(Hopelessly) Spineless on Sudan

It irritates me that Kristof still holds a slim belief that Bush will somehow, someway, miraculously begin to live up to what he says or has said -- past or present. Perhaps Kristof is trying to appear journalistically neutral.

Whatever the reason, it should be more than evident to anyone with a shred of functioning brain tissue that The Shrub never has and never will live up to his word. His words are a political convenience and nothing more; any professed commitment to honor them evaporates into the thin air of their utterance. What is more, Bush-words spin the truth, twist the facts, mislead, and misinform -- he can never be "taken at his word."

It is time to insist that this incompetent, dangerous, little tyrannical puppet be removed from our government along with his evil puppeteer, the King of VICE (President) Cheney. Sadly, nothing beneficial will be accomplished in Darfur or anywhere else until that happens.


Spineless on Sudan
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

In May 2006, President Bush declared: “The vulnerable people of Darfur deserve more than sympathy. ... America will not turn away from this tragedy.”

Since then, Mr. Bush has turned away — and 450,000 more people have been displaced in Darfur. “Things are getting worse,” noted Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a human rights campaigner in Sudan.

One of the most troubling signs is that Sudan has been encouraging Arabs from Chad, Niger and other countries to settle in Darfur. More than 30,000 of them have moved into areas depopulated after African tribes were driven out.

In the last few months, Sudan’s government has given these new arrivals citizenship papers and weapons, cementing in place the demographic consequences of its genocide. And if Sudan thinks it has gotten away with mass murder in Darfur, it is more likely to resume its war against southern Sudan — which seems increasingly likely.

Within Darfur, aid groups have increasingly become targets, and in April alone three aid workers were shot and 20 were kidnapped, while hijackers tried to seize aid workers’ vehicles at a rate of almost one a day. As for African Union peacekeepers, seven of them were shot dead the same month — so they’re in no position to rescue aid workers.

The cancer has also been spreading into Chad and the Central African Republic, compounding each country’s intrinsic instability. Last month a 27-year-old French woman, Elsa Serfass, on her first assignment with Doctors Without Borders, was shot dead in C.A.R. as she drove through an area where militias had been burning villages. So Doctors Without Borders has had to suspend much of its work in the area.

Something similar is happening in eastern Chad. Mia Farrow, the actress — who has shown a toughness about genocide that no Western leader has — has just returned from her sixth visit to the region and says that eastern Chad now feels like Somalia.

“Pick-ups with machine guns bolted onto the rear and loaded with armed, uniformed men careen through the dusty streets terrorizing people,” she told me. “No one knows who they are.” While Ms. Farrow was visiting the town of Abéché, an elderly guard at a U.N. compound there was killed and two people were badly beaten.

Then there’s rape. Ever since Sudan began the genocide, it has been using rape to terrorize populations of Africans — and then periodically punishing women who seek treatment on charges of adultery or fornication.

So far this year, at least two young women have been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery. As Refugees International puts it in a new report: “The government is more likely to take action against those who report and document rape than those who commit it.”

Much of the news on Darfur has been a bit optimistic lately, because it has focused on recent flurries of international diplomacy. While it’s true that China is belatedly putting some pressure on Sudan to admit international peacekeepers, at the same time China continues to supply Sudan with the guns used to slaughter Darfuri children. China also just signed a 20-year agreement to develop offshore oil for Sudan, and in April China pledged “to boost military exchanges and cooperation” with Sudan.

Let’s hope that athletes who go to Beijing for the Olympics next year will wear T-shirts honoring the victims of the genocide that China is underwriting.

In the burst of diplomatic activity, one person who stands out is Nicolas Sarkozy, the new president of France. Mr. Sarkozy is pushing to send a European Union force, including many French troops, to stabilize Chad and the Central African Republic. If they arrive by October, as planned, they just might pull those two countries back from the brink of collapse.

In contrast, Mr. Bush has been letting Darfur rhyme with Rwanda and Bosnia. For years, Mr. Bush’s aides have discussed whether he should give a prime-time speech on Darfur to ratchet up the pressure; he still hasn’t. Laura Bush just completed a four-nation swing through Africa, but she didn’t include a visit to any of the areas affected by the Darfur crisis.

