JOHN SHATTUCK: Welcome to the John F. Kennedy Library. I’m John Shattuck, the CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and on behalf of myself and our Director, Tom Putnam, of the Library, and all our colleagues here, I want to thank you for coming this afternoon to this very, very special and urgent forum on the crisis in Darfur. You already welcomed our wonderful guests and speakers. I want to thank the institutions that make these Kennedy Library Forums possible, starting with our lead sponsor, Bank of America, as well as the Boston Foundation, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Corcoran Jennison Companies, the Boston Globe, NECN and WBUR, which broadcasts our forums on Sunday evenings at 8:00.
Three years ago, I published an article in the Boston Globe about what was happening then in Darfur. I wrote it because I was haunted by what had happened a decade earlier when I was serving as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, and on my watch, the world was confronted simultaneously by two genocides: one in Rwanda, which we failed to stop, and another in the former Yugoslavia, where we finally intervened to end the killing. Sadly, what I wrote in 2004 about Darfur still applies today, so I would like to just briefly quote from the situation in 2004.
“The Darfur region of Sudan is in flames. Cynical leaders in Khartoum have been seeking to enhance their power by using local militia to suppress the non-Arab population. They have driven a million and a half people from their homes, forcing them into refugee camps, denying them access to food, water, and shelter. More than thirty thousand have been killed. Genocide and crimes against humanity are being committed every day, including the mass rape of women and the systematic destruction of villages, livestock, crops and people.”
Now in the three years since those words were written, the only thing that’s changed in Darfur is the number of people killed, which has increased nearly tenfold. Outside Darfur, the reaction, frankly, is mixed. Governments have stood by as genocide has been committed with impunity. But many people, many people, including above all our three speakers here today, and many of you in the audience, have refused to be bystanders. Remembering the lessons of Rwanda and Bosnia and the Holocaust, citizens across the country and around the world have been organizing coalitions to shine a spotlight on Darfur and to press governments to act. And here in Boston, our own wonderful Reverend Gloria White Hammond has been a leader of the effort to save the people of Darfur, along with Liz Walker, who’s up here on stage. Gloria, would you please stand for a moment so people can recognize you for your work? [applause]
I also want to thank Facing History and Ourselves, a wonderful organization here in Boston, for spotlighting Darfur and making it possible for so many students to join us here at this forum today.
Today we’re here to learn more about what’s happening. But we’re also here to learn what each of us, as citizens, can do about it. Our speakers are here to challenge us to act, just as President Kennedy challenged his fellow citizens of the world when he proclaimed, in his inaugural address, “Now the trumpet summons us again to bear the burden of a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself. Can we forge, against these enemies, a grand and global alliance? My fellow citizens of the world, ask what, together, we can do for the freedom of man.”
One of the ways to stir people to act against a common enemy like genocide is to write a book and then go out and speak about it. Don Cheadle and John Prendergast have teamed up to write a powerful book about Darfur. The book is entitled Not On Our Watch. Just today, it went on the New York Times advanced bestseller list and will be for sale in our Pavilion and signed by the authors after this forum.
Of course, it’s a terrible irony of history that the Darfur crisis came to the attention of Don Cheadle while he was making Hotel Rwanda, the film that raised the consciousness of people around the world to the reality of genocide in our time. Through an extraordinary performance that won him an Oscar nomination and scores of other honors, Don put himself, and therefore all of us, in the place of Paul Rusesabagina, the quietly courageous hotel manager who saved hundreds of lives as the Rwandan holocaust engulfed his country. While Don was on location, he learned what was happening in Darfur, and he decided to act to try to prevent a repetition of the horror he had come to know so well. It was then that Don Cheadle met John Prendergast, a former state department official and now senior advisor to the International Crisis Group, and together they set out for their first trip to Darfur. They will tell you what they saw, but I will tell you what they did. For the last three years, by speaking out as witnesses to genocide, they’ve raised our consciousness about Darfur, just as Don Cheadle did in 2004 by making Hotel Rwanda. Don is one of our nation’s finest actors. His starring role in Hotel Rwanda was recognized--
DON CHEADLE: ... (inaudible)
[laughter]
DON CHEADLE: I was editorializing.
JOHN SHATTUCK: All right. I’ll accept. He doesn’t believe it, but we do. His starring role in Hotel Rwanda was recognized with an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Broadcast Film Critics’ Award and the Screen Actors Guild nomination for Best Actor. He was named Best Supporting Actor by the Los Angeles film critics for his first film, Devil in a Blue Dress. Over the years, Don has been showered with honors for his extraordinary performances on screen, stage, and television. He is also a talented musician and composer, and an accomplished director, with a wide range of stage productions to his credit.
John Prendergast worked in the Clinton White House in the State Department, where I first met him on a trip to Africa with President Clinton in 1998. He’s been involved in the effort to bring peace to Darfur, Southern Sudan, and many other conflict areas in Africa. Two weeks ago, he gave congressional testimony on Darfur before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and he’s published numerous articles and commentaries, calling for action to stop the killing. Over the years, he’s worked with members of Congress, UN agencies, and human rights organizations, and traveled regularly to Africa’s war zones. My favorite story about John is that once, at a meeting in the White House, President Bush apparently came over to chat with him, because he mistook him for Bono. I think you can see why. [laughter] Take ‘em however you can get ‘em.
We’re very fortunate this afternoon to have as our moderator one of Boston’s leading journalists and humanitarians, our own wonderful Liz Walker. Everyone in Boston knows and loves Liz as the award-winning anchor of WBZ-TV news for many years, and now is the host of her own weekly program, Sunday With Liz Walker. Liz has been involved in helping the people of Sudan since 2001, when she made her first trip on a fact finding mission with Christian Solidarity International to look at the issue of slave trading in the south of the country. Over the years, she’s traveled several times more to Sudan, most recently to Darfur this spring. She’s a humanitarian leader and a human rights witness, and we’re proud, Liz, to have you here with us today.
