A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide (review)

Eric Reeves has been one of the most outspoken, influential, and consistent critics of the ruling regime in Sudan. A Long Day’s Dying, a compilation of previously written essays on Darfur, continues that tradition. In vivid and dramatic prose, Reeves advances the basic argument that the government of Sudan is responsible for genocide; that the international community has failed in its response; and that forceful intervention is needed. One can admire Reeves for the public attention he has brought to Darfur and for his unsparing criticisms. However, while he claims to balance “advocacy and analysis” (11), the former is much more pronounced than the latter, and the book is repetitive and at times awkwardly organized. A Long Day’s Dying is thus a moving testament to one man’s struggle to end terrible violence and a powerful condemnation of international failure to prevent genocide, but it is also a book that has analytic limits.

The book has four principal sections. In the introduction Reeves presents his main themes: that the “vast tyranny embodied in the ruling Khartoum junta” (1) has since 2003 waged a genocidal campaign against Darfur’s black African population, and that the international community has “failed... to confront the ultimate human crime” (18). The second section comprises thirteen separate dispatches, mostly organized chronologically and ranging from November 2003 through June 2005; with only one entry after July 2004, the focus is on the early stages of the conflict. Reeves’s perspectives are evident: a May 2004 essay uses the label “African Auschwitz” (81) to refer to camps in Darfur and speaks of a “new holocaust” (82) to which the world is “acquiescing” (81). Indeed, the argument that the Darfur violence is “genocide” is central to these essays. As Reeves asserts, “There simply can be no reasonable skepticism or agnosticism about the genocidal realities in Darfur” (111).

The book’s third section (entitled “Rwanda Redux”) consists of eleven dispatches, seven of which are from 2004. Reeves again condemns the “woefully inadequate leadership” (137), “betrayal” (196), and “moral cowardice” (216) of the major international actors. As noted in the sections’s title, he postulates an analogy between Rwanda and Darfur, but he also claims here and later that Darfur is “genocide by attrition” (175), which Rwanda was not. He further advocates for humanitarian intervention to stop the violence in Darfur. The final section consists of six dispatches, four from 2004 and two from 2006. Here the themes are repeated: despite “searing moral clarity” (253), the international community has failed morally and politically. Again, Reeves pushes for humanitarian intervention and, in places, regime change: “the international community must move to end [Khartoum’s] reign of terror”(275).

Even if one appreciates Reeves’s outrage and admires his sharp eye for contradiction, the book’s moral absolutism undermines the analysis. He offers his readers little insight into why mass violence is happening in Darfur and instead deploys moralistic language, characterizing the regime variously as “Islamic fascism” (19,32), a “security cabal” (7), and “shamelessly persistent evil” (276). Similarly, he is dismissive of international actors and actions, calling them “disingenuous” (77), “shameful” (89), and “docile and impotent” (182), and referring to their “failure of nerve and dishonesty” (86) and their “unctuous hand-wringing” (99), among other accusations. In this way, Reeves overlooks the complex legal, practical, and political problems that any international actor confronts when trying to craft a policy to stop mass atrocity.

The book also has significant omissions and areas that are insufficiently developed. The gaps stem in part from the book’s focus on the early stages of the conflict, when less international attention was given to Darfur than at later periods. In particular, Reeves spends little time on Colin Powell’s important “genocide” determination in late 2004 and on the United Nations Commission of Inquiry report on Darfur in 2005; both events pertain directly to the thrust...