Not on Our Watch

by Don Cheadle

  My education was about to begin.

  The only place to which I could get a visa on short notice was Mali, a country well to the west of Ethiopia but suffering a major food crisis as part of the Sahelian drought. I knew no one in Mali, with the exception of Mark Heim, a Peace Corps volunteer with whom I had played soccer during one year of high school (before I dropped out of that school ... starting to see the pattern?). I am not sure what the hell I was thinking I would or could accomplish, or even how I thought I would learn what I would need to do to make a difference.

  But fate, or God, intervened. On the plane ride over, a Malian guy appropriately named Mohammed came up to me and told me he remembered me from playing basketball at the Georgetown University gym during my freshman year. I guess since I had long hair then too, and I played very flamboyantly. He understood immediately that I was just a 21-year-old kid who wanted to learn and to help, and he took it upon himself to make sure my introduction to Africa 101 was the right one.

  He worked for the Agricultural Department of Mali, so he showed me how Malians themselves were trying to deal with their own problems. Nonetheless, tariffs and subsidies in Europe and the US made it impossible for them to compete as farmers. Right away, I started to see the unfairness of the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world. I moved into one of his houses, as he had three little huts in which his three wives lived. He moved one of them into another house, and the chickens and I took over the third hut. Eventually I met an American guy, Jeff Gray, a fellow hoopster who worked for an American organisation called Africare, and he let me accompany him as his assistant as long as I would talk with him about basketball and Philadelphia, and we headed into the Sahara Desert to initiate water projects for the people all the way up toward Timbuktu, a place I thought existed only in fairy tales.

  Coming back to the US after that trip was difficult. I couldn’t think about anything else but Africa. I would tell my stories of adventures in Africa to my Little Brothers from the programme and they would tell me their stories of growing up in Philly and DC. The core inequity, discrimination, and maldevelopment were shared, but Africa’s place at the very bottom of the global priority totem pole drove me to want to return, to be somehow part of changing that deadly cocktail of neglect and exploitation.

  I went back the next year to Zanzibar to take a volunteer job on a youth employment project. Zanzibar was paradise, but I wanted to go somewhere in which my initial interests in confronting war and famine were at play. So I next went to Somalia, and that is where the worm really turned for me. That is where I saw the Cold War being played out, where the US was cynically using Africa in its geostrategic chessboard, with the Somali people acting as the pawns. My government was pouring money into a military dictator who was brutally repressing and killing his own people. I spent time volunteering in an orphanage and watched babies die needlessly of malnourishment and disease.

  My reaction was one of pure anger. Anger at the injustice that was actually killing people. Anger at my own government for not only not intervening to stop it, but instead actually pouring gasoline on the fire by providing arms and money to the perpetrators. I had never seen anything as nakedly unfair as that, and with such devastating consequences. I decided then that I would dedicate the rest of my life to attacking that injustice in whatever way I could. The lightbulb finally went on. I could sit there and try to help save the starving babies, or I could go back to the US and work on policies toward Africa that would ensure that babies didn’t have to starve.

  Of course, seeing the pictures in 1983 of millions of starving Ethiopians was an extraordinary pull factor in influencing me to make my first trip to Africa. My basic humanitarian tendencies were certainly triggered massively by the level of helplessness of those who had been targeted and hunted in the context of the war-induced Ethiopian famine (one of the deadliest in the world during the last century). Simplistically, at that time I just wanted to help, wanted to figure out the best way to get life-saving aid to those most in need.

  But it took me a few more years to figure out that while food and medicine were crucial, they were not the sole solutions. I began to see the political roots of the lack of response from my country and the larger Western world. I was greatly helped in seeing that, as a very naive 22-year-old, by the organisation of the Live Aid concert in 1985, but particularly by the organiser, a musician-turned-radical-politician, Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats, who would later help organise the Live 8 concerts in 2005.

  Geldof appeared to me like a force of nature. He was on the cover of my beloved Rolling Stone magazine and many others, swearing at the political leaders who were obstructing a meaningful response to the famine and its roots. He took on the system; in fact he spat on the system, damning it for not caring in the face of such human deprivation. And he attacked our apathy and ignorance, swearing that he wouldn’t sleep until everyone woke up to the horrors that the people of Ethiopia were living on a daily basis.

  Geldof helped shake up the status quo and force a larger response to the crisis. He slammed the issue of starvation into the face of the larger public in Europe and America. And he changed forever the face of celebrity involvement in crises.

  With his long hair, huge ego, gutter mouth, irreverence, and unyielding passion for the people who were suffering so badly, Geldof was a heroic figure, perhaps unexpected, but a role model anyway for the ability of one person to make a major difference in the world. He challenged politicians to live up to their pledges, and challenged us as regular people to help him make a difference. I felt his call, and the call of the Ethiopian and Eritrean people, to respond to this emergency. They were dialling 999; Geldof was just a dispatcher, and I took it as a challenge and a responsibility to respond. I wouldn’t have missed that call for the world.

  What I saw on the ground in Somalia, combined with what I perceived Geldof and his allies to be accomplishing, was a powerful combination for me, a catalyst for what became my lifelong commitment to promoting peace and human rights in Africa. Which leads me back to Sudan.

