Not on Our Watch (6 page)

I hate waking up early. I’m an unapologetic, unreformed vampire, hard-pressed to lay my head on the pillow before 3am. Let’s just say it isn’t easy to get me out of bed anywhere in the vicinity of the crack of dawn. So when I first heard the sound of banging on my hotel door on a scorching July morning in Khartoum in 2003, I wasn’t pleased. I knew the zealous housekeeping staff liked to finish their work before it got too hot, but they knew from experience that my room was usually the last one they would have access to on any given day. But when the knocking persisted and even got louder, I knew I had to surrender and find out the reason for the urgency of the knuckles on my door.

I opened the door and my friend the bellhop practically tumbled into the room, breathlessly proclaiming that this time I had gone too far. ‘You’ve been declared an enemy of the state,’ he blurted, with a mixture of satisfaction and concern. ‘The foreign minister is saying your security cannot be guaranteed. That is decidedly not good.’

My first reaction was logistical. Having been in more than a few jams over two decades travelling in war zones, I usually liked to make sure I had a good escape plan, just in case the temperature rose a little too fast. Over the years, I’d been shot at, bombed, mortared, imprisoned, beaten, threatened (credibly, I would hasten to add), deported, surveilled, chased, and defamed a hundred ways till Sunday. (My mother’s prayer group saying the rosary for me is probably the main reason I am still alive today.) But this ‘enemy of the state’ thing was a new one, and I didn’t know for sure what the next move would be.

The bellhop wasn’t finished. Apparently, my appearance on the Arabic television equivalent of CNN, Al-Jazeera, went over like a lead balloon with the authorities. I had emptied my rhetorical chambers into the camera the day before, saying that the leaders of the regime should be tried for war crimes in front of an international tribunal for what they were doing in Darfur and what they had done in the south of the country. This was an unwelcome message at the time, as the regime was doing its best to clean up its image around the world and trying to keep what it was doing in Darfur under the radar screen. My eyewitness account to Al-Jazeera, broadcast live from Khartoum, appeared like a rabid skunk at a white linen picnic. The daggers were drawn quickly. The bellhop was sure my life was in danger, even though he was clearly pleased with the message I’d delivered, given that his own family had been victimised in a village raid a year earlier by government-backed militia in Darfur.

My second reaction was one that I had unfortunately had a few too many times in my life: ‘Another fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into, JP!’ It was hard to imagine the chain of events that led me to that moment. I will try, however, starting with the ideas and influences that eventually came to shape my character. They originated early on, in the dark basements of the houses I lived in as a kid, where I would voraciously consume comic books about my heroes who took on evil to protect the helpless. The Mighty Thor, Captain America, Batman, Daredevil, and the Silver Surfer were all guys who hated injustice and put their lives on the line for it. They all had certain powers that they used in the service of others, often to the detriment of their own lives. When I was a kid, I used to read about these superheroes like there was no tomorrow. I wanted to be like them somehow, wanted to stand for something good. I was especially drawn to the darker characters, the ones with significant personal flaws, those who were running from something yet throwing themselves into their mission. Their humanity, their vulnerability, made their commitment all the more appealing. I always felt that many of their powers were just exaggerations of things certain human beings were capable of under extreme pressure (with the possible exceptions of flying, shooting spiderwebs out of hands, turning green, and picking up entire buildings). When I would hear about things like floods in Bangladesh or famines in Africa, I wondered why someone like my superheroes couldn’t save the victims.

But of course there are no superheroes in that sense and we don’t really ‘save victims’. It is about working with others in defence of justice and human rights. And that means some element of sacrifice, even if it is just a few minutes on a computer to write a letter. After the Al-Jazeera interview, the correspondent asked me, ‘Aren’t you worried for your safety? I keep hearing about you running into trouble. Why do you do it?’ My response: ‘Anger. I can’t accept that we just stand idly by while entire peoples are being extinguished because of the actions and advantage of a few people. Every time I think I will walk away from this and become a sportswriter, focusing on my beloved Kansas City Chiefs, I see something like this and it just flames me up again. I’m doomed to do this for as long as I live.’

But last I checked, the contract for this book doesn’t say ‘autobiography’, so I will spare you the details of my childhood. Save that one for some future movie of the week. The far distant future. Or maybe my baby brother Luke can write it; he remembers everything. I mean everything. For the purposes of this story, however, the journey really begins later, in my early 20s, when I was a somewhat clichéd rebel without a cause and a crusader in search of a mission.

After bouncing around the United States and going to four different universities, I ended up back in my adopted hometown of Philadelphia, working for a congressman and going to Temple University at night for my fifth and final undergraduate stop. (Papa was a rolling stone, a frozen food salesman to be exact, and this apple didn’t land too far from Jack’s tree.) I was doing all kinds of stuff focused on urban problems in the United States: my job with the congressman allowed me to get involved in many things. I also was a Big Brother to kids in the Big Brother/Little Brother programme, as well as to kids I met in the homeless shelters where I was volunteering. (That’s the next book.)

I loved my work and loved what I was studying at school on urban policy, but in 1983 a story broke that changed my life forever. The famine in what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea emerged into the public consciousness very slowly, as these kinds of issues do, if they ever do at all.

The ‘Ethiopian Famine’ of 1983–1985 resulted from the tactics of war pursued by the Ethiopian regime at the time against Eritreans fighting for independence and Ethiopians fighting for a more inclusive government; these tactics were exacerbated by drought. Many of the war tactics used by that regime have been replicated by the Sudanese government in Darfur. For more information and a cheap plug, see John Prendergast and Mark Duffield,
Without Troops and Tanks,
Red Sea Press (Lawrenceville, 1994).

I kept seeing these pictures of mass starvation (mostly on those post-midnight fund-raising paid programmes that organisations buy to highlight the horrors they are trying to ameliorate with their food and medicine) and reading into them messages of a world that just didn’t care enough to do whatever was necessary to end the suffering of those people. There were images of hundreds of thousands of homeless Ethiopians and Eritreans in makeshift camps—people living and dying in the worst circumstances humanly possible. I was overwhelmed by the pictures; all of my empathetic and protective tendencies went into overdrive. I hadn’t studied any of these issues, but I knew at the bottom of it all there must lie a massive core of injustice, overlaid by a blanket of apathy.

In 1984, I decided to go to Africa to investigate for myself. After reading all those comic books and believing in the ultimate triumph of good over evil, it was time for Captain America’s number one fan—naive but determined—to spring into action. I believed very innocently then that if the United States would just get involved, we could fix everything.

My education was about to begin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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