Not on Our Watch (20 page)

Miles followed that with a fund-raising campaign for Darfur in November 2006. He researched the issues and interviewed a young man from the region who works at his school. He also put together another PowerPoint presentation and had a chance to meet Paul Rusesabagina as well.

Rebecca Bernstein is an investment counsellor at a money management firm in San Francisco who in March 2005 organised a benefit event at a bar to help increase awareness of what was going on in Darfur. Rebecca had been reading a lot about the crisis there but felt that little was being done about it, that the atrocities were simply being ‘swept under the rug.’ After getting an e-mail from her sister that said how important it is to speak up when no one does, she decided to organise an event to try to get people involved. Aside from collecting donations at the door, Rebecca also sold raffle tickets for donated restaurant gift certificates. A speaker came from the American Jewish World Service, and Rebecca put up photos and distributed literature about the crisis. After raising nearly $2,700, she said, ‘I would do it again and it wasn’t that hard to organise. If anything, I would hope to do a better job and raise more money next time.’

Jesse Brenner had the benefit of an internship with Afropop Worldwide, a radio programme, website, and database that help to raise awareness about music prod-uced by the African Diaspora. Afropop works to ensure that the benefits return to the artists and their home countries. While updating Afropop’s website, Brenner learned about the developments in Darfur. Appalled by the lack of mainstream media coverage of the genocide, he and fellow ‘co-conspirator’ Eric Herman founded a production company and record company called Modiba Productions to help raise awareness. Brenner cites his Jewish heritage and horror at past genocides as his motivation. He recalls watching the killing unfold in Rwanda and ‘feeling very angry. I remember screaming at the TV.’ Seeing genocide in Darfur a decade later, Brenner felt impulsively, ‘I need to do something. Genocide is man-made. There is a moral imperative to act. We can’t stand idly by.’

Through Modiba, he and Herman released the
Afrobeat Sudan Aid Project
(ASAP) to benefit the internally displaced in Darfur. They talked with Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s, and through him, they were sponsored by Truemajority.org, a grassroots education and advocacy project. They also teamed up with iTunes. As we went to press, Modiba had sold over 8,500 copies, raising more than $135,000 for Save the Children in Darfur. As Brenner puts it, ‘People should use whatever talents they have to take action. They should realise the fate of these people [in Sudan] is tied up with their own fate as fellow citizens of the globe.’

Raise Awareness: Actions You Can Take

1. Educate yourself about Darfur and the world’s other most urgent crises at www.enoughproject.org.

2. Talk to your family, friends, and colleagues about these crises and what we can do to help end them.

3. Host a screening of a documentary about Darfur such as Paul Freedman’s
Sand and Sorrow
(www.sandandsorrow.org),
Darfur Diaries
by Aisha Bain, Jen Marlowe, and Adam Shapiro (www.darfurdiaries.org), or Brian Steidle’s story captured in Annie Sundberg’s film
The Devil Came on Horseback
(www.thedevilcameonhorseback.com).

4. Write a letter to your newspaper or local TV news asking for more coverage of Darfur and other areas that need our help.

5. If you are a blogger, blog to end genocide on leading blog sites!

6. Invite a speaker to your house of worship to talk about Darfur and what must be done to end genocide and mass atrocities worldwide.

7. Join/start prayer groups or promote interfaith events.

8. Organise a vigil, fast, or protest to support stronger action to stop crimes against humanity.

9. Wear the cause: purchase T-shirts or green wristbands and give them as gifts.

Raising Funds: Actions You Can Take

1. Make an individual or family donation to humanitarian, human rights, or advocacy organisations. (You can find a list of these organisations on the ENOUGH website—www.enoughproject.org)

2. Urge your employer to make a contribution to one or more of these organisations, or place one of these organisations on its United Way designated charities.

