April 15,
2007 UNEDITED
Rev. Barbara McKusick Liscord
Unitarian Universalist Congregation in
Milford, NH
Drumbeat for Darfur
This past
week we have endured winter fit for January … not April. Hard to believe that
spring has been with us
almost a month. My
son plays on his high
school lacrosse team and they have been struggling to find a time and
place to
play on open fields between April blizzards.
The athletic directors moved quickly to
reschedule the game a day early on Wednesday
instead of Thursday in
anticipation of the snow storm that did indeed arrive as predicted. It turned out that it was
a pretty nice day-
we watched strong young men play the “creator’s
game” as the Canadian plains Indians
called it. They
played well… so happy to
finally be able to play their first game of the season.
How lucky we were sitting among friends in
the luxury of watching our young people play a game for fun. Our biggest problem during
the week was the weather
and needing to reschedule sporting events.
As we
headed back to Milford
from Keene…
snow covered Monadnock shone in the
setting sun. I took
a deep breath. So
lucky in that moment. Struck by the beauty
and the happiness that comes of feeling at home in my family and
community.
I began to
listen to NPR- to Garrison Keilor’s Writer’s
Almanac and learned that on that
very day- April 11th in 1945 the U.S. Army
entered the Buchenwald
concentration camp near Weimar
Germany. About 56,000 prisoners had
died there. There
had been reports of concentration
camps, but no American soldiers had seen them yet.
Then on that day in 1945, they became the
first western observers of one of the worst atrocities in human history. Only the prisoners were
left. The U.S.
soldiers took pictures with
their Kodak cameras, so people would believe what they had seen-
skeletons who
were walking, the bodies of victims stacked around the camp like piles
of
wood. One of the
children liberated at Buchenwald
that day was a teenager named Ellie Wiesel,
who would go on to write about it and to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He had been forced to March
from Auschwitz a
few weeks earlier and his father had recently
died in the camp. Wiesel
had stopped
going for his food rations. He had given up on living.
But on that day in 1945, he saw American
jeeps rolling into the camp. He
wrote, “I
will never forget the American soldiers and the horror that could be
read in
their faces. I’ll
especially remember one
black sergeant who wept tears of impotent rage and shame. We tried to lift him onto
our shoulders, but
we didn’t have the strength.
We were too
weak to even applaud him.”[1]
Ellie
Wiesel was one of the many voices raised in protest against the
genocide in
Darfur at the Save Darfur rally that I attended last April 30th
on
the mall in front of the capital building in Washington DC. Our own
President of the Unitarian
Universalist Association, Rev. Bill Sinkford offered the invocation. Rabbi David Saperstein,
director of the
Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, announced the start of the
Reform
movement’s campaign to call on all faith communities to lobby
worldwide for a
United Nations resolution on the conflict.
"We, the Jews of America, we whose people have
been the …victims of
ethnic cleansing and genocide, join with a rainbow of Americans of
conscience
to speak not of remembered dreams but of ongoing nightmares." He asked
us
to repeat in unison the words "Never Again."[2]
Yet the
genocide continues. Over
two years ago,
the Bush administration acknowledged that the violence in Darfur
was indeed genocide. At
that time 30,000
people had died. Today,
more than
300,000 have been killed and at least 2.5 million people have been forced to flee their homes and now
live in
displaced-persons camps in Sudan
or in refugee camps in neighboring Chad. Refugees give strikingly
similar and horrific
descriptions of their experiences—sisters and daughters
raped, fathers and sons
and even babies murdered, villages looted and burned to the ground. The crisis has deepened
because security for
humanitarian workers as well as displaced people is worsening.[3]
Since
early 2003, Sudanese armed forces
and Sudanese government-backed militia known as
“Janjaweed” have been fighting
two rebel groups in Darfur,
the Sudanese
Liberation Army/Movement (SLA/SLM) and the Justice and Equality
Movement (JEM).
The stated political aim of the rebels has been to compel the
government of Sudan
to
address underdevelopment and the political marginalization of the
region.
