry that I didn’t take notes, so I won’t be able to reproduce her main points. I will say, somewhat as an aside, that she was passionate, smart, goofy, and easily the best speaker I’ve seen. Her talk was “Can Genocide Be Stopped in an Age of Terror?” and I was very impressed by her candid discussion of the structural/institutional barriers that get in the way of acting on genocide – she has a lucid understanding of how politics works, in Washington and elsewhere, and made a number of pragmatic suggestions about how to work through those barriers to raise awareness of genocide and make something happen politically. In general, she wants there to be healthy and active political pressure groups about human rights and/or genocide awareness. (Nerdy aside: Dominick LaCapra was at the conference and he asked Ms. Power a question in such a way that I knew he had been reading Agamben, especially The Open: Man and Animal; I think W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction has also been on his bedside table).

Nicholas Kristof spoke tonight to a packed house (Power’s talk also required an overflow room). His presentation was very impassioned and definitely organized to move the audience to both a greater awareness of the tragedy going on in Darfur and, hopefully, to some kind of action. He told a number of stories about his experiences in Sudan, most augmented by pictures that were just heartbreaking. I really hope that he was successful, and there was definitely a feeling in the room, at the end, of some form of determination.

So what now? As a librarian, I kind of wish we’d been more involved in the whole symposium, even if only to put together a “further reading” list for the symposium website. I’m not sure what to recommend, other than to say that anyone who wants to know more about genocide in the world today should read any of Samantha Power’s numerous articles in magazines (here’s an online version of Dying in Darfur from The New Yorker), or look at her book A Problem from Hell. Also, Nick Kristof writes frequently about Darfur for The New York Times, so take a look at his op-ed home page (linked to above) and read what he has to say. He mentioned the website Save Darfur, so I would encourage all of you to take a look at the site and, at the very least, fill out the form to let our President know that you’d like something more done to help put an end to all of the killing in Darfur.

UPDATE (5/1): Telling Stories has a good overview of Kristof’s talk. There’s also a webcast from Berkeley called A Crisis in Human Rights: Genocide in Darfur and Beyond.