3. Organise a fund-raiser in your community by hosting a dinner, a concert, an auction, a fun run, or a fast.

4. Link to the organisations you support from your personal home page or your blog.

Strategy Three

WRITE A LETTER—SAVE A LIFE

It is worth reminding ourselves what Senator Paul Simon said back in 1994 about the Rwandan genocide: how a mere 100 letters to each member of Congress could have changed the outcome.

Our democracy is taken for granted. We forget that our congresspersons and parliamentarians are our representatives—not unreachable decision makers. Often it is as simple as clicking on an e-postcard already prepared by an organisation devoted to Darfur. But e-postcards are not nearly as effective an advocacy tool as an impassioned, personal letter addressed to your local, state, and national representatives, or even to the president or prime minister. A personal letter tells elected officials that you care about the issue enough to take 15 minutes out of your busy day to put your thoughts on paper. Indeed, Amnesty International has shown through the decades the success of impartial letter-writing campaigns in freeing political prisoners. As Professor Eric Reeves emphasises, ‘People don’t realise it, but members of Congress are very responsive.’

However you choose to do it—fax, e-mail, phone, postcard, letter—the few minutes it takes to write and send a message could mean the difference between collective action and continued atrocities. Personal, impassioned letters are more effective, ultimately, than clicking on a website, if you are willing to take the extra few minutes. That is what makes politicians take notice: constituents taking time out of their day to write letters themselves.

Here is an example of what a letter might look like. Be aware we are writing this in early December 2006. You will need to update your letter by going to www.enoughproject.org.

Dear Representative/Senator/MP/TD/ etc _______:

I am a taxpaying and voting constituent and am writing to appeal to you as my elected representative to do more to help end the genocide in Sudan. As you may be aware, since 2003 the Sudanese government has orchestrated and waged a deliberate campaign of murder, rape, and displacement against the people of the Darfur region. More than 400,000 people have died, thousands of women have been systematically raped, and more than 2 million people have been displaced and forced to live in squalid refugee camps. I appreciate your leadership and ask you to do more to help end the crisis in Darfur.

First, our government must continue to support measures designed to protect the civilians in Darfur. We provide significant humanitarian assistance to Darfur, but that is not enough. Parliament must urge the Administration to rally more UN Member States for a stronger, more robust international peacekeeping force. It is also critical that parliament continue to adequately fund an international peacekeeping force in Darfur until the perpetrators of these crimes are brought to justice and the civilians can return to their lives in peace.

Secondly, our nation must play a stronger role in finding a political solution to the conflict. Representatives and/or delegates to Sudan must continue to engage directly with the relevant parties, including the rebel groups who have not signed the Darfur Peace Agreement, the African Union, the major stakeholder groups, and the Sudanese Government of National Unity to reconvene talks on how to make the Darfur Peace Agreement more inclusive. The Darfur Peace Agreement resulted in part from international engagement, but we have failed to secure the level of inclusiveness required for a peace agreement to succeed.

Lastly, we should impose targeted sanctions on National Congress Party officials responsible for crimes against humanity in Darfur. The orchestrators and perpetrators of genocide must be held accountable and there must be pressure on the ruling National Congress Party until the genocide is brought to an end. I urge you to ask (insert relevant country head) to ensure that the government cooperates with the investigation of the International Criminal Court into crimes against humanity in Darfur. Punishing those responsible for atrocities is necessary to achieve justice for the victims and prevent similar crimes from occurring in the future.

Thank you so much for your time and I look forward to your response.

Sincerely

The Golden Gate Community helps rebuild lives of at-risk youth in San Francisco. Despite their local focus, the community created and distributed postcards on Darfur for Congress, handed out informative bookmarks at book fairs, and held a benefit concert that informed attendees about the crisis, raised funds, and offered petitions for people to send to President Bush.

Josh Gleis, a graduate student at Tufts University in Boston, started a ‘pen campaign,’ sending letters to policy makers with pens, urging them to sign strong legislation to help end genocide in Darfur. The pen avoided any excuses about not being able to vote or sign a bill into law. He says, ‘One may collect 10,000 signatures for a petition and mail it to the president. But that is one envelope with 10,000 signatures. If you send 10,000 individual letters, that’s even better. If you send ten thousand individual letters with a pen in each one, it is not something to be ignored.’