Ultimately, the only way the genocide will end will be with a negotiated political settlement — but the only way to get that is to put much more pressure on Khartoum.

So how about if Mr. Bush invites Mr. Sarkozy — along with Gordon Brown, Hu Jintao and Hosni Mubarak — for a joint visit to Chad and C.A.R. to meet Darfuri refugees? Maybe Mr. Sarkozy could lend Mr. Bush and the others a little backbone.

Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

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The Witness Next Door

By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

One of the most unusual people in New Jersey these days is a tall 34-year-old black man named Daoud Hari. Others may lose their tempers at traffic jams on the turnpike, but he’s just glad he’s no longer being tortured.

Mr. Hari has just arrived in the U.S. from Chad and Darfur, where he says he was beaten and told repeatedly he was going to be executed. He is one of just a handful of Darfuris — his lawyer knows of two others — whom the U.S. has accepted as refugees.

I knew Mr. Hari in his previous life, because he interpreted for me early last year. We journeyed together along the Darfur-Chad border through a no man’s land of villages that were being attacked by Sudan’s janjaweed militia.

Mr. Hari helped me interview two orphan boys living under a tree, a 13-year-old girl shot in the chest, a 6-year-old boy trying desperately not to cry as doctors treated shrapnel wounds to his leg and a 15-year-old girl gang-raped by the janjaweed.

It is a different world there. It is the antipodes of New Jersey.

When our vehicle became stuck in the sand in one janjaweed area, we strained side by side to push it out before trouble arrived. We slept in the sand under the stars, we saw gruesome injuries, we witnessed people preparing to be killed, and we saw each other dusty and frightened. In that crucible, I grew steadily more impressed with Mr. Hari’s courage, for as a local person he was at greater risk of immediate execution than a foreigner like me.

He was scared, of course, but what drove him was a relentless determination to get out the story of what was happening to his fellow Darfuris. He was determined to fight genocide with the best weapon he had, his training in English.

Interpreters and drivers are the secret to good international reporting, and they do much of the work, take most of the risks and get none of the credit. Mr. Hari regularly interpreted for other journalists, repeatedly putting himself in danger to get out the stories.

Last August, he accompanied an ace Chicago Tribune reporter, Paul Salopek, into Darfur, but they were seized by an armed faction. Once, he said, a commander ordered his soldiers to execute him, but they were from the same tribe and balked. Another time, he says, a commander untied him and told him to escape — but he refused unless the driver was freed as well. So Mr. Hari was tied up again, and he was beaten as he was interrogated about his work with me and other journalists.

Finally, after more than a month, Sudan freed Mr. Hari along with Mr. Salopek and the driver. Eventually Mr. Hari made his way back to Chad, and the U.S. granted him status as a political refugee. It is disorienting to be with him here, where we are both clean, rested and safe.

Yet even here Mr. Hari is haunted by Darfur. He knows one brother was killed; the other was attacked and beaten, but Mr. Hari assumes he is still alive. Of his three sisters, Mr. Hari last saw one in 2003 and the others in 2006.

He plans to study and is also determined to speak out about Darfur and tell Americans what is happening to his people.

Mr. Hari’s presence in the U.S. underscores a profound difference between Darfur and past genocides: In the past, we could always claim that we didn’t fully appreciate what was going on until too late.

It was only a faint reed of an excuse, for in fact information always did trickle out about past genocides even as they were underway. But this time we can’t even feign ignorance.

A superb new documentary, “The Devil Came on Horseback,” provides a wrenching tour through the eyes of a tormented American military observer there. A handful of books chronicle the killings; one of them, “Not on Our Watch,” has hit the best-seller list with its suggestions for what citizens can do. President Bush has described the slaughter in Darfur as genocide since 2004.

Google Earth has developed a first-rate program to observe the devastation from above. On my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, you can see a man whose eyes were gouged out by the janjaweed as well as video from the journey last year with Mr. Hari.

