Not on Our Watch (16 page)

Genocide Intervention Network (GI-Net)

An Ecuadorian student who recently graduated from Swarthmore College and the grandson of four Holocaust survivors, Mark Hanis is no stranger to the concept of genocide. Embracing the slogan, ‘Never Again’, Hanis’ battle against genocide began early in his college career. After a seven-month internship in 2003 at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, he became interested in ways to respond to and prevent genocide. Upon his return to school in 2004, the lack of campus attention to the tenth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda disturbed Hanis, so with a passionate group of students at school, he created a Genocide Awareness Month in April. The month included a screening of the documentary
Ghosts of Rwanda
and a special presentation by Joseph Sebarenzi, the former speaker of the Rwandan House of Parliament. As a result of this awareness month, students geared up to learn more about Rwanda and the crisis that was unfolding in Sudan. They created a Do It Yourself (DIY) kit to help students raise awareness and action for Darfur on campus. The students put the kit online, and the word began to spread to campuses across the country.

While news of the DIY kit and campus activism was spreading, Hanis and friend Andrew Sniderman devised a creative and unprecedented proposal: fund-raising for the African Union peacekeepers on the ground in Darfur, given that these forces were the only ones currently deployed to protect the people there. They also wanted to help create an anti-genocide constituency. Hanis and Sniderman knew that previously when Americans did get political around issues relating to genocide, the community of activists dissolved after the crisis. It is necessary to have a permanent anti-genocide constituency because ‘Darfur won’t be the last genocide,’ Hanis explains. ‘Looking back at Rwanda, don’t we wish someone had supported General Dallaire when he asked the United Nations for more civilian protection? Yes, of course.’

Hanis and Sniderman concluded that if organisations could fund-raise for food, there was no reason they couldn’t fund-raise for civilian protection. Convinced the idea was plausible, they asked for advice from Holocaust and Genocide Studies professors at various universities, and the positive feedback spurred them to begin pulling all-nighters, e-mailing former presidents, secretaries of state, and other high-level officials from past administrations to ask for support in fund-raising for the AU peacekeeping force.

The duo got Gayle Smith (now a senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress) on board. Soon after, Howard Wolpe, the director of the Africa Program at the Woodrow Wilson Centre; Anthony Lake, President Clinton’s first national security advisor; James Smith, chief executive of the Aegis Trust; and John agreed to support the proposal. As support was building, Gayle felt confident in the efforts, and she made a trip to Ethiopia to negotiate a contract with the AU. The AU was ‘taken aback’ but impressed with the students’ unique approach. Swarthmore Sudan morphed into an international effort and took on a new name: the Genocide Intervention Fund (GIF).

The team pressed further and developed a new fund-raising initiative called ‘100 Days of Action,’ which began on 6 April 2005, the 11th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. During those 100 days, GIF asked students, religious groups, and other organisations to hold events to both raise awareness and fund-raise to support the African Union, including a press event on Capitol Hill and a day of lobbying Congress. Hanis believes that the 100,000 letters that they solicited helped attract 16 more sponsors on the Darfur legislation bills that were circulating.

Spurred by GIF, Mamaroneck High School in New York raised $5,000 with a benefit concert, ‘Jam for Sudan.’ A screening of
Hotel Rwanda
at Cornell University raised close to $3,000. Other schools sold bracelets and hosted a ‘Salsa for Sudan’ fund-raiser. Overall, the ‘100 Days of Action’ project raised a quarter of a million dollars, and the organisation worked with the US Treasury Department to get the requisite approvals to send the money to the African Union. Enthusiasm was building; GIF received a letter from one man who wrote, ‘Thank you for reviving my faith in humanity.’

Stephanie Nyombayire, a Swarthmore student from Rwanda, had a very personal reason to become involved with GIF. Stephanie lost over 100 family members and friends during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and she was determined to do everything in her power to avert a similar failure to act in Darfur. She became GIF’s outreach director, and early in 2005 she took a trip to the Chad/Darfur border with Nate Wright of STAND and Andrew Karlsruher, a film student from Boston University. The three of them had received a grant from mtvU, a division of MTV, to be student correspondents and film a documentary about the plight of the refugees.

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.