So please join me once again in welcoming to the stage of the Kennedy Library, Don Cheadle, John Prendergast, and Liz Walker.
LIZ WALKER: Thank you. I want to give you a little information about the business at hand. I’m going to ask questions for about thirty, thirty-five, forty minutes. We have library staff members who are going to walk around with file cards for you to ask questions. We’re going to try to do it efficiently, so that if you have a question, if you’re moved by something, please take a file card. We’ll also give you a pencil.
John, I’m going to start with you, and because of my news background, I’m going to ask the first question on the latest news. Security, of course, is a priority, the most immediate concern in this area. We’ve heard talk of the UN going in, we know that the African Union supposedly is on the ground, yet people, we hear, are still dying and people are being displaced, and so first to you, what’s going on with security, and is there any reason for hope?
JOHN PRENDERGAST: Well, Professor Shattuck, in his opening, talked about John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, where he talked about tyranny, poverty, disease, and war. We have all four of those, and we have them in the extreme in Darfur, even today. You all know about the genocide that has unfolded in Darfur. You all know pretty much, in general terms, what has happened to get Darfur where it is. Don and I called that Phase One of the genocide, which has been this extraordinary scorched earth policy, which attempted and succeeded in burning to the ground about 1,500 villages throughout Darfur. You can see it, literally, by clicking on your computers. Google Earth has established a relationship with the Holocaust Museum to take you to Darfur via your computers, and I would urge you to do so. It’s an incredible educational tool.
Well we feel that was Phase One. Everybody knows about Phase One and the village burnings. Phase Two is where we are now in the genocide in Darfur, and that is, the government of Sudan, and you were there in 2001 and saw the ravages of the Sudanese government’s policy in southern Sudan, and Gloria has worked extensively on that as well. And the government perfected one of the oldest tools of war in the book, starvation as a use of war. It is now applying the lessons it learned in Southern Sudan to Darfur by restricting access of the aid agencies through bureaucracy, through red tape, and attacks on aid workers, to the point where we now have over one million Darfurian human beings who are outside of the access of the humanitarian agencies. We have heard-- and anyone who will tell you Andrew Natsios, first and foremost-- that the situation is getting better in Darfur. We have no idea if it’s getting better, because we have no witnesses as to what is happening for over a million Sudanese people in the west of that country. The government’s policy of divide and destroy has led to the burning of Darfur, has led to the starvation of Darfur and now, I think we are set to see mortality rates increase rather dramatically, unless there is action taken now.
LIZ WALKER: What about the UN? I thought they said they were going to come in.
JOHN PRENDERGAST: UN-- you know, this is the funny thing about posturing in diplomacy. We had a US ambassador to the United Nations who walked loudly and carried a toothpick when it came to Darfur, and he rammed down the throat of the United Nations Security-- and the United States, you know, even with Iraq, even with Afghanistan, even with Lebanon, although there are issues that are pulling us down internationally and making it harder to build alliances, we still can get what we want in the Security Council of the United Nations, when we want it. And Ambassador Bolton, at President Bush’s direction, basically pressed, pushed and jammed down the throats of the Security Council a resolution last year that authorized a United Nations force to go in with a very ambiguous question of whether or not it required Sudanese government agreement. Well, nobody’s going to send troops to Darfur right now, with all of the stuff that’s going on in the world, with Osama bin Laden himself making a statement, United Nations troops that get sent to Darfur are going to find their graves in Darfur. Nobody’s going to volunteer troops, so you know, yapping and barking and barking without any bite, simply emboldened the Sudanese government, because they knew nobody was going to send any force. And that’s what we’ve seen in the last few months. Their policy’s even become worse with respect to Darfur.
So where we are now is a compromise has been brokered amongst the international actors, brokered by the previous Secretary General of the United Nations, which would have a United Nations and African Union hybrid force that would be, with the consent of the government of Sudan, deployed to protect people and oversee ceasefire provisions. But the government of Sudan has not accepted that force, so that’s where we are now. The government hasn’t accepted a force that would be led by the United Nations. It hasn’t allowed for the resumption of a real peace process, so we’re blocked, and it’s the government of Sudan that’s blocking progress in Darfur today.
LIZ WALKER: This next question I’m going to throw to both of you, but I’ll start with you, Don. It’s difficult for most of us to understand what the method is behind this madness in Darfur. Is this about race, is it about oil, is it about land? How do you see what the reason is, or is it all of that?
DON CHEADLE: Well, it’s definitely-- all of those are components, but it’s really about those in power maintaining power by any means necessary and fostering rivalries and conscripting soldiers who have a racist ideology to--
JOHN PRENDERGAST: You shouldn’t have said that. [laughter]
DON CHEADLE: I know. Are they coming to get me? But using those who already have a racist ideology, and conscripting soldiers and arming them to put forth their agenda, which continues to… When they’re speaking in terms of them being in a defensive position, you know when the GOS talks about, when Bashira talks about-- he says, “We’re just responding to a rebellion.” But Antonov bombers against villagers and soldiers on the perimeter while the janjaweed, which is the armed Arab militia that we’re talking about, go in and wipe out entire villages, is not really a response to a rebellion as much as it is attempting to, as we talk about in the book, “drain the pond to capture the fish.” If you destroy the entire civilian base where the rebellion comes from, then you have an attempt to destroy the rebellion, but that actually has not happened.
And that rebellion is very fractious, to be sure, right now, but it is still there. He’s been unable to quash that completely. And obviously, many more millions of people are suffering who are not involved in the conflict. And it’s not-- I always want to be careful because people say, “So it’s Arabs against blacks,” and it’s not that blanketed of a statement. It is a small percentage of Arab militiamen, just like it would be the KKK here, with this severe racist ideology, that are attacking. So it’s not that Arabs all hate the blacks. Many of them are actually intermingled, and many of the family lines, or the bloodlines, go back many generations. So it’s just the design by those in power, and we’ve seen it-- it’s “How You Maintain Power 101.” If you read history, you see it over and over and over again. It’s how you maintain power.