Or, if you live in New Jersey, you can simply turn to one of your newest neighbors, and see the pain in his eyes as he wonders if his sisters are still alive.

Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

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Save the Darfur Puppy

By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

Finally, we’re beginning to understand what it would take to galvanize President Bush, other leaders and the American public to respond to the genocide in Sudan: a suffering puppy with big eyes and floppy ears.

That’s the implication of a series of studies by psychologists trying to understand why people — good, conscientious people — aren’t moved by genocide or famines. Time and again, we’ve seen that the human conscience just isn’t pricked by mass suffering, while an individual child (or puppy) in distress causes our hearts to flutter.

In one experiment, psychologists asked ordinary citizens to contribute $5 to alleviate hunger abroad. In one version, the money would go to a particular girl, Rokia, a 7-year-old in Mali; in another, to 21 million hungry Africans; in a third, to Rokia — but she was presented as a victim of a larger tapestry of global hunger.

Not surprisingly, people were less likely to give to anonymous millions than to Rokia. But they were also less willing to give in the third scenario, in which Rokia’s suffering was presented as part of a broader pattern.

Evidence is overwhelming that humans respond to the suffering of individuals rather than groups. Think of the toddler Jessica McClure falling down a well in 1987, or the Lindbergh baby kidnapping in 1932 (which Mencken described as the “the biggest story since the Resurrection”).

Even the right animal evokes a similar sympathy. A dog stranded on a ship aroused so much pity that $48,000 in private money was spent trying to rescue it — and that was before the Coast Guard stepped in. And after I began visiting Darfur in 2004, I was flummoxed by the public’s passion to save a red-tailed hawk, Pale Male, that had been evicted from his nest on Fifth Avenue in New York City. A single homeless hawk aroused more indignation than two million homeless Sudanese.

Advocates for the poor often note that 30,000 children die daily of the consequences of poverty — presuming that this number will shock people into action. But the opposite is true: the more victims, the less compassion.

In one experiment, people in one group could donate to a $300,000 fund for medical treatments that would save the life of one child — or, in another group, the lives of eight children. People donated more than twice as much money to help save one child as to help save eight.

Likewise, remember how people were asked to save Rokia from starvation? A follow-up allowed students to donate to Rokia or to a hungry boy named Moussa. Both Rokia and Moussa attracted donations in the same proportions. Then another group was asked to donate to Rokia and Moussa together. But donors felt less good about supporting two children, and contributions dropped off.

“Our capacity to feel is limited,” Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon writes in a new journal article, “Psychic Numbing and Genocide ,” which discusses these experiments. Professor Slovic argues that we cannot depend on the innate morality even of good people. Instead, he believes, we need to develop legal or political mechanisms to force our hands to confront genocide.

So, yes, we should develop early-warning systems for genocide, prepare an African Union, U.N. and NATO rapid-response capability, and polish the “responsibility to protect” as a legal basis to stop atrocities. (Genocide Intervention Network and the Enough project are working on these things.)

But, frankly, after four years of watching the U.N. Security Council, the International Criminal Court and the Genocide Convention accomplish little in Darfur, I’m skeptical that either human rationality or international law can achieve much unless backed by a public outcry.

One experiment underscored the limits of rationality. People prepared to donate to the needy were first asked either to talk about babies (to prime the emotions) or to perform math calculations (to prime their rational side). Those who did math donated less.

So maybe what we need isn’t better laws but more troubled consciences — pricked, perhaps, by a Darfur puppy with big eyes and floppy ears. Once we find such a soulful dog in peril, we should call ABC News. ABC’s news judgment can be assessed by the 11 minutes of evening news coverage it gave to Darfur’s genocide during all of last year — compared with 23 minutes for the false confession in the JonBenet Ramsey case.

If President Bush and the global public alike are unmoved by the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of fellow humans, maybe our last, best hope is that we can be galvanized by a puppy in distress.

Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

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Divestment from Genocide

In today's Times op ed, Nicholas Kristof suggests that "Sudan is a rare instance where narrowly focused divestment makes practical as well as moral sense."

I concur. When fighting against injustices of all kinds does it not make sense to use the most viable, non-violent, persuasive tactic we can -- and save military options for the rare instance when we literally and absolutely must and have no other moral choice?