  In mid-2003, before conferring upon me the title of ‘enemy of the state,’ Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail (aka ‘Mr Smile’) and I were in his opulent house in Khartoum, sitting by the Nile River. He insisted there was nothing wrong in Darfur, noting that the Americans concerned with Darfur were the same people that erroneously accused Iraq of having weapons of mass destruction. We argued over the basic facts of the Sudanese situation. I told him of emerging evidence of systematic crimes against humanity perpetrated by the militias in Darfur and of evidence that these militias were armed and supported by the government. He denied everything, with that patronising tone and ever-present smile that earned him his well-deserved nickname.

  But having seen the early results of genocidal policies in Darfur, I felt compelled to speak truth to power, to Al-Jazeera, to the world. Damn the personal consequences.

  I made it out of Khartoum in one piece, thanks to one of the Marines from the US embassy who rushed over soon after the bellhop rousted me out of my troubled reveries. He drove me to the airport and made sure I got out safely. In the three years since then, the regime hasn’t given me a visa to go to Sudan legally. Nonetheless I’ve gone back repeatedly into rebel-held areas of the country, gathering stories, trying to shine a spotlight on some of the world’s worst atrocities.

  Sudan is indeed where all the world’s worst atrocities come together, like a perfect storm of horrors. War, slavery, genocide—you name it. But particularly genocide. Beyond the Sudanese government and other perpetrators of mass atrocities, however, the ‘bad guys’ in this story are apathy, ignorance, indifference, and inertia. It is up to us to overcome them.

  Darfur represents the first genocide of the 21st century. The 999 call has gone out again. And people in Western or First World countries, particularly younger ones, are starting to respond in ways I could never have imagined 20-
something years ago. Across the First World, people are objecting to a political system which has made responding to Darfur a low priority, and they are succeeding in overcoming the apathy based on sheer ignorance of the situation. At the public education events I participate in at campuses across the US, students come up to me now with the same look I had back in the 1980s when I first saw the pictures of the Ethiopian famine. They say how they are inspired by the crisis to do more, from just doing something immediately like writing a letter, all the way to changing their majors and their career ambitions to pursue human rights advocacy, conflict resolution, or humanitarian action. In person and in e-mails, they express a desire to get involved somehow, to lend their hearts, minds, and commitment to the ultimate just cause, and to live a meaningful life. The hunger out there for meaning is extraordinary. It is perhaps the most fulfilling part of my work. We’ve gone through Generation X and Generation Y, but if Generation Z is in formation, and the massive outpouring of student action over the Darfur genocide is any indication, we have very good reason to hope in the future.

  When I first went to Africa and saw the extraordinary suffering, the massive numbers of people that had been forsaken and forgotten, what little connection I felt with God disappeared. Like so many others that have witnessed such scenes of absolute deprivation and unfairness, I became angry at any construct that would have a god somehow in charge of all this. That angry and studied agnosticism held for nearly two decades. It has only been in the last three years, corresponding ironically to the time of the Darfur genocide, that I have begun to reconnect to my faith.

  I remember going into a cathedral in Khartoum during that fateful trip in the summer of 2003. There I witnessed a vigil of hundreds of southern Sudanese praying for peace. I stayed after everyone had left and knelt in the pew, reading stories from the Gospels about Jesus, about redemption, about second chances, about forgiveness, about sacrifice, the themes that resonate so powerfully with southern Sudanese. I remember watching the pigeons (They looked like doves. Wait a minute, are doves actually pigeons? Are pigeons actually flying rats? Never mind, you get the point.) flying around in the church, as I reflected on the mistakes I had made in my life and the sadness I had caused, hoping that this redemption was real. And mostly I just felt an emptiness born of 20 years of travelling and battling, often on my own, in my personal and professional life, and I felt a peace creeping in as I read about Jesus’ life and his teaching. Though the particular window through which I view God is Christianity, surely only just one window into the divine, one of the most gratifying things about working on Darfur issues in the US is the way people of all major faiths—particularly Muslims, Jews, and Christians—come together in respect and partnership around a common cause and are motivated by their faith to pursue what is right.

  Early on, I had been a bit incredulous as to the real possibilities of citizen action in moving governments to act. Then, as I saw student and religious groups and others really responding and mobilising to these different crises, and as I started to see policy change, I began to believe in the power of ordinary people to make a difference. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but if these students and the thousands of other new activists on behalf of the defenceless have their way, the first genocide of the 21st century might also be the last, or at least the last one that doesn’t provoke an appropriately strong response.

  DON:

  Our first day in Africa is pretty much a bust as far as me doing anything of real substance. We all have a very brief briefing in the Le Meridien hotel banquet room, where we are brought up to speed on the latest developments in the region by US Ambassador Marc Wall. Though the Nightline camera is rolling, no one appears to be playing to the folks at home. Everyone is focused on the task at hand; it’s all business. The briefing yields little more than my research has already revealed, and I am looking forward to going out to the desert to see what I came to see. The meeting wraps up in relatively short order, and we pile into our escorted cars and head out to meet Prime Minister Moussa Faki of Chad.

