Not on Our Watch: The
Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond by Don
Cheadle, John Prendergast delves into the government's excuses
for inaction.
From Publishers Weekly: Over the past five years, youth groups,
religious organizations,
politicians and individuals have responded to the crisis in
Sudan in increased numbers. This book is a guide for these
already involved, as well as those who are interested in taking
action, or speaking out against the mass killings that continue
to occur in the country's Darfur region. Coauthored by Cheadle,
actor and star of the film Hotel Rwanda, and Prendergast, senior
adviser of the International Crisis Group, the book is a
pastiche of practical information, instructions, memoir and
history. As a handbook for budding activists, it's informative
and, at times, inspiring. The combination of charts, lists and
first-person accounts create a simple and reasonable path to
action. But as a source for information about the conflict in
Sudan, the book falters. The history is neither clear nor
succinct, and there is not much of it. Furthermore, although
Cheadle and Prendergast's personal anecdotes are entertaining,
they overshadow the few anecdotes about the Sudanese living
through the crisis. The book's most interesting moment, besides
the useful advice on how to get involved, is its delving into
the government's excuses for inaction. (May 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed
Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Description
An Academy Award-nominated actor and a renowned human rights
activist team up to change the tragic course of history in the
Sudan -- with readers' help
While Don Cheadle was filming Hotel Rwanda, a new crisis had
already erupted in Darfur, in nearby Sudan. In September 2004,
then-Secretary of State Colin Powell termed the atrocities being
committed there "genocide" -- and yet two years later things
have only gotten worse. 3.5 million Sudanese are going hungry,
2.5 million have been displaced by violence, and 400,000 have
died in Darfur to date.
Both shocked and energized by this ongoing tragedy, Cheadle
teamed up with leading activist John Prendergast to focus the
world's attention. Not on Our Watch, their empowering book,
offers six strategies readers themselves can implement: Raise
Awareness, Raise Funds, Write a Letter, Call for Divestment,
Start an Organization, and Lobby the Government. Each of these
small actions can make a huge difference in the fate of a
nation, and a people -- not only in Darfur, but in other crisis
zones such as Somalia, Congo, and northern Uganda.
Actor Don Cheadle once took part in a conversation that could be
seen as a commentary on today's news.
It was in the movie Hotel Rwanda, in which he portrayed Paul
Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who sheltered more than 1,200
people during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
In the movie, Cheadle thanks a Western TV cameraman for sending
footage of the killing to the West, saying it would prompt the
international community to intervene.
The cameraman replies, "I think if people see this footage,
they'll say, 'Oh my God, that's horrible,' and then go on eating
their dinners."
Now Cheadle is trying to prevent a similar reaction to what's
been labeled genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.
In 2005 he traveled to Sudan with John Prendergast, a former
Clinton administration official who is now a senior adviser to
the International Crisis Group. They visited a refugee camp for
people who had fled the violence in Darfur, and heard first-hand
accounts of killings, rape, torture and forced evacuations.
Cheadle and Prendergast are urging ordinary citizens to speak
out to end the suffering in Darfur.
They are co-authors of a new book, Not On Our Watch: The Mission
to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond, which maintains that
people can influence their governments to act.
"If U.S. citizens can make enough noise to press their
government to do what's right, then we will have saved literally
tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives in Darfur,"
Prendergast says.
R.org, April 30, 2007 · Chapter One: Challenges and Choices
It was sometime round midnight in a little village in southern
Sudan, and the only link to the rest of the world within a
five-hundred-mile radius was one satellite phone, so when it
rang it was a bit of a shock to everyone.
Don dispensed with the formalities. "My man, you are not easy to
find."
"Obviously, hiding from you is not as easy as I thought," John
countered.
Despite his attempt at a cool demeanor, John was excited. After
Marlon Brando and Mickey Rourke (John is well aware that he has
issues), Don was his favorite actor, and the fact that the two
of them were about to go on a trip together to Chad and across
the border into the western Sudanese region of Darfur was firing
him up.
However, Don wasn't making a social call. He was concerned that
the mission that we were going on with a bunch of members of
Congress was only going to spend several hours in the refugee
camps in Chad, and he wanted to stay longer. "You gotta rescue
it," Don instructed John.
John looked around to see what tools he had at his disposal in
that little southern Sudanese village, but all he could hear was
the ribbit, rabbit of the Sudanese frogs. "I am in the middle of
nowhere. Give me twelve hours."
