Not on Our Watch

by Don Cheadle

  JOHN:

  On one of the trips I took to Darfur with Samantha Power in late spring 2004, we met a woman, Amina, cooking on the ground. She had fled her village during an attack. Her husband had been shot as soon as he left their hut. She had two of her children on her back and the other two in her arms as about 20 Janjaweed chased her on camels. First they ripped her five-year-old, Adom, from her, and when she stopped running and begged for her child, they told her they would shoot her. So she continued running away from her village that was up in flames. The Janjaweed then tossed Adom into the fire. He was screaming and calling her name, but she just kept running. Despite her speed, her seven-year-old, Asam Mohamed, was then taken and shot, once in his side and once in his back. She was never able to bury her children.

  Over the last three years, on a number of trips to the region, I have spoken with countless other women who recounted with surprising candour how while collecting firewood for the refugee camps, they were beaten by Janjaweed, threatened with knives, cut, and raped. The women went to the police to report the rapes, but nothing happened. Most victims don’t trust the police and consider them as just another branch of the government that will rape, torture, and murder them. The government has even hidden Janjaweed fighters within the police, creating a sickening scenario of the attackers ‘guarding’ their victims. These women had no other option but to go out again to these unsafe areas on a daily basis in search of firewood.

  This fills me with an anger that can only be reduced when this genocide is halted and justice is served for the perpetrators, or at least those who orchestrated this madness. Until that happens, I will not stop sounding the alarm. In fact, I cannot stop. I hope you will feel the same way.

  One of the most effective alarm bells I have had the opportunity to sound has been the CBS show 60 Minutes. Correspondent Scott Pelley and his producers Bill Owens and Shawn Efran made a commitment to Sudan which allowed us to produce three shows in 2004 and 2006, reaching tens of millions of Americans. On the first trip Samantha and I took for 60 Minutes, we found a book bag full of notebooks in a partially burned hut in one of the destroyed villages. We brought the notebooks and other household items back to the United States, and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles both agreed to exhibit some of the items.

  Two years later, it finally occurred to me (not the sharpest knife in the drawer) that we should try to find the kid to whom the notebooks belonged and see if he or she was still alive. We got the notebooks translated from Arabic to English and found that the name of the kid was Jacob. Scott and I decided to go in search of Jacob, to see if he was still alive and what had happened to his village, where we had found the notebooks.

  Sometimes needles are found in haystacks. Searching throughout the refugee camps in Chad, we found someone with a name that matched Jacob’s who had registered for food rations at a camp in northeastern Chad. After what at times appeared like a wild goose chase, we finally found Jacob in a humble mud hut in the centre of one of the refugee camps outside of a town called Bahai. After getting over his initial consternation about the Martians who had landed in the middle of his refugee camp, Jacob was astonished to see the notebooks we handed over to him at the outset of our discussion. He was moved by the memories of his village and talked poignantly about the difficult choice he was making in not joining the rebels, but instead pursuing education in order to help bring about a political solution to the conflict.

  At the end of our discussion, when we asked him what he wanted to do with the notebooks, he urged that we return them to the museums in order to teach as many people as possible about what had happened to his homeland.

  Throughout 2003 and part of 2004, the government denied that there was a crisis in Darfur and enacted labyrinthine procedures aimed at blocking and delaying the establishment of humanitarian operations. As humanitarian workers applied for visas to travel to Sudan and assist victims of the conflict, the government’s embassies and consulates around the world processed their requests at a glacial pace. Government customs delayed the release of vehicles, equipment, and relief supplies, including essential medicines. Khartoum blocked food shipments to Darfur and grounded some of the aircraft used to move food and relief supplies. When relief workers did eventually arrive in Khartoum, they had to apply for travel permits to get to Darfur, and the delays continued. Relief agencies had difficulty getting jet fuel for the few planes that they had permission to fly, despite the fact that the Sudanese military had little difficulty fuelling its own planes and attack helicopters to bomb and strafe civilians.

  As the Sudanese military and the Janjaweed squeezed the life out of Darfur, peace negotiations in Kenya between the government and the southern-based SPLA moved slowly ahead. An agreement seemed tantalisingly close, and the international community was reluctant to take strong action to end the killing in Darfur for fear that the government of Sudan would reconsider negotiations with the south. The Bush administration had invested considerable time, energy, and money to push the north-south peace process forward. Genocide in Darfur threatened to expose the problems with negotiations that excluded northern opposition groups.

  In early 2004, policy makers made a lethal decision to conclude the peace agreement between the government and the southern SPLA rebels before focusing full diplomatic attention on Darfur. The National Islamic Front reacted by slowing down the negotiation process and accelerating their campaign of human destruction in Darfur. While US diplomats tried desperately to seal a deal that would end the war in southern Sudan, Darfur was in flames. The Sudan government knew that the longer it could delay an agreement with southern rebels, the more time it would have to conduct the genocide in Darfur.