  There is much pomp and circumstance when we arrive, but the moment is followed by confusion as it becomes evident that all in our company are not welcomed into the tiny room where this meeting is to be held. I never did find out if the prime minister’s representatives’ decision-making process was based on our perceived hierarchy or if it was simply that the room was too small to accommodate us all. Regardless, I offer to stay outside, not nearly as excited about listening to a political figure as I am about listening to the stories from the people on the front lines of the conflict. I slightly bow my head respectfully and try to back out but I’m grabbed at the last second by Congresswoman Watson, who must’ve thought I was being polite because she pulls me in behind her. Before I can protest, the door is shut on all of us in the stuffy little room and the prime minister’s man begins to speak. Apparently, I’m not going anywhere.

  The setup was very interesting, with the prime minister sitting at the front of the room dressed in what I believe to be traditional finery, swatting at small flying pests with a horse-tailed wafter, his assistant standing next to him in an ill-fitting suit. The meeting went on for what felt like an hour and maybe was. Prime Minister Faki was speaking in slow, even, thoughtful tones, almost as if he believed the pace of his speech might help us to better understand his language, but all the monotone cadence did for us in this hot little room was hasten our way toward the heavy-lidded respite that after over 20 hours of travel we all so very much crave. Between my super long blinks—blinks I tried to disguise by nodding my head thoughtfully up and down as if deeply affected by the words his equally inflection-less translator was spooning out—I caught sight of my fellow travel companions also bobbing for sleep, Ms Watson chief among them. When she and I finally made eye contact, I mouthed, ‘Thank you,’ getting a shrug in return. If she had known what we were in for, I’m sure we both would have opted to stay and play with the kids who had shown up outside the gates almost the second our cars pulled into the compound. It wasn’t that the information we were receiving was irrelevant to our trip, but the manner in which it was disseminated was for me strangely similar to the way many politicians on this side of the world do their thing: too many words representing too little action for too few (my present company excluded, of course). I wished we could have forgone all of this diplomacy and gone right into the camps, but that’s a lot like being without transportation and needing to catch a ride to the bank with your friend. If he wants to stop at the cleaners first, it’s better just to grin and bear it. Tomorrow will come soon enough.

  It doesn’t. Though we’re leaving at the crack of dawn, the time change, nerves, excitement, or a combination of all three has me up way before the sun, far earlier than any self-respecting farmer would dare begin his chores. Tired of tossing and turning, I sit up and turn on the TV. Just three channels work on the set; two of them have the same program, CNN news, and the other one is in Arabic, but somehow just having the fuzzy thing on helps to calm me down a little bit. I try to get into the real images on the screen so that the imagined ones of traumatised refugees can recede into the background. Being this close to it has me spooked now, or maybe it’s the local gendarme standing guard outside my door with a machine gun for my ‘protection’ that’s working my nerves. Heavy. I sit staring at the screen until the phone rings for my wake-up call a half hour later. It’s 4.30am.

  We convene in the hotel’s modest banquet room once again, and everyone’s pretty chatty this morning despite the early hour. The feeling in the breakfast line is one of purpose, the primary goal of our travel just hours away.

  After a short drive up the road, we’re back at the airstrip, this time headed first to Abeche, where we will deplane and then board a smaller aircraft before continuing on to Tine, a town on the Chad/Sudan border where the African Union has one of their outposts. We board the Beechcraft 1900 and everybody picks a seat. John sits behind me to the left. He
’s furiously writing away on anything that will hold ink—napkins, scraps of paper, gum wrappers ... I ask to trade seats with Betty McCollum so I can get a closer look at John’s Russell Crowe–like Beautiful Mind behaviour.

  ‘What is all that?’ It takes him a second to shift gears.

  ‘Hey, Buddy. Just trying to collect my thoughts here.’ I gather from all the references to Darfur I can make out on the scraps of paper that John wants to make sure he’s ready for the cameras. But it’s not a ruse; the man knows his stuff.

  ‘Thrall me with your acumen,’ I say, hitting him with a poor Tony Hopkins impersonation as Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs.

  ‘Do what to my what?’

  ‘It’s from Silence of ... Forget it. What are you writing about?’

  3

  Sudan’s Backdrop to Genocide

  As we stood together in Darfur’s golden sand, the stark reality hit us squarely over the head: the Sahara is rolling slowly southward. The desert is advancing, rendering access to basic resources such as land and water a matter of life or death. If you have access to those resources or the support of those in political power, you survive. When there is no democracy, no peaceful way of accessing power, then in Sudan, as in so many other places around the world, people pick up guns to win back their rights. In Darfur, the government of Sudan armed that country’s far deadlier version of the Ku Klux Klan, the Janjaweed, a mixed bag of bandits and racist ideologues whose ethnic cleansing of all non-Arab people is mostly motivated by the desire to take over land and steal livestock. John has talked with young Janjaweed recruits. They felt they had no economic alternative. These were the same feelings of the young members of the militias that committed the genocide in Rwanda. Cynical leaders can exploit economic destitution and desperation, and like macabre, racist pied pipers lead people right over the moral cliff.