A few hundred dollars of satellite phone calls later, a much
more substantial and lengthy trip was planned. We also managed
to get Paul Rusesabagina, whom Don had portrayed in Hotel
Rwanda, and Rick Wilkinson, a veteran producer for ABC's
Nightline, to come with us and help interpret and chronicle our
first journey together.
Our trip to witness the ravages of genocide in Darfur was not
the first brush with that heinous crime for either of us. Don
had visited Rwanda post-filming, and John had been in Rwanda and
the refugee camps in Congo immediately after the genocide.
As we listened to the stories of the refugees who fled the
genocide, we sensed what it might feel like to be hunted as a
human being. These Darfurians had been targeted for
extermination by the regime in Sudan on the basis of their
ethnicity. Although well-meaning and thoughtful people may
disagree on what to call it, for us the crisis in Darfur is one
that constitutes genocide.
Enough is ENOUGH. We need to come together and press for action
to end the violence in Darfur and prevent future crimes against
humanity. Through simple acts and innovative collaborations, we
can save hundreds of thousands of lives now.
That is our fervent hope, and our goal.
Darfur: A Slow-Motion Genocide
Genocide is unique among "crimes against humanity" or "mass
atrocity crimes" because it targets, in whole or in part, a
specific racial, religious, national, or ethnic group for
extinction. According to the international convention, genocide
can include any of the following five criteria targeted at the
groups listed above:
-killing
-causing serious bodily or mental harm
-deliberately inflicting "conditions of life calculated to bring
about its physical destruction in whole or in part"
-imposing measures to prevent births
-forcibly transferring children from a targeted group.
The perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda took one hundred days to
exterminate 800,000 lives. This was the fastest rate of targeted
mass killing in human history, three times faster than that of
the Holocaust.
JOHN:
In mid-2004, one year into the fighting and six months before
the trip Don and I took to Chad/Darfur, I went with Pulitzer
Prize–winning author Samantha Power to the rebel areas in Darfur.
At the same time, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was
visiting government-held areas in the region. But unlike
Secretary Powell, Samantha and I went to the part of Sudan that
the regime didn't want anyone to see, and for very good reason.
Before the genocide, Darfur was one of the poorest regions of
Sudan, and the Saharan climate made eking out a living an
extreme challenge. But these difficulties only made Darfurians
hardier and more self-reliant, mixing farming and livestock
rearing in a complex strategy of survival that involved
migration, intercommunal trade, and resource sharing.
It had been over a year since the genocide began, so Samantha
and I expected certain evidence of mass destruction. And we were
indeed witness to burned villages where livestock, homes, and
grain stocks had been utterly destroyed, confirming stories we
had heard from Darfurians at refugee camps in Chad.
Yet no amount of time in Sudan or work on genocide ever prepares
anyone sufficiently for what Samantha and I saw in a ravine deep
in the Darfur desert — bodies of nearly two dozen young men
lined up in ditches, eerily preserved by the 130-degree desert
heat. One month before, they had been civilians, forced to walk
up a hill to be executed by Sudanese government forces.
Harrowingly, this scene was repeated throughout the targeted
areas of Darfur.
We heard more refugees in Chad describe family and friends being
stuffed into wells by the Janjaweed in a twisted and successful
attempt to poison the water supply. When we searched for these
wells in Darfur, we found them in the exact locations described.
The only difference was now these wells were covered in sand in
an effort to cover the perpetrators' bloody tracks. With each
subsequent trip to Darfur, I have found the sands of the Saharan
Desert slowly swallowing more of the evidence of the
twenty-first century's first genocide.
To us, Darfur has been Rwanda in slow motion. Perhaps 400,000
have died during three and a half years of slaughter, over two
and a quarter million have been rendered homeless, and, in a
particularly gruesome subplot, thousands of women have been
systematically raped. During 2006, the genocide began to
metastasize, spreading across the border into Chad, where
Chadian villagers (and Darfurian refugees) have been butchered
and even more women raped by marauding militias supported by the
Sudanese government.
Sadly, the international response has also unfolded in slow
motion. With crimes against humanity like the genocide in Darfur,
the caring world is inevitably in a deadly race with time to
save and protect as many lives as possible. In the fall of 2004,
after his visit to Sudan, Secretary Powell officially invoked
the term "genocide." He was followed shortly thereafter by
President Bush. This represented the first time an ongoing
genocide was called its rightful name by a sitting U.S.
president. And yet in Darfur, as in most of these crises, the
international community, including the United States, responded
principally by calling for cease-fires and sending humanitarian
aid. These are important gestures to be sure, but they do not
stop the killing.