  In March 2004, on the eve of the anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, the top United Nations official in Khartoum, Mukesh Kapila, courageously compared the butchery in Darfur to the organised slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans ten years earlier. ‘I was present in Rwanda at the time of the genocide, and I’ve seen many other situations around the world, and I am totally shocked at what is going on in Darfur,’ he told a BBC radio program. ‘This is ethnic cleansing; this is the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis, and I don’t know why the world isn’t doing more about it.’ Most commentators and diplomats dismissed his admonitions as the rantings of a frustrated bureaucrat, but Kapila turned out to be dead right.

  Echoes of Rwanda

  Only a familiarity with Rwanda could prepare us for what we heard and witnessed in Darfur. But John’s 20 years in African war zones and Don’s work on Hotel Rwanda (particularly his travel to Rwanda itself) were only partial desensitisers to the tales of cruelty and horror.

  The worst stories, perhaps, were those of the brutal gang rapes that are the hallmark of Janjaweed attacks. Every day, hundreds of thousands of women in the displaced camps throughout Darfur face a Sophie’s Choice: they can either stay in the relative safety of the camps and watch their families starve to death with no firewood to cook the little food donated by the international community, or they can leave the camps and forage for firewood, which will allow their families to eat another day but expose them to the probability of rape, sometimes gang rape, by Janjaweed militia.

  These horrors can seem inexplicable and incomprehensible. But the why and how of genocide and other mass atrocities are often eerily similar. The two cases of genocide we are most familiar with are Rwanda and Darfur. Did the top regime officials in the Rwandan capital Kigali and Sudan’s Khartoum just wake up one morning and decide to unleash genocide? Of course not. These genocides are the product of cold, rational, chilling calculations.

  The story of the last 40 years of Sudan has been one of war, famine, and human displacement. The genocide in Darfur represents a culmination of the tactics used by the current government in other parts of the country. Crimes against humanity don’t just happen to people. There are planners, orchestrators, and
perpetrators. They must somehow be stopped, and they must pay for their crimes.

  The first category of stark parallels between the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur is why they have been perpetrated:

  - The regimes in Sudan and Rwanda wanted to maintain absolute power by any means necessary, even if that meant perpetrating genocide.

  - Both chose the oldest, most extreme method of counterinsurgency in the art of war: drain the pond to catch the fish. If you destroy the people from which your opposition comes, then you won’t have much of an opposition anymore.

  - Both wanted to send a message to any other potential rebels from any quarter: if you challenge us, herein lies your fate.

  That is megalomaniacal, murderous behaviour, but it is not irrational.

  The second category of stark parallels between Rwanda and Darfur is how these two genocides have been perpetrated:

  - Militias do most of the killing, to give the orchestrators—the governments—a degree of separation and hoped-for deniability. In the case of Rwanda, the Interahamwe militias did the dirty work. In Darfur, it is the Janjaweed.

  - Specific ethnic groups are targeted because of their support for opposition groups or as a mechanism for mobilising government support. In Rwanda, the Tutsi were vilified and targeted for extinction. In Darfur, three specific non-Arab ethnic groups were targeted initially: the Zaghawa, the Fur, and the Massaleit. We should know and remember their names.

  - Intercommunal rivalries are stoked. This is a classic case of divide and conquer or, more specifically, divide and destroy. The governments in both countries sow divisions to keep potential opponents weak. Tutsi were pitted against Hutu in Rwanda, and in Darfur, Arab populations were encouraged to attack non-Arabs.

  [1] IRC Press release, ‘Increased Sexual Assaults Signal Darfur’s Downward Slide,’ 23 August 2006.

  5

  Citizens v. Government: Knowing What we Are Up Against

  ‘If every member of the House and Senate had received 100 letters from people back home saying we have to do something about Rwanda, when the crisis was first developing, then I think the response would have been different.’

  Senator Paul Simon in response to US non-involvement in Rwanda in 1994[1]

  What happens when there is a horrific crisis that requires global intervention, and not enough citizens and policy makers care for that to happen? Nothing. Sadly, international inaction in the face of mass atrocities has a long, inglorious history. The Rwandan genocide was simply the most dramatic example of impotence and indifference.

  It is frustrating to us how sparse and sporadic the news coverage is of Africa, which only makes headlines when another crisis erupts. This has led to a ‘conflict fatigue’ associated with the continent as a whole. The truth is, however, that much of Africa is a good news story. There are positive stories that deserve air time, such as:

  - The move away from dictatorships to democracy throughout Africa

  - A proliferation of nongovernmental organisations contributing to the development of most African countries

  - Effective roles in the war on terrorism by many African governments

  - Peace agreements forged in countries which only a few years earlier had been ripped apart by war and crimes against humanity, such as Sierra Leone, Liberia, southern Sudan, and Burundi

  - Serious methods by African institutions to combat transnational threats of disease and ecological degradation

  - Commitment on the part of many African governments to fiscally responsible economic policies focused on alleviating poverty.