LIZ WALKER: Did you want to--
JOHN PRENDERGAST: Only to just add a little footnote. We didn’t even talk about this, but this morning, I was reading over some of the information-- which is something we’ll talk about later in the International Criminal Court-- the indictments that were issued in the last couple of days. And there was a quote that the ICC investigators had gotten, received from, that was attributed to one of the masterminds of the genocide, one of the indictees, a government official who is actually, ironically, the Minister of State for Humanitarian Affairs. And he said-- Don had just said a minute ago that this whole counterinsurgency strategy of draining water to catch the fish and Haroun was quoted as saying that “we know that the fish swim in the water, and we took aim at the water.”
LIZ WALKER: Let’s talk about that a little bit. The ICC, The International Criminal Court, last week issued arrest warrants for two men accused of war crimes in Darfur. Now that’s huge, because the ICC alone has a mandate to investigate and prosecute the crime of genocide. But then Sudan says, “We don’t recognize you; we don’t care.” So what does that mean?
JOHN PRENDERGAST: Exactly what the United States has said about the International Criminal Court, “We don’t recognize you; we don’t care.”
LIZ WALKER: Right, so--
JOHN PRENDERGAST: I mean it’s amazing that in that regard, the company that we’re in are places like North Korea and Syria and Iran, who don’t recognize that international body.
LIZ WALKER: What will have to happen, or is that just one more empty threat?
JOHN PRENDERGAST: In the short term, you know, it looks very bleak for the ICC with one of its parents… During the Clinton Administration-- and Ambassador Shattuck knows well-- the United States worked vigorously to put together the international coalition to create the court. Unfortunately, its birth occurred as we were getting the transition to the next administration, which was taking aim at all international treaties, the ICC just being one of them. So imagine this embryonic institution, during the first four or five years of its life, with one of its parents turning on it and trying to destroy it. So the ICC has grown up under very difficult conditions. However, it has managed to issue indictments for five people in Northern Uganda and one in Congo and now two in Darfur, which are the three kind of cases that it’s invested its time in.
I believe the ICC is the most important international legal development regarding accountability since the Nuremberg Trials. We finally have a sitting body that will do it. As soon as we get another president, it really doesn’t matter who it is or what party he’s from, or he or she is from, we will have someone that will be much more constructive towards this issue. Whatever negotiation that has to occur to address the single issue that prevents us from signing will happen and we’ll have the United States on board. That’s the long term. So the medium term is how does the ICC have relevance to Sudan? It perhaps is the ultimate weapon, and I’ll tell you why.
They were only able to issue indictments for two of these officials because the ICC Chief Prosecutor, Ocampo doesn’t have enough evidence, quite, to indict some of the more senior officials, the guys who are really responsible for committing genocide in Darfur, Nafi Ali Nafi, Abdullah Gosh, and there’s a couple of other guys that could and should be indicted for war crimes. And so, who has that evidence? Who has the information, because of our vast signal and human intelligence, that we have been collecting on Sudan since Osama bin Laden lived there in the 1990’s? The United States does. And we’re holding on to it, because of this administration’s neuralgic opposition to international treaties and the International Criminal Court. Imagine the leverage, just imagine the leverage.
Even if the United States chose not to cooperate with the Court, if we put together a little brief in a little folder, sent over an official, no announcement-- every time we announce and bark, we don’t bite-- don’t bark, don’t say a word. Send a person over to meet with Bashir or Taha or Nafi, or one of these officials, put the little folder on the table and say, “Right in that folder we have enough evidence to put you away for life in the International Criminal Court. It’s probable that, because the Court doesn’t have enforcement authority yet, that they won’t grab you in the near future, but as far as our knowledge of history goes, no government has lasted forever. So good luck being the next Milosevic or Pinochet. What do you want us to do? We’re giving you sixty days. Thanks. The meeting is now over. We’ll be taking our brief with us. Do what you think you have to do.” And if they want to be chased for the rest of their lives and established as international pariahs, with the big, big scarlet letter on their shirt saying, “Indicted War Criminal,” it’s their choice. We have that leverage that we are not using, and to me, it’s one of the crying shames of this administration, is that we’re sitting on leverage that could end a genocide, and we’re not using it.
LIZ WALKER: One of the many reasons that I am just loving your book is because you give us many concrete things to do. But in the interim, it seems to me, there’s so much action going on, and none of it is effective, or at least not immediately effective. A case in point: Save Darfur has targeted Fidelity for divestment of PetroChina, which does business in Sudan. And so far, Fidelity, as far as I can understand, has not budged. So Don, what’s going on with the divestment area of this movement? Give us some reason for hope here.
DON CHEADLE: Well, I think it takes time. I mean, in the scope of things, this has been a lot of movement. Since I’ve come on board, I’ve seen a lot of ramping up of the divestment issue. I think when I first got involved, there was maybe two states that had done it. Now we have nine states that have taken this up--
JOHN PRENDERGAST: It took years in South Africa to get ... (inaudible)
DON CHEADLE: Absolutely. That’s right. People are more savvy about it, the movement is happening, there is more of a groundswell. We’re in a somewhat nascent period right now of this movement, but there is movement.
And I think of course we want immediate results. The 2.5 million people on the borders of Chad and Sudan are starving to death and are being denied aid and being denied medical assistance. But I think if we turn away, then we know what the result will be. I think we have to restrengthen this effort and keep pushing. And we have many examples in the book where we show that, as John is quoting, that this arc of justice is bent, that the arc is bending toward justice. It’s just how fast. We just have to continue to keep the pressure on it. We will see it bend toward justice more quickly. I believe we are seeing. It’s not immediate, you know.
Especially in this country, we have a very sort of a sound bite mentality, and we have a very “American Idol results” oriented desire to pick up a phone and see something happen and Sanjaya’s out of there. [laughter] But it’s going to take more time than that.