We believe it is our collective responsibility to re-sanctify
the sacred post-Holocaust phrase "Never Again" — to make it
something meaningful and vital. Not just for the genocide that
is unfolding today in Darfur, but also for the next attempted
genocide or cases of mass atrocities.
And there are other cases, to be sure.
Right now, we need to do all we can for the people of northern
Uganda, of Somalia, and of Congo. Though genocide is not being
perpetrated in these countries, horrible abuses of human rights
are occurring, in some ways comparable to those in Darfur.
Militias are targeting civilians, rape is used as a tool of war,
and life-saving aid is obstructed or stolen by warring parties.
Furthermore, by the time you pick up this book, another part of
the world could have caught on fire, and crimes against humanity
may be being perpetrated. We need to do all we can to organize
ourselves to uphold international human rights law and to
prevent these most heinous crimes from ever occurring.
That is our challenge.
Raising the Political Will to Confront Crimes Against Humanity
Preventing genocide and other mass atrocities is a challenge
made all the more difficult by a lack of public concern, media
coverage, and effective response, especially to events in
Africa. Crimes against humanity on that continent are largely
ignored or treated as part of the continent's political
inheritance, more so than in Asia or Europe. The genocide in
Darfur is competing for international action with human rights
emergencies in Congo, Somalia, and northern Uganda —conflicts
that along with southern Sudan have left over 6 million dead —
but the international response to these atrocities rarely goes
beyond military observation missions and humanitarian relief
efforts, which are insufficient Band-Aids.
Crises like these need the immediate attention of a new
constituency focused on preventing and confronting genocide and
other crimes against humanity. Of these four conflicts, only
Darfur has generated sustained media and public attention.
Images of innocent Darfurian civilians — men, women, and
children — hounded from their homes by ravaging militia have
triggered significant activism on the part of Americans and
citizens around the world. But these public expressions have
not, by the time of this writing, at the end of 2006, yielded a
sufficient international response. The United States government
has yet to take bold action to protect the victims, build a
viable peace process, and hold those responsible for this
genocide accountable.
There is some positive momentum building. At the United Nations
World Summit in 2005, member nations agreed to a doctrine called
the Responsibility to Protect, or R2P. R2P states that when a
government is unable or unwilling, as is the case with Sudan, to
protect its citizens from mass atrocities, the international
community must take that responsibility. We believe that this
doctrine, developed by a high-level panel cochaired by Gareth
Evans (the president of the International Crisis Group, where
John works) and Mohamed Sahnoun (former Algerian diplomat and UN
special advisor) commits us all, as individuals and nations, to
do our part to fulfill that responsibility.
During our visit to Darfur and the Darfurian refugee camps in
Chad, we heard story after story of mind-numbing violence
perpetrated by the Sudanese government army and the Janjaweed
militias they support. We heard of women being gang-raped,
children being thrown into fires, villages and communities that
had existed for centuries being burned to the ground in an
effort to wipe out the livelihoods and even the history of those
communities. We heard things that simply should not be happening
in the twenty-first century.
In one of the refugee camps in Chad in 2005, we met Fatima,
forty-two, who described how she had to escape her village of
Girgira in western Darfur after her mother, husband, and five
children were all killed by the Janjaweed militias. She said she
feared the government would kill her as well. In desperation,
she walked for seven days to a refugee camp. She couldn't walk
during daytime hours because of the Janjaweed gangs. She hid
under trees and plants. Despite all this, she wanted to return
home, but she wanted to be sure it was safe. Having lost
everything, she no longer trusted anyone, even the African Union
troops deployed in Darfur.
Omda Yahya, a tribal leader we talked with from Tine, also saw
all his children die in a violent raid on his town and in the
subsequent escape to "safety." His town, he says, was attacked
by men on horseback, planes dropping bombs, and armies on foot.
He fled with many of his tribe, and after more than fifteen days
of walking without food or drink, they arrived at a refugee
camp. "We lost our village. They burned it. If we get all our
possessions back, then after that we can go back. But now we
don't think it is safe to go back."
How do we respond to these horrors?
What we've learned is that there are three pillars to fostering
a real change in human rights and conflict resolution policy:
field research to learn what is really happening in the conflict
zones and what needs to be done, high-level advocacy to deliver
the message to the people who determine policy, and domestic
political pressure from a constituency that cares about these
issues and takes them up with their elected officials.
This last one often goes missing. Sustained and robust campaigns
by organized citizens are needed for maximum impact. Fostering
these constituencies must be our focus.
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Publisher: Hyperion (May 1, 2007)
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Language: English
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ISBN-10: 1401303358
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