  By ignoring the positive news, US and European media risk fostering a tendency to dismiss the entire continent as hopeless. So when wars erupt and their attendant human rights abuses emerge, the response—if there even is one—is often tentative and muted, and conflict-ridden countries easily descend into a free fall. We think these conflicts are not just an affront to humanity, they are the greatest threat to overall progress throughout the African continent.

  JOHN:

  In mid-March 1998, as a young official at the National Security Council, I had the honour of participating in President Clinton’s first trip to Africa, the longest overseas travel of his entire presidency. President Clinton visited Senegal, Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, and Botswana over eleven days. I helped organise the visits to Rwanda and Uganda, and the Heads of State Summit during the trip. Led by Susan Rice at the State Department and Ambassador Joe Wilson at the National Security Council, which also had the excellent support of White House staffers Robin Sanders and Erica Barks-Ruggles and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson, the objective of the trip was to highlight the positive aspects of and opportunities in Africa. Since all we ever see on our television screens is famine and war, President Clinton wanted to show the other side of Africa: democratic governments, reforming economies, extraordinary cultures, great investment opportunities, and the legendary resilience of Africa’s peoples. Media, business executives, and legislators came on the trip to see the other side of the story.

  The trip was a grand success. President Clinton came back psyched to do more for Africa. And then ... WHAM! Wars erupted like the mother of all fireworks displays all across the continent, wars which made headlines because of the terrible atrocities committed. All of the plans to do more were laid to waste. The whole positive media spin turned poisonous, and support evaporated for new initiatives and investments.

  Two realities slapped me in the face, hard, and helped refocus my life’s priorities:

  - First, if conflicts aren’t resolved, efforts to support Africa’s development will be undermined repeatedly.

  - Second, political will for supporting positive agendas in Africa has a great deal of competition from many other pressing priorities, so unless people like you reading this book become more vocal, little will change in how we respond to Africa.

  The conclusion hit me in the middle of the forehead, and it has only grown since that time. Quite simply, we need to build a popular constituency for Africa. Throughout my time in the Clinton administration, I saw first-hand how difficult it was for senior policy makers to marshal the attention and resources to address the hard issues confronting countries beset by crimes against humanity, because usually there are few US political constituencies pressing for action. In other words, there is no political cost for inaction. That’s precisely what Don and I—and many others around the world—are trying to change.

  Bono, DATA (Debt AIDS Trade Africa), and the ONE Campaign are going a long way toward doing that in the areas of foreign aid, trade, and debt relief. Only recently has an adequate effort begun to prevent crimes against humanity. To that end, my longtime friend and colleague Gayle Smith and I decided to launch an initiative called the ENOUGH Project, which we talk about later in the book, in Chapter 8.

  So it is absolutely imperative that resolving conflicts and confronting mass human rights abuses be central objectives of Western policy in Africa. However, the US and other Western governments usually do not respond to cases of mass atrocities—particularly in Africa—because of the previously mentioned Four Horsemen Enabling the Apocalypse: ignorance, indifference, policy inertia, and apathy.

  When the people—or influential subsets of them—do not make noise about mass atrocities, then it is highly unlikely that their government will do much more than express concern and call on the parties to lay down their arms.

  However, the case of Darfur is different. Americans—particularly a few important constituencies—have expressed great horror over Darfur and demanded more action. If this were a ‘normal’ case, we activists could have influenced the policy makers and something viable might have been done.

  But Darfur has an added point of complexity. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Sudan regime—out of fear of reprisals for their earlier support of
Osama bin Laden and continuing contacts with other terrorist groups—intensified their counterterrorism co-operation with the US government.

  President Bush wasn’t kidding when he uttered the famous words, ‘You’re either with us or against us.’ In this case, Sudan is with us, and that bought the regime breathing room while it unleashed the genocide in Darfur.

  A Pattern of Global Inaction

  One of the most consistent responses to genocide and other mass atrocities by governments around the world is to deliberately portray matters as more complex than they really are. In this way, officials can delay difficult and bold decisions and justify inaction. Certainly, the dynamics of most conflicts are indeed complicated, but somehow when US or other governments’ interests are at stake, these administrations have found a way to understand and effectively react to the situation.

  Another response by governments and the UN to crimes against humanity is to practise moral equivalency, treating perpetrators and victims equally, calling for cease-fires rather than calling for accountability. This is the unfortunate case in Darfur. As you can imagine, we need much more than rhetorical and balanced appeals to stop those willing to commit such crimes. Moreover, such equivalency ignores the international convention relating to genocide, which clearly states, ‘Persons committing genocide ... shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.’ While military skirmishes by rebels or competing governments may have started a conflict, mass atrocities are always far beyond a reasonable and proportionate response.