In response, the Sudanese government’s regular armed forces
and the Janjaweed –
largely composed of fighters of nomadic background – have
targeted civilian
populations and ethnic groups from which the rebels primarily draw
their
support – the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa
Since the Sudanese government is
made up primarily of Arab Muslims and the rebel and civilian
populations are
primarily African Muslims, many of us have come to see the genocide in Darfur as a product of racism or
ethnic cleansing. Recently,
I’ve come to understand the conflict
in a different way.
In his Atlantic
magazine article this month, Stephan Faris, says that we need to look
back to
the mid-1980s before the violence between Arab and African began to
simmer.
Alex de Waal, a program director for the Social Science Research
Council was in
Darfur then
studying indigenous reactions to
the drought that gripped the region.
He
met an old bedridden Arab sheikh, named Hilal Abdalla who said that he
was
noticing things he had never seen before- sand blowing into fertile
soil. Farmers who
once hosted his tribe and his
camels were now blocking their migration.
The land could no longer support both the farmer
and the nomadic herder. Many
tribesmen lost their stock and scratched
at millet farming on marginal plots.
In 2003,
the Janjaweed- fighters in military uniforms riding camels and horses
swept
across the region in a campaign of ethnic cleansing aimed at Darfur’s
blacks- the farming tribes I mentioned before.
Leading them was a 6 foot 4 Arab with an athletic
build and commanding
presence. De Waal
recognized him… he was
the old sheikh’s son, Musa Hilal.
The killing
is usually described as racially motivated, but the division has its
origins in
the distinction between farmer and herder.
The aggression of the warlord can be traced to the
fears of his father
and how the climate change in that region destroyed a way of life. Until the rains stopped,
the herders were
welcome to pass through the farms, grazing their camels on rocky
hillsides that
separated fertile plots. The
farmers
shared their wells and the herders fed their stock on the leftovers
from the farmer’s
harvest. But with
the drought the
farmers started to fence off their land, for fear it would be ruined by
passing
herds.
The
distinction between Arab and African in Darfur
is defined more by lifestyle than by any physical difference. Africans are typically
farmers. Arabs are
generally herders and clung to that
cultural identity. The
two groups are
not racially distinct.
So the
horrible conflict in Darfur
can be traced to
the failing of the land and the social disruption of ways of life that
go back
hundreds of years. In
the 1980’s and
1990’s the environmental damage was blamed on the inhabitants
of the semi- arid
region. Dramatic
decreases in rainfall
were blamed on unwise land use.
Mistreatment of vegetation exposed more rock and
sand which reflected
sunlight back toward space and driving clouds away.
The Africans were said to be doing this to
themselves. But
about 4 years ago,
scientists fed historical sea- surface temperatures into a variety of
computer
models of atmospheric change. The
models
strongly predicted the disruption in African monsoons.
As one scientist said, “this is not
caused by
people cutting down trees… the roots of the drying of Darfur
are in the changes to global climate.”
Some say that Darfur
is just a
foretaste of climate-driven political chaos.
Recognizing
the ecological origins of the Darfur
crisis lead
to a different understanding of what it will take to create a lasting
peace
there. Lifestyles
and agricultural
practices will need to change.
Up until
now, I have felt personally motivated to work to end the genocide in Darfur… quite simply
because it is genocide.
What is happening there is so clearly wrong
and the stories of what people are suffering there breaks my heart. And that is enough to move
me to action. But
now it appears that the region’s collapse
was in some part caused by emissions from our factories, power plants
and
automobiles, which means: we
have some
responsibility for the dying. As
one
political scientist said, “This changes us from the position
of the Good
Samaritans- disinterested, uninvolved people who may feel a moral
obligation-
to a position where we, unconsciously and without malice, created the
conditions that led to this crisis.
We
cannot standby and look at it as a situation where we can decide to get
involved or not. We are already involved.”[4]
And beyond
the origins of the crisis, we need to look at what is continuing to
fuel the
violence and take steps to stop it.
How
can we exert the needed pressure on the Sudanese government to stop the
slaughter and allow others- like a United Nations peace keeping force-
to stop
the slaughter? Many
have concluded that China
has the
power to stop the killing. China is Sudan’s
biggest economic and
diplomatic supporter and a permanent member of the United Nations
Security
Council. China
buys 70% of Sudan’s
oil
exports … and its Sudan’s
oil exports that help Sudan’s
economy hum along despite the horror in its western region. Last year, a United
Nations plan to send in
an armed force to protect humanitarian workers and stop the killing was
ditched
when the Sudanese government refused to let them in and China
abstained
from the vote. And China
supplies weapons used by the Khartoum
regime.
