Not on Our Watch

by Don Cheadle

  Stephanie remembered one of the first refugees she met, a 15-year-old girl who had lived in the camp for close to a year. The Janjaweed had killed the girl’s parents during an attack and then raped her. She was 13 and a half. ‘She had to walk for 50 days across the desert, where she survived by begging and eating dry leaves until she had reached the Chadian border,’ Stephanie recalled.

  CNN and ABC interviewed Stephanie about her trip, and the connection between her personal experience with Rwanda and her firsthand look at genocide in Darfur resonated deeply with audiences. She focused attention on the state of impunity that allowed the Janjaweed to continue their killing spree unabated in Darfur. A similar impunity eleven years earlier had enabled the Interahamwe militias to kill 800,000 of her countrypersons in 100 days.

  During the summer of 2005, GIF pushed further, launching jointly with the Centre for American Progress the ‘Be a Witness Campaign,’ an online campaign designed to pressure major media outlets to report on a current-day genocide.

  Hanis and five other GIF members graduated, merged with STAND, and transitioned their student organisation to a nongovernmental organisation that focuses on constituency building, changing the name to the Genocide Intervention Network (GI-Net). Hanis says: ‘The change from Fund to Network was huge. For Darfur and future genocides, generating the political will to act is what’s really important. You can raise money, but money is not the entire issue.’

  Nicholas Kristof

  Many people have credited Nicholas Kristof, columnist for the New York Times, with introducing them to and putting several human faces on the Darfur genocide. Kristof himself was told of a growing number of refugees from Darfur in Chad by field workers with Doctors Without Borders and the International Rescue Committee. He agreed to do one story on the border area in March 2004. When he got there, though, he was ‘blown away.’ ‘I couldn’t get those people out of my mind,’ he says. ‘The world simply wasn’t paying attention to the atrocities in Darfur ... I had to go back and try, again and again, to drag it on to the agenda.’

  Kristof has written dozens of columns (his op-eds on Darfur are consistently among the most forwarded articles on nytimes.com), travelled several times to the region, and with some success brought Darfur to national attention. He uses his columns to ‘try to force people to face up to this slaughter.’

  ‘I believe that once Americans pay attention, they’ll get upset and the political process will work and politicians will respond,’ he says of his Pulitzer Prize–winning work. ‘This is not just a journalistic or literary exercise—I write the columns because I want to make a difference.’

  Professor Eric Reeves

  For Eric Reeves, raising awareness has taken on a new meaning. A professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College, Reeves is the go-to man on up-to-date information from the field and for effective lobbying for increased efforts for the region. When the former executive director of the US branch of Doctors Without Borders, Joelle Tanguy, told Reeves she thought Sudan needed a champion, she probably didn’t expect it to be an English prof from Northampton, Massachusetts. He started before Darfur broke out, when it was southern Sudan that was the hot spot, with slavery, the Lost Boys, and a deadly civil war as backdrops.

  Reeves began his work the way many other activists do: writing letters and op-eds. Then he began a weekly analysis of the country and a now popular website, www.sudanreeves.org, which acts as a resource centre on the crises in Sudan. His e-mail list includes journalists, NGOs, policy groups, politicians, foreign diplomats, and concerned citizens. He also started a successful divestment campaign against Talisman Energy, and has been a catalyst for the current efforts across the country to get universities, cities, and states to divest all their stock holdings from companies doing business in or with Sudan. He has done all this while battling cancer. Reeves said, ‘Effective advocates must have a strong grasp of the issue, and people must be determined ... The more work I’ve done, the more apparent it has become to me that there is a lack of commitment on the part of the international community to stop genocide in Africa. I do not leave work unfinished and therefore will continue to do this work.’

  JOHN:

  Calling my friend Eric Reeves a warrior is surely an understatement. Fighting cancer and frequently working from his hospital bed, he has waged an often lonely but always Herculean struggle to ensure that the American public is aware of what is happening to the people of Sudan—whether in Darfur, the south, or the Nuba Mountains. One night when I was working in the White House, there was a marathon Africa meeting at the State Department—we Africanists so rarely get a chance to speak in high-level policy meetings, so when we do, we often don’t know when to shut up. It was about 9 pm on a Friday night, and I was down in the office of the then State Department Sudan desk officer, and rising star, Matt Harrington, just shooting the after-meeting breeze. The phone rang, and Matt just looked at it, looked up at me, and said, ‘Mother of God, it’s gotta be Eric Reeves.’ There was genuine fear in his voice, but fear tinged with respect and admiration. You can run from Eric, but you surely can’t hide.