It’s going to take a more consistent effort, but it is changing. We are at several watershed moments, we believe, that we haven’t been at this place before. We have an election coming up, we have a democratic process, somewhat, in this country that we’re hoping for, and at least six of the candidates have either been to this region or at least spoken extensively about it. It’s a completely bipartisan issue. No one on either side of the aisle is rooting for genocide. In fact, they are crying for it to stop. As these debates come forward, John and I are talking about writing an open letter, so that we can inject this question into the debate. We want to hear our candidates respond to what is their policy going to be with regards Darfur. How are they going to take this up, and if they don’t, then it’s on us to press them, and that’s really where that engine lies.
We also have the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. I mean, I don’t know if all of you know about what happened when Mia Farrow wrote the letter to Steven Spielberg, who was going to go over there and sort of put this PR spin on the Olympics, and said, “I don’t know if you’re aware or not, but you may be the Leni Riefenstahl of 2008.” And immediately he was taken aback and pulled back from the issue. And China sent a representative from their government to the Sudan, and that’s a direct reaction to feeling that they might be shamed. For whatever reason, and the reason is the Olympics, at this time, China does care, the government cares about how they are perceived in the world. So we have to take advantage of that right now.
We also have this Plan B that is sitting in the wings. Hopefully it will be signed by our president and that will give some real teeth to what we’re trying to do in Sudan with target sanctions and assets frozen and travel bans, and we have to try to keep the pressure on them. We know about these measures and we know about these levers. We as the people have to push them, because as long as there’s no cost, political cost to an action, it’ll just be business as usual, and that cost comes from us. It doesn’t come from the top down, it comes from the bottom up.
JOHN PRENDERGAST: All I want to say is, this very well could be, ladies and gentlemen, the first time anyone has uttered the words “Darfur” and “Sanjaya” in the same sentence. [laughter]
LIZ WALKER: Only in America, only in America. John, I hear the terms “genocide,” and then I hear “humanitarian crisis.” What’s the difference there politically, morally-- what’s going on with the two words?
JOHN PRENDERGAST: Well, I guess there are kind of layers of definitions. “Humanitarian crisis” is the catchall phrase. In fact, when you really want to softball your response, you sort of say it’s a humanitarian crisis, and then you say, “By the way, we’re giving a billion dollars in humanitarian assistance.” During 2004, during the debates-- talking about the debates for 2008-- in 2004, when President Bush and Senator Kerry had their first debate, it was a foreign policy debate. And remarkably, one of the first questions that Jim Lehrer asked was, what are you going to do about-- you both called this thing a genocide. By the way, Bush called it genocide as a result of pressure that was mounting during the electoral campaign, which just gives more credence to Don’s point about the 2008 electoral process being a watershed.
And so when Lehrer asked them, what are you going to do about it, they hemmed and hawed, both of them, which they were very good at-- I shouldn’t say that-- for thirty seconds, and they ended up by saying well, we’re giving more humanitarian assistance. It’s apples and oranges. When you’re talking about genocide, as you all know-- and as obviously, they didn’t-- you’re talking about the commission of a crime, where the orchestrater or the perpetrator intends-- which is a very specific thing-- intends to kill, in whole or part, a specific group of people on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity. Humanitarian aid isn’t going to stop them from doing that, and if we're going to be serious about stopping genocide, we're going to have to address the motivations and calculations of the killers. And these guys in Khartoum-- as Don said, the objective of genocide in this case, just as it was in 1994 in Rwanda, his term, his phrase is correct: maintaining power by any means necessary-- and these guys are willing to use genocide.
So we’re going to have to, very creatively, think about some very robust measures in order to respond to that, because they’re not going to be stopped with speeches or use of the term threats. Speeches in the Holocaust Museum, like we saw two weeks ago-- Don and I were talking about-- that President Bush made, where he basically threatened to threaten. I mean, we have to have very specific actions and take them. And that’s really what-- and my last point there would be-- I can’t even remember what the original question was--
DON CHEADLE: --the difference between calling it a genocide versus crimes against humanity or acts of atrocity.
JOHN PRENDERGAST: Well, don’t ruin it.
DON CHEADLE: I’m refreshing your memory!
JOHN PRENDERGAST: But the key point there is, completely unrelated to the question, is that this Plan B, which we really can’t reinforce enough, is so central to whether or not the United States is going to take the necessary leadership to stop what is unfolding as Phase Two of the genocide in Darfur. And Plan B is simply the elaboration of what the Genocide Conventions ask, which again is, signatory states commit themselves to do all they can to prevent-- too late for that-- or to punish the crime of genocide. How can we have gone four years now with this genocide unfolding and not one significant punitive measure has been imposed on the senior officials who are responsible for it? And that’s what Plan B is supposed to be.
Right now, measures that President Bush is considering introducing are a little too unilateral and not quite extensive enough to get the Sudanese government’s attention in order to change their calculations, to get them to pull back, dismantle the janjaweed militia and stop the genocide.
You yourself traveled in 2001 with the Christian Solidarity International, because you were looking at the slave trade. Now the slave trade is very interesting. During the 1990’s, the government of Sudan invested in a number of militias in Southwestern Sudan, in the same way that they’ve invested now in the janjaweed. And those militias were called the Murahilin. And everybody at that time said, “Oh boy, it’s a Frankenstein monster gone out of control. Even if the Sudanese government stopped funding these guys and stopped supporting them, they’re still going to run amok.”
Well, when the heat got too high because of people like you and Gloria going over there and shining a spotlight, and the United States took the lead-- the last administration took the lead, and Ambassador Shattuck was part of this-- in isolating the Sudanese government for these kinds of actions, the Sudanese government stopped. They basically dismantled the war machine. You know what? There was no more slavery; it stopped. And so we’ve got to do the same thing now. And Plan B is part of that. It’s still not strong enough, so it’s going to be up to us, basically, to demand that he takes stronger measures, but it’s the directional thing that’s right now. Because if we stay with this sort of constructive engagement, where we’re just having tea with mass murderers and pleading with them to stop killing their own people, it isn’t going to happen. We have to impose a cost for committing genocide and change their calculations in Khartoum.
