Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror

By Mahmood Mamdani

(Pantheon, 398 pp., $26.95)

The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All

By Gareth Evans

(Brookings, 349 pp., $24.95)

I.

In the summer of 2007 , Mahmood Mamdani found himself at a meeting of activists and politicians, listening to sentiments that had by then become quite common among a certain class of politically active Americans. The speakers were calling on the United Nations to send peacekeepers to Darfur. Fed up with the inability of African Union troops--who were already on the ground in western Sudan--to stop the ongoing bloodshed, they insisted that U.N. forces could do better. The United Nations, explained one politician, echoing a view you could have heard on any number of college campuses at the time, would grant "mercy" to the people of Darfur.

'Take off your veil!" the Somali soldier shouted at the woman in the mostly empty street. Steadying his assault rifle with his right hand, he ripped away the woman's black niqab with his left. "Why are you coming so close to us? You have explosives?" He leveled the muzzle of his gun against the bridge of her nose. Her mouth, suddenly embarrassed and exposed, broke into a jester's forced grin.