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DESCRIPTION:Priority Africa Network (PAN)\nEVENT\nContact: 
 PriorityAfrica@yahoo.com\nThis and all Africa events in the Bay available 
 at: http://www.priorityafrica.org/\n\nFriday, April 10\n7:30 pm\n\nMahmood 
 Mamdani, The Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and of Anthropology at 
 Columbia University \n\nReads from his newly released book:  Saviors & 
 Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror\n\nat the\n\nBerkeley 
 Arts & Letters at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave in Berkeley 
 \nDirections: http://www.berkeleycityclub.com/\n\nSaviors and Survivors 
 invites the reader to rethink the lesson of Rwanda in light of Darfur. It 
 is a warning to those who would act first and understand later.\n\nPart One 
 discusses the nature of Save Darfur advocacy. Like the War on Terror from 
 which it has borrowed its assumptions and coordinates, Save Darfur has 
 turned into a lavishly funded and massive ad campaign spreading and 
 sustaining a lethal illusion, consistently exaggerating the level of 
 mortality and racializing the reasons for it. Why has Save Darfur not lost 
 credibility even though its information is increasingly divorced from 
 reality? A part of the answer lies in its ability to turn activism around 
 Darfur into a domestic "feel good" issue while obscuring the context of the 
 violence in Darfur.\n\nPart Two of the book explains this context, starting 
 with correcting the widely-held assumption that Arab tribes of Sudan are 
 settlers from the Middle East, when they actually comprise local tribes 
 that adopted the Arabic language and identity in the course of forming 
 local states. The book locates the roots of the current conflict in 
 colonialism, ecology, and the Cold War: colonialism introduced into Darfur 
 a system of local discrimination based on tribal identity; an ongoing 
 ecological crisis has led to the expansion of the Sahara by a hundred 
 kilometers in four decades, igniting a conflict between nomadic and peasant 
 tribes over fertile land in the mountains of the south; and, finally, the 
 Cold War confrontation in Chad between Gaddafi (with Soviet support) and 
 the Reagan administration (allied with France and Israel) spilled over into 
 Darfur and militarized the conflict.\n\nPart Three explains the Darfur 
 crisis. Rather than a willful attempt by the government to eliminate 
 particular groups--genocide--the present phase of the conflict stems from a 
 land-based ecological confrontation at the local level and a struggle for 
 power at the central level, exacerbated by the ongoing War on Terror. The 
 urgent need today is not to punish those responsible for the mass killings 
 of 2003-04 but to arrive at a political solution that will reform the land 
 system in Darfur and political power in 
 Sudan.\n\n---------------------\nPriority Africa Network\nMailing Address: 
 P O Box 2528\nBerkeley CA 94702\nOffice: AFSC Office/PAN\n1730 Franklin St. 
 Ste 212\nOakland CA 94612\nTel: (510) 238 8080 ext. 309\nFax: (510) 238 
 8088\nPriorityAfrica@yahoo.com\nhttp://www.priorityafrica.org/\n\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/03/17/18578555.php
SUMMARY:Saviors & Survivors: Darfur, Politics & the War on Terror
LOCATION:Berkeley Arts & Letters at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave in 
 Berkeley \nDirections: http://www.berkeleycityclub.com/
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/03/17/18578555.php
DTSTART:20090411T023000Z
DTEND:20090411T040000Z
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