DON CHEADLE: And the EU has just announced that they would hopefully have the motivation for us that by June-- which is great, because they’ve actually set a timeline and just haven’t said, we’re going to do something at some point-- by June, if there hasn’t been anything done, that they are going to begin to impose the kinds of measures that John is talking about. And we have to be shamed into being second to do something, that’s fine. But this is another watershed moment. This is another hope that we have, another thing we can look forward to that will hopefully affect things on the ground.
LIZ WALKER: What I believe you both are recommending in the book is a program of, I’m calling behavior modification, on the part of the government in Khartoum. Why not just regime change? Why not just say, get Bashira-- he seems like the man we need to get out of there, to me. Am I naïve? Why not just recommend that?
DON CHEADLE: Well, we can recommend it, but I think it’s very-- our track record on sending Americans into an Arab-led country to change the people that are working there is not good, so I think we have to continue to attempt in every way to make this an international effort and not to move unilaterally, as John is saying, not to say that we’re the only ones. And when I testified a few months ago-- I testified with General Dallaire, Romeo Dallaire, who was one of the commanders, one of the only remaining commanders, the UN commander in Rwanda at the time, and one of the senators asked him, I think trying to set him up to say “Don’t you think that if we went in there, given the hit that we’ve taken around the world for-- that our moral authority has taken-- don’t you think if we are the ones to go in there, guns blazing”-- you know, he didn’t say these exact words but it was hidden in his rhetoric-- and Dallaire said, “Why do you want to set yourself up like that? Why do you always want to be the ones that are going to either take the credit for it or take the hit for it by yourself?
We should be working with everyone in this one.” He said, “Our country should be doing more too.” You know, First World, Second World-- all these nations need to come together because the dangerous thing is when you call something genocide, when you use the word, invoke that, and then do nothing, it obviously emboldens the perpetrators of it as well as telling others, who may be thinking about putting their own agenda down, which may be genocidal, that it’s all good. Go for it. And I think that that’s the scariest thing.
And we here in this country are very comfortable, and we obviously don’t believe that our shoulder will be tapped and we’re going to be the next one that someone’s going to try that with. But as we see, this sort of bleeds beyond the borders and we see the violence spread. In fact, it’s become so bad in Chad now, the neighboring country, that some of the refugees who fled into Chad are coming back to Darfur because it’s dangerous in Chad, because the militias are linking up. So this thing becomes vital in a way that will soon-- it’s potential to take over that entire region is very possible. It’s not some theoretical idea. We see it happening.
LIZ WALKER: I’m in the process of doing a documentary on Reverend Gloria and her work in the Sudan-- that’s my commercial, okay? But the reason I’m doing that is because the media doesn’t seem to be showing up on this story. What’s your assessment of the media, nationally, locally, internationally, responding to this crisis?
DON CHEADLE: Well John has said this, and it’s true: it’s really a supply and demand market, as everything is. And the media-- none of these things are somehow not a part of us.
You know, we like to point at things and go, “The Media,” as if people don’t make it, or “The Government,” as if we have nothing to do with it, you know? It’s what this administration is saying about the United Nations. You know, “It’s the UN,” as if we aren’t one of the major components of the UN and have no control there. And again, we say that we have to let our affiliates know, the local news know, the major news know. We have mechanisms to reach out to them, and it doesn’t take that long, and it’s not that arduous of a task, and you can form a small coalition and make a bigger fist than just your one single voice, and tell the media that this is what you want.
Why aren’t we reporting about this? Why, in the last several years while this has been going on, that there’s been twenty minutes devoted to that and I don’t know in the last three months, how much to Anna Nicole Smith, how much to Britney cutting her hair off. Those are-- like I said, we’re really a sound bite and “Give it to me quick” kind of a society. But that’s us. If we accept that that’s what we’re getting, then that’s what we’ll continue to get. We have to have as much energy and as much devotion to seeing what we want to see and pressing the media to do what we want it to do as we do with anything else. And if we don’t, then really we don’t have anyone to blame, we really can’t get mad because the news doesn’t cover what we want it to cover. Tell it what to cover.
JOHN PRENDERGAST: Here’s the big secret. Most members of the media, with some exceptions, are not obsessed individually with Anna Nicole Smith. They really are-- Liz is the tip of the iceberg. What I’ve found, and you tell me if I’m wrong, is that there’s all kinds of people in print and electronic journalism who really want to cover these issues, but it’s the supply and demand factor. So we have to demonstrate to our affiliates here of NBC, ABC, CBS, and if we’re feeling really rambunctious, you can even call up Fox, and just tell them. I mean, why is it that you can’t-- it’s an email, it’s a call, and if every one of you did it, if you got five people to do it, and all of a sudden the NBC affiliate or the CBS affiliate or whatever, received five, six or eight-- “Why can’t we just see a little bit about what’s going on in the 21st century’s first genocide? What’s wrong with you that you wouldn’t cover this? This matters to us.” You’ve got to do-- just like we-- I mean the bottom, the bedrock of our political system is based upon American citizens letting their elected officials know what they care about, and then the elected officials hopefully responding to our concerns. It’s the same with the media: supply and demand. Don’t forget that.
LIZ WALKER: You have really turned a lot of my questions around to what we can do, so let’s talk about the most immediate things that people here can do. Maybe you’re not an activist or maybe you’re not Reverend Gloria, but what can we do?
JOHN PRENDERGAST: One of the things we were doing while we weren’t writing this book, when we were delaying and procrastinating-- oh, I see, it’s just funny to us, huh? [laughter] It wasn’t funny, actually. Just staring, he always talks about that blinking cursor, you know, just haunting him--
DON CHEADLE: I dare you to write something!
