Letter to the New York Review of Books (unpublished)

The following letter was submitted to the New York Review of Books on June 23, 2009 (Kristof's article appeared online before the date of the issue) but was never published. The editors did publish a letter from Mamdani. (SF)

To the Editors:

Nicholas Kristof’s July 2 article, “What to Do about Darfur,” reviews several recent books on the Darfur conflict, focusing mostly on the scholar Mahmood Mamdani’s “Saviors and Survivors.” Yet in tearing into Mamdani’s “error-filled polemic,” Kristof does more to discredit his own work than to mount a meaningful critique Mamdani’s.

Perhaps most tellingly, Kristof dismisses Mamdani’s contention that the U.S. has imperial ambitions in Africa. In his travels through the Congo, Kristof avers he has never found “a US colonist of any kind” – but fails to see that the “diamond-buyers” from foreign mining companies that he encountered are a rather obvious manifestation of Western control, established at gunpoint, of the Congo’s vast mineral wealth. Again missing the point, he proposes a Western military intervention in Darfur from the French base in Chad, and U.S. base in Djibouti – yet fails to realize that the very fact that these bases exist is a clear manifestation of the Western meddling in African affairs that Mamdani rightfully despises.

At his most critical, Kristof concedes that Washington has “studiously pretended not to notice failed states,” citing Somalia as an example – a country, he notes, that “has staggered on in chaos.” Unfortunately, the U.S. did notice – and backed a brutal Ethiopian invasion and occupation, which interrupted what UN officials called a “golden era” in the country, relative to its violent recent history. Such is the actual nature of U.S. foreign policy, Kristof’s illusions notwithstanding.

Sincerely,

Steven Fake and Kevin Funk, coauthors of Scramble for Africa: Darfur – Intervention and the USA