  Paul Rusesabagina

  As the ‘real-life hero’ of the movie Hotel Rwanda, Paul Rusesabagina has unmatched credibility when it comes to responding to genocide. Paul’s experience with us in the Darfurian refugee camps in eastern Chad reinforced his resolve to be active on Darfur. When Paul and our delegation arrived in the first refugee camp in Chad, at least 2,000 children were waiting to greet us. Many of the children held drawings of Sudanese government helicopters destroying villages and killing people. But the poster that touched Paul the most was one that read, simply, ‘Welcome to our guests. But we need education.’ He immediately thought of his own country, Rwanda, and the millions of displaced people growing up there without education, opportunity, or hope for the future. Seeing this situation again in the dry expanse of eastern Chad and Darfur, and knowing that, as with Rwanda, the world was failing to respond, reinforced Paul’s determination to speak out about Darfur. And since early 2005, Paul has given over 200 speeches around the world to audiences of at least 2,000 people. After all, this is a man who stood up to those committing genocide in Rwanda and helped protect over a thousand people from death.

  Brian Steidle

  Brian Steidle was a senior operations officer working in the Nuba Mountains for a group called the Joint Military Commission. Initially, motivated by the money offered to work in Darfur, Steidle got stationed as a US representative to the African Union observer mission. He immediately became a witness to the horrible violence plaguing the region. After six months, monitoring the almost nonexistent cease-fire, Steidle realised ‘that nothing was changing on the ground. And actually from when I got there in October to January things had even gotten worse. There’d been larger attacks and I did not see much media attention. I didn’t see a lot of people who even cared. I would talk to people via e-mail and they would say we haven’t heard anything about Darfur. Where is it? What’s going on?’

  He knew that he could have a larger impact by bringing the photographs that he had taken back to the United States and spreading the word as widely as possible about what was taking place in Darfur. ‘I can hopefully try to bring around at least awareness, if not some type of influence on the government and decision makers to actually do something to stop the genocide.’

  Steidle has made his photographs available through Nicholas Kristof’s column, the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and other venues. He is currently working with the non-profit organisation Global Grassroots to raise awareness about Darfur by travelling and sharing his story. Steidle strongly believes in the power of the public voice. ‘The people move this government ... If we turn our eyes away from hundreds of thousands of people that are being killed ... then we are lesser people for it.’

  mtvU

  Stephen Friedman is the general manager of mtvU, MTV Networks’
channel dedicated to college students. A powerful segment on Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour ignited Friedman’s interest in Darfur about three years ago. The segment covered a Holocaust survivor’s college lecture tour, and how he had lost his entire family in concentration camps. The documentary highlighted the meeting of the lecturer and a young woman (Jacqueline Murekatete) he noticed crying at one of his events. The lecturer went to speak with the young woman, who told him, ‘Yes, the same thing happened to my family a few years ago in Rwanda.’ Moved by the documentary, Friedman recognised that genocide is still occurring. ‘Everyone said, “Never Again,” but we had one 11 years ago. In Darfur we now have an example of a genocide in slow motion.’

  Friedman wanted to talk with Jacqueline and tell her story. ‘The power of using someone’s story gets under your skin. You dream about it, or have nightmares about it. Use the powerful, individual stories and hope that they resonate. The model of talking about numbers is too overwhelming, but you hear about one college student who is going campus to campus, and you realise that is something anybody can do.’ And once her story aired, it caught on and grew a life of its own.

  At one point early on in mtvU’s Sudan campaign, Friedman met Francis Bok, a Sudanese refugee who was enslaved in Sudan for ten years. Bok escaped, and his dream was to go to college. Featuring Bok in mtvU’s PSAs helped make that dream a reality. Nate Wright, the co-founder of STAND, then approached Friedman about his STANDfast idea. Friedman decided to make the campaign national. ‘I wanted to shout about it on air, online.’ Eventually, over 170 schools committed to being a part of the campaign.

  mtvU continued its involvement by giving major grants to student groups and doing commercial spots with Don. ‘College students are very pragmatic,’ notes Friedman. ‘They have also historically been the leaders of campaigns of change. Think about apartheid. They want to make change, and they want to do that through concrete action.’

  Their efforts continued when mtvU sent three students to Darfur to create a documentary in March 2005. Friedman says that one of his greatest accomplishments on this campaign was ‘sending those students to Darfur. For a kid who may not know anything about it, it is a great, eye-opening experience. We did have Nate and Stephanie, but most important was Andrew Karlsruher, a student from Boston University. He was not an activist. Before he went, he said, “All I knew about Africa was The Lion King.” But there was a willingness to explore in him, and you need to give that a chance.’

  In an ironic twist of innovation, Friedman learned that neo-Nazis are using video games to recruit new members, and he decided mtvU should do a video game against genocide. The game is called ‘Darfur Is Dying’ developed by Susana Ruiz, Ashley York, Mike Stein, Noah Keating, and Kellee Santiago of the University of Southern California. Anyone can play it for free on mtvU’s website. mtvU’s Alexis Hyder told us that the game has been played more than 2 million times, and tens of thousands have gone on to write letters to the White House, petition their representatives in Congress, or simply raise awareness by forwarding the game to a friend.

  Friedman is inspired by a quote from Theodore Parker that Martin Luther King made famous: ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’ He says, ‘That’s something that everyone at mtvU believes in our hearts. In the end, if you have compassion, knowing that you can make change, making change in small increments fires you up. It’s the little things that get you to that point.’

  For all kinds of activist tips, go to the ENOUGH Project website at www.enoughproject.org.