Write a Letter: Actions You Can Take

1. Write letters to urge your representatives to take specific actions for Darfur and other crises.

2. Ask your family, friends, and colleagues to write letters to their elected officials. And hound them until they do so.

3. Sign or start a petition calling for greater accountability for those responsible for genocide and other crimes against humanity. And present it to your local congressperson.

4. Think big! Start a letter-writing campaign at your high school, university, house of worship, or office.

5. Write a letter to the editor of your local paper and support specific policies while targeting specific elected officials.

Strategy Four

STOP FUNDING THE GENOCIDE—CALL FOR DIVESTMENT

Not since South Africa’s brutal and repressive apartheid system of racial segregation has an African tragedy generated such outrage within segments of the public. Through the 1980s and the early 1990s, citizen-driven divestment from companies doing business with the racist government in Pretoria helped free Nelson Mandela and end apartheid. And as with the anti-apartheid movement worldwide, a nascent divestment effort has begun with Darfur activists. Traditionally, Khartoum responds to the stick, not the carrot, and foreign direct investment is a lifeline that helps keep its war machine afloat.

Anti-genocide activists are now calling for the removal from school, state, and personal pension and mutual funds of assets that are tied to the Sudanese government. The objective of many advocates is targeted divestment, which focuses on companies providing revenues for the government. Such targeting allows the penalty to be focused directly on the perpetrators, not indirectly on the Sudanese victims. By depriving the Khartoum government of investment from abroad, particularly in the oil and energy sector, these activists are helping cut off the funding for the genocidal campaign in Darfur.

The push for divestment from Sudan began before the conflict in Darfur. Despite a restriction on conducting business in Sudan, oil companies were hampering the boycott by continuing to operate there. A growing number of grassroots organisations began pushing for divestment from these companies, including Canada’s largest private oil company, Talisman Energy. Since 1995, Canadian NGOs and student groups had pressed Talisman shareholders to sell their shares in protest and demanded that Talisman (and earlier its predecessor Arakis) pull out of Sudan.

As a direct result of this pressure, Citizen’s Bank of Canada sold its Talisman holdings and the Ontario Teachers Federation said it would divest its $184 million (Canadian) of Talisman stock. In the United States, pressure from activists, spearheaded by Professor Eric Reeves, led to the divestment of more than $100 million by ten major shareholders and additional divestments by New York City’s pension fund, Teacher Retirement System of Texas, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (Cal Pers), and the Vanguard Group. As a result of the divestments, Talisman announced in 2000 that it would have to buy back $300 million of its own shares to buoy the share price, which had dropped by 35%. Because of economics and public relations, the company was soon forced to seek a buyer for its oil concession holdings in southern Sudan and leave the country.

Universities, private investment firms, and public retirement systems should make it a priority to review their portfolios and divest themselves of any holdings in companies that act as patrons to human rights violators and war criminals. The divestment should also be made public, to generate media coverage and send a clear message that the actions of perpetrators of mass atrocities and the companies that support them are intolerable.

In October 2004, a couple of students at Harvard University, Ben Collins and Manav Kumar Bhatnagar, read an article in the school paper that compelled them to act. The article, ‘Endowment Tied to Sudan’ by staff writers Daniel Hemel and Zachary Seward, described how the university was heavily invested in the Chinese parastatal oil company PetroChina, a major player in the Sudanese oil sector. The article outlined how oil revenue funds Khartoum’s killing machine and how Chinese support at the United Nations helped deflect stronger international action to end the slaughter. Collins and Kumar decided to start a movement to call on Harvard to sell its stock in PetroChina and four other oil companies operating in Sudan. They paid $10 for a domain name and started an online petition. They e-mailed students and professors asking for support, and within a week they had 1,000 signatures.