After waging a
successful effort to divest Dartmouth College from Sudan, the Darfur Action Group is continuing its campaign. I offer this update and some advice:
1. Divest from Darfur. This effort--combining both private (Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Brown, Amherst, Dartmouth and perhaps the UC system soon) and public institutions--will have a tangible effect.
2. Contact your Congressman. Contact your local newspaper. Join the Power to Protect campaign.
This is so important, firstly, because the U.S. Government still does not seem to have a coherent policy toward the crisis in Darfur.
Last month, President Bush
called for increasing international troop presence under the stewardship of NATO. But also last month, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer ($)
"refused to say that genocide was currently taking place in the region." U.S. policy is still up in the air and, despite what the press
says, it is the U.S., not Europe, who is more likely to block a robust NATO mission.
Secondly, sufficient public pressure has been shown to make the difference between stopping the killing and standing idly by. Samantha Powers, author of
A Problem From Hell,
documented how and why the United States stood by during the Rwandan genocide. One problem she identified--no public outrage:
"Timid people" at the State Department, Richard Land [of the Southern Baptist Convention] insists, "get vapors" at the "first mention of force." The only counterweight to "business as usual at Foggy Bottom," he contends, is constituency pressure. This assessment is confirmed by Samantha Power in her book on responses to genocides... Explaining why America did not act against the Rwanda genocide, Clinton national security advisor Anthony Lake explained that "the phones weren't ringing on Rwanda." link
Despite our best efforts, we are seeing a Rwandan redux:
"I don't get a lot of people calling me on the phone or writing me letters saying, 'Send U.S. troops to Sudan,'" Chris Padilla, chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, said during a December discussion at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. ($) link
So consider giving
Mr. Chris Padilla a call, and best of luck to all of you from Hanover.