JOHN PRENDERGAST: So, well, one of the delaying tactics was to hold meetings. We would bring some very interesting people together from different sectors of society to talk about what we could do. And out of that germinated a new campaign called the ENOUGH campaign, just launched the last couple of months. Lisa Rogoff is here and will have some materials. But one of the things that the materials has is a list of things that you can do, that you yourself can do, that we believe very, very strongly, based on our collective experience, can make a difference. And let’s go through a couple of them just illustratively, and jump in any time, Don.
As individual-- and all of you know this; it’s patently obvious-- but as an individual, there’s very little that we can do, that we can accomplish on our own, and that’s a lesson, certainly, our own government ought to have learned by now. But collectively, when you join forces with other people of like mind and like spirits, we can do a lot more. So join an organization. If you’re not already part of one, there are so many, we’re not going to advertise any particular ones except to say that the Save Darfur Coalition have-- you know, it’s 185 faith- and non-faith-based organizations, a coalition. There’s the Genocide Intervention Network, which is a wonderful group started by students. There’s a student network called Stand. There’s Amnesty International, which we all know and probably at some point have been members of. Rejoin it. There’s so many different groups you can join, and they all have their own variation or form of things that you can do on the ground, in your daily life.
Secondly, after joining an organization, I’ve got to make another plug for the oldest trick in the book, which is just getting in touch with your elected officials. They have to hear from you. The quantifiable factoring in of an elected official to understand what his or her voting public cares about is through the emails, phone calls, the letters and, most importantly is that-- I really urge you to do this-- is get a group of people together and make an appointment with your two Senate offices. When your Senator comes frequently back home and they meet people, fourteen hours a day, that’s what they do. Why not you? Why not about Darfur? I can’t tell you how many Senators and Congresspersons have told me, back in Washington, the reason-- the first time they really decided okay, I’ve got to do something about this, is when they were home in Nebraska, Iowa, or Kansas, and they were told by constituents that it mattered to them. And they remember the moment where that person came up to them and said, “How could you not do anything about this?” or “How could you not be leading on this? How could your voice not be raised? Just don’t vote the right way, be a leader on this thing.” We’ve got to demand that our-- the Senators here are influential ones, and they have to be pushing this issue much more than they are.
The third thing you can do is-- and stop me whenever you want; I could go on for hours-- the third thing you can do is you can literally call our president and leave a message. They quantify it at the end of the day. That’s 202-456-1414, that’s the White House comment line. If they get five hundred, a thousand, a thousand five hundred calls a day on a particular issue, Karl Rove is going to know about it. And, frankly speaking, if we don’t politicize responding to mass atrocities and crimes against humanity, nobody’s ever going to do a damn thing.
LIZ WALKER: Go on. I just wanted to say I was going to stop you here, only because we have all these questions from the people here. Don, did you want to add anything?
DON CHEADLE: No, that’s a lot of questions.
LIZ WALKER: That number?
JOHN PRENDERGAST: 202-456-1414.
DON CHEADLE: And we do believe that is-- I’ll just say this before we move to the questions, you know. I was asked to meet with Condoleezza Rice several months ago, and I don’t believe that would have happened had there not been this feedback, had she not believed, because basically what she just called me in to tell me to tell people to back off of President Bush, but--
JOHN PRENDERGAST: It really is remarkable, frankly. I’ve heard his account-- it’s unbelievable.
DON CHEADLE: But I’m saying, that’s what we’re talking about. That’s what happens when the din reaches the level. She’s like, “Tell your people to chill it out.” But that means that it’s getting there, that means that there is a reaction, especially if she thinks I can do that.
LIZ WALKER: What was her official reason? You know, I know why--
DON CHEADLE: Because she said that the president is actually-- and this is again, this ...(inaudible) comes back-- she said that George Bush is doing all he can. It’s really at the UN. This is the problem, the problem is the UN. They have a very bureaucratic process and a lot of red tape, and it takes a long time to push it through. And incidentally, she said to me, “When we missed Lebanon and Israel-- when that happened and the soldiers were kidnapped and that blew up and we needed a resolution quickly-- I sent someone down there personally to sit on that process and make sure it got pushed through. I said, “Well, I guess when you want there to be a result at the UN, you take certain measures to ensure that they happen, and when you kind of just want things to go along, you don’t.” So it was strange to on one hand say it’s the UN, and on the other hand say, well I sent someone down to the UN on this issue because I needed it rushed through. So the two things didn’t quite meet up to me.
LIZ WALKER: Here’s some questions from our audience. What role is--
DON CHEADLE: And I will be taken off and sent to ...
LIZ WALKER: What role is the African Union playing in Darfur, and would it be best if the US empowered the African Union?
DON CHEADLE: Well, the African Union-- it is also interesting to note that one of the first countries that wanted to respond to this and has battalions, literally two battalions waiting to go in and strengthen the African Union and support them, is Rwanda. And they do want to handle this internally. They obviously need support and this is what we’re talking about with this Plan B, and we need to get behind them. But right now, as it stands, the African Union has about seven thousand members there, roughly, to patrol an area basically the size of Texas or the size of France, so it’s an impossible task. And their mandate actually doesn’t even allow them to engage the enemy unless they come under direct attack. They are not allowed to protect civilians, even if they witness that they are being attacked, to directly engage the enemy. They are allowed to report and send information back, so their mandate needs to be strengthened as well as their numbers need to be strengthened.
LIZ WALKER: Mr. Prendergast, why is the present administration not supporting the ICC? You touched on this a little bit.
JOHN PRENDERGAST: I think there are two levels, probably, and John, you probably know better than anybody. But the first level is just this opposition to international treaties and these kinds of things, and the idea of this creeping global government that all the neo-cons are very, very suspicious of.