Some think
that appealing to China’s
national pride and honor may be a way to force China
to exert its pressure toward peace in Darfur. The
2008 summer Olympics are being held in Beijing
and there is a move to brand them the “Genocide
Olympics.” It
may remind you of Nazi Germany’s hosting
of the Berlin
games in 1936. Organizers
of the
Genocide Olympics “branding” point out that
China’s complicity in the Darfur
genocide make its Olympic slogan of “One world, one
dream” ghastly in its
irony. There is
also some discussion of
countries boycotting the games. There’s
good
reason to be optimistic that pressure on China
will work. 70% of Sudan’s
crude exports go to China,
but that makes up only 10% of China’s
oil imports. Sudan
needs China
more than the other way around. So
China
has leverage and we should look at ways to
have leverage with China.[5]
The other
thing that we can do is to divest of companies doing business in Sudan. The Sudan Divestment Task
Force has developed
a targeted divestment strategy that helps to maximize impact on the
Sudanese
government, while minimizing potential harm to both innocent Sudanese
civilians
and investment returns. And the Unitarian Universalist Service
committee has recently
joined hands with the “Fidelity out of Sudan
divestment campaign” to cut
off the flow of funds that are financing the Sudanese
government’s campaign of
genocide. The
idea is to pressure
Fidelity to divest its holdings in PetroChina, a Chinese oil company,
and make
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir recognize the cost of his actions. Fidelity Investments
currently invests $1.2 billion
in PetroChina. Given
that 70-80 percent of Sudan’s
oil
revenues are used to purchase weapons, Americans are literally funding
the
genocide against the Darfurian people through their savings and
retirement
accounts. I know
that this suggestion
hits close to home because many of our community work at Fidelity and
use
Fidelity as a manager of their investment funds. [6]
We also
need to continue to call and write e-mails to President Bush and our
representatives and senators in Washington. And we can wear the green
ribbons that Lauren
McCAnn-Thomas has made and brought to church today… to
remind people we meet
that the horror and misery continues and deepens in Darfur.
And we can invite people to tell their
stories.
Recently I
heard of a report that Americans respond more compassionately when they
hear of
one or a few people dying in a calamity.
When the numbers get big—as they
certainly have in Darfur
it is more difficult to feel compassion and act. So
part of what we need to do to keep
motivated to do good this vital work is to
hear stories of individual lives.
Recently I learned that Elaine Walker, a
member of our congregation, has started working with the Southern New
Hampshire
Sudanese resettlement Community-- working on setting up a computer at
their
center in Manchester. She
thinks people
there would be interested in sharing their stories.
Perhaps some of you would like to bring them
here to get to know what they have been through… and as you
listen you will
help their healing process. What
I heard
from Sudanese in Washington last year was that what happened to them
was hard,
but it is made harder when you feel the world has not heard and
seen… when you
are alone.
The huge
crisis in Darfur
reminds us again that our
planet is a small place.
The magnitude
of our carbon emissions, our purchasing decisions and our investment
decisions
matter. How we live
makes a difference
in whether or not others live at all.
The interconnections abound.
Whatever
action you can take, large or small… please do it. Please do whatever you
can… so that all
people can know the happiness that comes from feeling safe and at home.
As
Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale said, I am only one, but still I
am
one. I cannot do
everything, but still I
can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse
to do
the something that I can do.
[1]
American
Public Media, The Writer’s Almanac,
available at
http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=23631.
[2]
http://www.jewishtimes.com/scripts/edition.pl?stay=1&SubSectionID=48&ID=2836
[4]
The last
few paragraphs on the climate change origins of the Darfur crisis were
drawn
with quotes and paraphrase from “The Real Roots of
Darfur” by Stephan Faris in The
Atlantic April 2007. Many
thanks to Marie Keifer for sharing this
article with me.
[5]
These
paragraphs on China’s
culpability in the Darfur
crisis are drawn
with quotes and paraphrase from “Genocide Games” Boston
Globe, March 25, 2007
Unitarian Universalist
Congregation
in Milford