Good vs. good

THE CRISIS IN Darfur has exposed many fault lines. One of the cruelest is the emerging divide between the human rights activists grouped around the Save Darfur coalition in the U.S. (and S.O.S. Darfur in Western Europe) and the humanitarian workers in relief groups working on the ground in Darfur and across the border in Chad with refugees and internally displaced people.

Surprised to hear that they're in conflict? Most members of the general public understandably imagine that human rights advocacy groups and humanitarian relief organizations are natural allies -- both on the side of the angels, fighting against brutality and repression on behalf of refugees and the oppressed and the threatened. This belief is surely reinforced by the fact that we routinely describe interventions that are designed to protect people from mass murder or ethnic cleansing as "humanitarian" interventions when, in fact, that may not be the case at all. In the case of Darfur, where at least 200,000 people have been killed and millions have fled their homes in recent years, the opposite may be true.

News stories have reported that a number of relief groups on the ground in Darfur (most notably, Doctors Without Borders, which has one of the largest and most effective programs in the region) had been privately complaining about Save Darfur's activities in the U.S. -- complaints that many believe led to a shake-up in the organization and its board's decision to remove the group's director, David Rubenstein.

What prompted the complaints were a series of ads run by Save Darfur calling for more aggressive action in Darfur, including the imposition of a "no-fly" zone over western Sudan to prevent attacks by the Sudanese air force on the Darfurians. For humanitarian relief groups, the effect of this, however well intended, would be to put the on-the-ground aid effort at risk because the relief organizations themselves fly constantly over Darfur in aircraft virtually indistinguishable from those fielded by the government of Sudan.

Even more important, relief organizations including Doctors Without Borders and Action Against Hunger argue that this no-fly zone would have to be established without Khartoum's consent and, as an Action Against Hunger statement put it, would "have disastrous consequences that risk triggering a further escalation of violence while jeopardizing the provision of vital humanitarian assistance to millions of people."