How you can change course of history in Sudan

*Paul was the manager of a hotel in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. In 1994, an extremist government set in motion a plan to exterminate Rwandans who were ethnically Tutsi and non-Tutsis who sympathized with them. Paul was a member of Rwanda’s other main ethnic group, the Hutu. When genocide consumed Rwanda in 1994, Paul protected more than one thousand Rwandans from near certain extermination at the hands of extremist Hutu militias. Hotel Rwanda tells his courageous story.

†Throughout this book, we will use the phrases crimes against humanity and mass atrocity crimes interchangeably, treating genocide as one particular extreme manifestation of such crimes. Whether the crimes against humanity committed in Darfur should be regarded as genocide has been the subject of some debate. A United Nations Commission of Inquiry and several reputable research and advocacy organizations—including the International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International—do not use this description. They have a number of good arguments, perhaps best summed up by Gareth Evans, the President and CEO of the International Crisis Group and member of the UN Advisory Panel on Genocide Prevention, who argues that, here, as in a number of other cases, use of the term genocide can be unproductive, non-productive, and even counter-productive. Unproductive, because there are always lawyers’ arguments about whether the legal definition in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide has been satisfied, and this can be a real distraction from the immediate imperative of protecting the victims of what everyone agrees are crimes against humanity. (The Convention definition requires that certain acts be “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group,” and it is extremely hard to establish that element of specific intent to destroy non-Arab groups in Darfur.) Non-productive, because, as the U.S. response to Darfur illustrates, even when the term is invoked there is no legal obigation under the genocide convention for countries that use the term to actually do anything. And counterproductive when expectations are raised that a particular situation is genocide, but then lawyers’ arguments prevail that some necessary element is missing, as was the case with the UN commission in Darfur: in these circumstances the perpetrators of what are unquestionably mass atrocities or crimes against humanity achieve an utterly unearned propaganda victory. All of this demonstrates that right-thinking people can disagree about the use of the term genocide. What we and these organizations all totally agree on, however, is that mass atrocities are being committed inDarfur, as well as in the Congo and northern Uganda, and were being committed in the 1990s in southern Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, and Burundi. In those last five countries, international and local efforts have combined to being about an end to the atrocities and the wars that generated them, giving all of us hope that horrors in Darfur, northern Uganda, Congo, and Somalia can also soon be ended, and future catastrophes prevented.

*Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.*Samantha was a journalist in Bosnia during the horrors of that war, and her frustration with the failure of the United States to lead a strong international response to the atrocities being committed compelled her to research and write a book about America’s response to genocides throughout the twentieth century. Her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books, 2002), won the Pulitzer Prize. Samantha showed that time and again U.S. leaders were aware that crimes against humanity were occurring but failed to take action. After she and John traveled to Darfur in 2004, Samantha wrote an article for the New Yorker magazine that won the National Magazine Award for reporting in 2005.*Testimony before U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, September 9, 2004.*White House press releases, September 9, 2004.*Despite how Africa is often portrayed in the mainstream media, there is much good news. The journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault’s new book, New News Out of Africa: Uncovering Africa’s Renaissance (Oxford 2006) tells the other side of the story.*“Heroes of Darfur,” New York Times, May 7, 2006.

†The ENOUGH campaign was founded by a small group of friends and colleagues who had grown weary of watching the world reinvent the wheel every time mass atrocities lurched onto the world’s television screens. There is no reason that we collectively cannot do far better and save countless thousands of lives in the process. ENOUGH seeks to strengthen the efforts of grassroots activists, policymakers, advocates, concerned journalists, and others by giving them up-to-date information from on the ground in countries of concern and offering practical pressure points to end the violence. The initial efforts focus on a trio of countries: Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the situation in northern Uganda. To learn more go to www.enoughproject.org.

Excerpted from “Not One Our Watch” by Don Cheadle and John Prendergast. Copyright 2007 Don Cheadle and John Prendergast. All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion. Available wherever books are sold.

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