  Darfur’s Other Champions

  DON:

  Several years ago my old friend JB Schramm asked me to appear as a speaker at a Youth Conference convened by former President Bill Clinton at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. JB is the mastermind behind an organisation called College Summit, whose mission it is to help low-income high school juniors prepare for their college admissions via a four-day intensive writing program. College Summit’s motto: working toward ensuring that every student who can make it into college makes it to college. Jeffrey Swartz, the president and CEO of the Timberland Company, is also scheduled to speak today and, like me, has found himself holed up in this small greenroom while we wait our turns, stressing over our speeches, confident that we will both undoubtedly be upstaged by President Clinton, also scheduled to appear.

  ‘There’s no way I’m going after him,’ Jeff tells me.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry. I’m sure he’ll be batting cleanup.’

  In addition to his role at Timberland, Jeffrey also sits on the board of City Year, an organisation dedicated to enriching the lives of young people by introducing them to civic strategies, specifically citizen service, civic leadership, and social entrepreneurship. Little did I know that this self-effacing ‘shoe guy’ as he called himself would factor in what would become a mission of mine.

  Jeffrey and I kept in touch over the next year or so, e-mailing back and forth whenever he would see me in something he loved, hated, or felt indifferent to. I always looked forward to reading his words whatever his opinion; he had a poetic turn of phrase and a unique insight, being both a social activist and CEO of a major multinational corporation. After viewing Hotel Rwanda, Jeffrey wrote me a very long e-mail expressing how much it meant not only to him but also to his son, who convinced his junior high school to show the film and form discussion groups after the screening. I told Jeffrey about my learning of the Holocaust as a young man and wondered if our film would impact the students in the same way that the film Night and Fog had impacted me in my junior high school auditorium. Would we possibly one day see fruits from the influence of this modern depiction of genocide, many new activists joining the ranks in the not so distant future? Jeffrey assured me that he didn’t need to be drafted; he wanted to get the call first thing when and if the battle cry went out for whatever dragon I needed aid in slaying. I e-mailed him my thanks and we both got back to our busy lives.

  Spring 2005, the movie Crash is in cinemas and the cast is making the rounds on all the television talk shows. Chris Bridges, Larenz Tate, and I do a turn on the BET program 106 & Park. In consideration of the company I’m keeping and the style of the show, I throw together a funky ensemble finished off at street level by my blue suede, seven-hole, Timberland boots. Crash, it turns out, is a hit, and apparently so is the airing of this episode because not two days later, I receive an e-mail from Jeffrey, with a photo attached of me sitting on the couch talking with the co-hosts of the show, AJ and Free, my legs crossed, and prominently featuring my footwear. Jeffrey wrote: ‘Great interview, footwear irrelevant. But I thought I would have gotten your design for a Darfur boot by now.’

  I was shocked. Never had we spoken about the idea of doing something like that, but I was way into it. I wrote back immediately: ‘Watch my smoke,’ and grabbed a pencil and pad to sketch out some ideas. What an amazing opportunity this was. In my many discussions with John about outreach, ways to widen the circle of influence where Darfur was concerned, we had often broached the idea of ‘branding’ activism, tying in the spirit of social justice with an easily recognizable and perhaps even popular outward symbol of such. At first blush, it may sound counter-intuitive to combine the crisis of genocide in Darfur with the concept of being cool, but imagine the possibilities if such a marriage did exist. Remember the ‘Vote or Die!’ campaign? Activism and fashion needn’t be mutually exclusive, and in fact, if sporting a phat boot with a strong message can attract more young people and bring them into the fray, young people whose energy and drive this movement needs, young people who unfortunately may inherit this and other similar tragedies in years to come, why not take this opportunity to create a righteous blend? Besides, I’ve always rocked Timberlands and relished any excuse to stuff another pair into my shoe-heavy closet.

  I played around with several boot ideas before shooting them off to Jeffrey, who put me in touch with his design team, whi
ch had already begun working on concepts. We went back and forth for the next couple of weeks tweaking our ideas for images and colour. I wanted the boot to have a tread cut into its sole that left behind the message ‘Stomp Out Genocide’ if the wearer were to walk on dry ground after traipsing through water, mud, or snow. Team Timberland was able to accommodate that, and every other design modification I requested. Shortly thereafter, they produced about 100 pairs of boots that we subsequently delivered to humanitarian activists, policy makers, journalists, and entertainment professionals who had raised awareness of and championed change in Darfur. In addition to the boot, Jeffrey directed the company to produce T-shirts with the words ‘What Footprint Will You Leave?’ emblazoned across the chest and ‘Save Darfur’ boot tags. Both were available for purchase to the general public, with proceeds going to AmeriCares, a longstanding partner of Timberland, providing life-saving aid in the Sudan. I have since worn the boots and shirt on many occasions, from television appearances to red carpet arrivals to just general day-to-day errands. Almost every outing, without fail, I am asked about the design, often by young people, giving me a natural segue into talk about Darfur, affording me the opportunity to make a potential convert. I have Jeffrey Swartz to thank for this.

  Hollywood and Hip-Hop Meet Darfur