But then I think that the second level is more a legitimate issue that has to be dealt with on both sides of the aisle, and certainly there are Democrats who, and well meaning and good Republicans, who want to see us play a more appropriate role in the world, have a problem with, and that is the question whether American forces in peacekeeping operations can be indicted by the International Criminal Court. And so I think that there will probably need to be some finessing or negotiation that goes on to clarify the mandate, not just for the United States-- that would be sort of just more hubris and is unnecessary and alienating to the world-- but rather, a real negotiation so that, you know, whatever compromise is required about troops operating in peacekeeping environments or when you cross borders for humanitarian purposes, which brings us into much greater gray areas, but that’s what negotiations are all about-- we find a common ground with the rest of the world so we can sign it. I think, with few exceptions, most of the candidates for 2008 are much more constructive than this current crop here, and the likelihood is that the United States will be able to move forward to be part of the ICC in the coming years, coming administration. I hope. Unless there’s a certain-- oh, never mind.
LIZ WALKER: This is a follow-up to something you both have talked about a little bit. The US has an exceptionally poor global reputation these days, especially with Muslim countries. Why do you think in Darfur, the Sudan government would ever listen, would ever respond to diplomatic pressure? Why do you think that Sudan would ever respond to diplomatic pressure, given the poor global reputation that the US has?
JOHN PRENDERGAST: We can hope and wish for things to be a certain way, or we can look, as students of history and diplomacy, at empirical evidence as our guide. And it just so happens, fortunately, that we have eighteen years of empirical evidence to study, which this regime has been in power in Khartoum for. And during those eighteen years, we have three occasions when the government of Sudan, when pressured diplomatically and with financial sanctions and with the threat of potential military force, credible threat of military force, when those levers have been applied, the Sudan government has changed its policies fairly dramatically.
The three cases, very briefly, because they’re fascinating cases if you’re just interested in history and international relations. First one is, that of course that was mentioned already, bin Laden lived in Sudan from ’90 to ’96. The Sudanese government was a major state sponsor of terror in the 1990’s. The Clinton administration imposed a series of measures through the United Nations Security Council-- key point. The government of Sudan kicked bin Laden out, kicked the other terrorist groups out, severed most of the ties, dismantled the terrorist training camps, dismantled Al Qaeda’s commercial infrastructure, etc. etc. etc. They changed their behavior in response to international pressure through the UN Security Council, which took real measures.
Second case, again, which you and Gloria are well familiar with, is this slavery issue. When the United States led the international community to create real costs for the government support for these militias that were raiding villages in southern Sudan and led to a full scale resumption of the slave trade-- when the United States led those efforts, the Sudanese government pulled the plugs on the militias, and the slave raidings stopped.
Third case is the larger context in which slavery found itself, was the North/South war, which we all know about. Two million people died, probably the second deadliest war since World War II. It came to an end in 2005. Again, United States diplomatic leadership. We sent a presidential envoy, former Senator John Danforth. A lot of pressure was applied on the Sudanese government. There was support to the neighbors, who brought military pressure against the Sudanese regime. And as a combination of all these different factors, the government signed a peace deal, even though it was certainly dedicated to destroying the south militarily, it changed its policy as a result of pressure.
Forget about opinions; what we’re trying to bring to you today is facts, that this government changes its behavior when there’s pressure with punitive measures. What the hell are we waiting for in Darfur?
LIZ WALKER: John, you said the end of slavery. And this question says, can you predict when and how slavery will end in Sudan? So this person obviously thinks slavery’s still ongoing there, and in other areas of the world that still have slavery. Is slavery over in Sudan?
JOHN PRENDERGAST: Well, the support to these militias, I said, was terminated. There are-- I guess I see that the flip question is, there are thousands of people who were enslaved during the 1990’s, and many of whom have not been accounted for. There was a very comprehensive effort to catalog by going back to the villages in Southwestern Sudan, particularly in Bargazal, to quantify and get the case studies of nearly everyone. I mean, it was a very comprehensive study, led by ... (inaudible), who is a Southern Sudanese academic. And there are in the neighborhood of thirteen or fourteen thousand people that they can certainly say were enslaved. The estimates from Christian Solidarity International were in the hundreds of thousands. We don’t know if that’s true or false. We can only say that there are certainly above ten thousand. So there are thousands still unaccounted for.
So what are we going to do about that? Well, there are efforts, diplomatic efforts, underway, or that have been underway for some time now, working through the United Nations, through UNICEF particularly, through the International Committee for the Red Cross, and through Save the Children, the international nongovernmental organization based in the US and London. And all of these groups backed, by fairly substantial diplomatic efforts, to try to find these people, where are they, and to try to identify them and to bring them home. The trickle has not turned into a stream yet, and this is a shame on us, because we haven’t been able to do it. That’s the thing: there are so many issues in Sudan that we’re pursuing at the same time, sometimes these kinds of issues get dropped out.
So there still has to be a much more vigorous effort undertaken to try to identify these people, find out where they are, and then undertake whatever action is necessary. Sometimes it’s not very easy when somebody has been literally living as part of a household for some time, as we can all imagine. How do you deal with that, especially because it’s often powerful people in local areas who have these people, who have enslaved people, who have bought these people to work for them. So to get them out somehow, the government of Sudan doesn’t want to mess with this stuff, so it’s a process of negotiation and difficulty.
So it’s still going on, efforts are still being made to try to bring those people back, but in terms of large scale conscription of people and abductions of people in Sudan, I think we’ve seen the end of that, for now. But as you say, as long as regime change isn’t in the offing, as long as they’re in power, as long as we’re still just kind of nibbling at the edges of the solutions, well, there’s potential for the resumption of that.
Just one last footnote to this is-- and because we talk about Darfur, and I’m sure Gloria would really support the sentiment, which is, we have to have a Sudan policy. You know, we have to ensure that the North/South peace agreement that I mentioned, that war that took two million lives, needs to be implemented fully, so that the Southerners have their chance at a referendum for independence in 2011. We have to go out and make sure that these people who were enslaved are returned home. We have to make sure that we continue to receive the kind of information the CIA says is important for us to receive from the Sudanese government about Al Qaeda when we ask them, or the dribs and drabs of current terrorism stuff that we need from them. And we need to see a number of things happen in Darfur so that this genocide will end and a peace deal will finally be signed. We have multiple things. We gotta walk, chew gum, whistle, and do a number of things at the same time. We do it, or we try at least to do it on Iraq and North Korea and Iran when it matters to us. We have to do it for Sudan as well.