In other words, to "spread freedom" around the globe, do the opposite of everything the Bush Brigade has been doing....

Death by Dollars
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

So is your Fidelity account underwriting genocide in Sudan? Is your pension fund helping finance the janjaweed militias that throw babies into bonfires in Darfur and Chad?

The answer to both questions is complicated but may be yes, and that’s one reason a divestment campaign is gaining strength around America and abroad. Six states (including California) have already begun divesting from companies active in Sudan, and legislation is pending in 23 more states, including New York.

More than 30 universities, beginning with Harvard in 2005, have sold certain Sudan-related investments. Five cities have divested, and New York is considering doing so. A bill before Congress would bar certain companies active in Sudan from receiving federal contracts.

Let’s start by acknowledging that divestment and economic sanctions generally fail. The closest thing to a success was the way they helped topple white rule in South Africa in the 1980s, but even there one result was greater hardship for ordinary blacks.

Elsewhere, divestment and economic sanctions have mostly been counterproductive. Our Cuban embargo has hurt Cubans but cemented Fidel Castro in power; our sanctions against Myanmar have inflicted tremendous pain on Burmese without dislodging the brutal government.

So I’m against economic sanctions in almost every case. But Sudan is an exception, a rare instance where narrowly focused divestment makes practical as well as moral sense.

Partly that’s because Sudan’s economy depends on foreign oil companies, giving the outside world leverage. And 70 percent of Sudan’s oil revenue goes to weaponry, like bayonets used to gouge out people’s eyes.

The oil companies in Sudan aren’t American; the biggest players are Chinese companies. Pressure on them is also one way to get the attention of the Chinese government, which is Sudan’s main protector in the U.N. Security Council.

So in this case pressure on a small number of foreign companies could help get Sudan’s attention, and that of its protectors in China, without hurting ordinary people. And Sudan has shown that it can be nudged and embarrassed into behaving better: the best example is the way that pressure (including economic sanctions) led Sudan’s leaders to end their brutal war in southern Sudan in 2005.

Fortunately, the Darfur divestment campaign has been remarkably restrained in choosing targets. Organizers are not seeking divestment from all of the more than 400 foreign companies that operate in Sudan, but only from a few dozen that are complicit in genocide without helping ordinary Sudanese. (See the guidelines at www.SudanDivestment.org, developed largely by a recent U.C.L.A. graduate, Adam Sterling.)

“People are surprised to find out that Royal Dutch Shell is not a targeted company by us, even though they are an oil firm and operate in Sudan,” notes Mark Hanis, who runs the Genocide Intervention Network (which has a divestment hot line, 1-800-GENOCIDE). That’s because Shell sells gas in Sudan at a retail level, rather than enriching the army through production, Mr. Hanis said, and less than 5 percent of those sales are believed to be to the government.

More than other money managers, Fidelity has resisted the pressure and clung firmly to Sudan-related investments. So Darfur campaigners are urging investors to avoid Fidelity mutual funds: more information is at www.FidelityOutofSudan.com.

The biggest U.S. investor in Class H shares of PetroChina, a Chinese oil concern whose parent company is active in Sudan, is Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. I have huge respect for Mr. Buffett, and he may be thinking: My obligation is to make money for shareholders, not to use their investments in a dubious attempt to save the world. But surely if Berkshire Hathaway and Fidelity mutual funds saw lucrative opportunities in selling bayonets to the janjaweed, they would balk at that. We do have limits; the question is where we draw them.

In this case, the cost of divestment to fund managers or investors is negligible, and there is a real prospect that the strategy will add enough attention, embarrassment and pressure that Sudan will stop slaughtering Darfuris — just as it has stopped massacring people in southern Sudan.

It’s not a sure thing. But remember that in Darfur and Chad, aid workers — some of them Americans — are being killed, raped and beaten as they try to alleviate the slaughter. So shouldn’t we make the minimal sacrifice of divestment, rather than blithely continue to invest in ways that provide grenades and guns to kill aid workers and Darfuris alike?

Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

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