LIZ WALKER: And Don, a little more personal question for you, and I may be wrong, but I think that this is a new level of activism for you, at least at this height, at this depth. What was your biggest surprise about taking this issue on, about the world, and about yourself?
DON CHEADLE: Well, I think I was surprised how once I said I want to be involved in this, this is something that I want to do, how many people there were. I mean, this gathering surprises me. When I started talking to John-- he mentioned last night, he would show up at events and there’d be six people and there’d be a bunch of chairs, and he’d say, let’s just move the chairs out of the way and sit on the floor and talk, because no one was showing up. And we’ve seen the numbers really increase dramatically, I think, since I got involved with this and seen a lot of results.
And the third time I went to Africa, John and I, we went to Uganda and I brought my children with me. And we went to these IDP camps and World Vision camps and met with these child soldiers who had been abducted and had either escaped or been freed, and were in these camps, trying to deal with all that they had seen and all that they had done and all that they had to live with and try to come to grips with it, some reconciliation with themselves over what had happened in their lives. And I brought my children, and they were there for these conversations, and they heard these stories that these soldiers told. And my children are ten and twelve, the same age as a lot of these boys and girls who had dealt with this. Initially I felt that it was possibly the wrong thing to do, you know. I wasn’t sure if I should expose them to this kind of harrowing story, but it really sensitized them, and it gave rise to their interesting conversations, and they weren’t traumatized. I mean, maybe they’re going to end up on the couch in five or six years and I’ll have to pay some huge therapy bill, but at this point, it really sort of sensitized them and woke them up to a world that was beyond their little existence in Los Angeles and definitely one much less privileged than they’re aware of.
And it’s kind of had a similar effect on me, going to Darfur, seeing these children, mostly, really, and interacting with them without the benefit of speaking each other’s language. And that’s when you really start to feel like, that’s me; I’m them. Any one of these children could be my kids, if we could get along and they didn’t clean their rooms too. So it just sort of sensitized me, and woke me up. And you realize that the road is long. Someone said to me the other day, why should we care, why should I even do this, and do you think it’s going to make any difference? And I said, well, I know what not doing anything will do. I don’t know if this is going to make a difference, I don’t know if we’re going to come back a year from now and be meeting and going okay, we’re still looking at the same problem again, what can we do? But I know if I don’t do anything, then I don’t really have a leg to stand on, so I just wanted to be about it, not just talk about it.
JOHN PRENDERGAST: I just want to let my man know that he ought to probably put a little money aside, because having those kids have him as a father, they’re going to need therapy. [laughter]
LIZ WALKER: I was just going to wrap up, John, with a question for you along the same line. You see so much of the evil and what doesn’t work in the world, how do you hold on to hope, what gives you the most hope?
JOHN PRENDERGAST: Therapy does indeed help. Hanging around with him, that’s a form of therapy, it’s a strange one, it’s radical therapy. But I think, you know, I’m sure there are a lot of people in this room who have spent a lot of time in difficult situations. Now I’ve got about a quarter of a century, dragging around in war zones in Africa, and I think you do anesthetize a bit- self-anesthetizing, I would just put that thing in there, and build up little walls here to the despair. But I think that the thing that just sustains me is the-- again, I just go back, rather than having opinions, go to fact-- there is empirical evidence all across this continent, the continent that I love so much of Africa, that the capacity for transformation is literally unlimited. I mean, if you look at Sierra Leone or Liberia ten years ago or seven years ago, with the child soldiers and the, you know, amputation as a tactic of war by the RUF and Charles Taylor, and then you look today at Sierra Leone and Liberia, both democracies, one of which elected the first woman president in Africa, something we could take a chapter out of. I mean, it’s remarkable. Look at South Africa.
Don and I both just spent time there, you know, and ten, fifteen years ago, Nelson Mandela in prison and white supremacy was like the legal code of the land. Now you go there and it’s an incredible place. Transformation is unlimited. Southern Sudan, a place that both you and Gloria visited yourselves. I’ve spent so much time over the last twenty years in Southern Sudan. Once there was a peace deal and the shots stopped being fired, people are moving back, rebuilding little places which had been burned to the ground, little huts. One of the most incredible stories all of you probably know about, is the lost boys. Well, the story we see of the lost boys with the movies and the books-- and please read it, and you go-- and the next step, if Dave was to write the next sequel or had a postscript, it’s now the lost boys coming here and trying to figure out how to live in the United States, but now some of them are starting to go back home. They got an education. They’re going back to Southern Sudan and they’re going to be future leaders in Southern Sudan. You talk about coming from hell and then going back, and then trying to rebuild, or build your heaven on earth, and that’s what they think, that’s what they believe, communally and individually.
So I mean, how can you not-- I’m like excited by the work that I do and being able to visit places, because I know Darfur is down now. Darfur is at its moment of need, it’s on life support, the IV’s hooked up to the whole region, and just as every other case that I’ve mentioned, we could go on and on-- what about Rwanda in 1994 and Rwanda today? My God, it’s just unrecognizable, the difference. And I know that Darfur, if given just a little hand from us, if we do the right thing, if we are upstanders and not bystanders in the face of this genocide, that it too, like all these other cases, will be able to transform itself, and that’s an exciting thing to be part of.
LIZ WALKER: Okay thank you, thank you.
[applause]
LIZ WALKER: We’re going to ask the audience to remain in your seats for just a minute, because we’re going to escort Don and John to the book signing. But I want to thank you both for being our leaders. I want to thank you for your activism, for your courage, and I think you both give us hope. Thank you very much.
END