MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Ruth Messinger, Executive Director of the American Jewish World Service, will speak at the Rally to End Genocide in Darfur this Sunday on the National Mall. She has traveled to the Darfur region twice and has been leading the Jewish community’s movement for Darfur.
TRANSCRIPT:
NARRATOR: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Your host is Jerry Fowler, Director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience.
JERRY FOWLER: Our guest today is Ruth Messinger. She is the President of American Jewish World Service. Ruth and AJWS have been in the forefront of efforts to stimulate action on Darfur, and along with the Holocaust Museum, co-founded the Save Darfur Coalition. Ruth welcome to the program.
RUTH MESSINGER: Thank you Jerry; delighted.
JERRY FOWLER: Ruth, let me go back first, you went to Darfur in 2004. It is hard to believe it is almost two years ago. What sticks with you most from your trip to Darfur?
RUTH MESSINGER: I did; I went to Darfur in 2004. I actually went to Chad in 2005, and I guess there are two things that stick. One is that it was not the first time, but anytime you are ever in a camp—a refugee camp, a camp for internally displaced persons—you just have to face the fact that this is unbelievable that this is where people are expected to live, with no notion of when that will ever end, and in some amazing way, people are so resilient that they try desperately to put together—or put back together—a sense of home, a sense of family, having experienced unbelievable trauma, having lost their homes and being suddenly in the middle of tens of thousands of people when they were use to living in small villages. You just see the resilience and the determined effort of parents to keep an eye on their children and children to find something to do. That is one thing.
The second image is of all of the sick children. I spent a lot of time on that first trip in what were called the therapeutic feeding tents; tents to which mothers and eligible children were allowed if the medical staff determined that those children had some chance of having their moderate to severe malnutrition reversed. The faces of those children and their mothers have never left me.
Then, finally, the camp impression is, in this instance, how the story that each individual person tells you is so chillingly similar to the last one you heard because it makes it so clear that this genocide is an orchestrated effort to destroy individuals, families and communities. Every person tells you a similar version of first the planes came and bombed the village and killed relatives, then the militia rode in, raped people, attacked people, slaughtered animals, poisoned the wells, firebombed the village, and you hear this not once, but in a three or four day visit, you hear this twenty times. It is just clear that we are in the middle of this systematic effort, orchestrated by the government of Sudan to destroy a portion of its own citizenry.
JERRY FOWLER: AJWS is a relief organization. It has been involved in relief in a lot of different places, but my sense—correct me if I am wrong—is that you personally, and AJWS, are focused on Darfur in a much different way than you had focused on anything else before. Was it your trip to Darfur that caused that, or how did that change come about?
RUTH MESSINGER: Slight correction first; AJWS is actually an international development organization, so we mostly do grassroots development. We do respond to world disasters; more often, of course, those are earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes. In the case of Darfur, a couple of things happened. One is, as we became aware of this genocide—significantly through the writings of Nicholas Kristof and the decision of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to declare a genocide warning—we said to ourselves, “How can a Jewish organization concerned about the lives of people in Africa not respond immediately and strongly to the victims of this genocide?” Because there was so little publicity about the genocide, it was therefore necessary for us to launch a public campaign to let our audiences, our supporters know that there was a genocide; that there were people quite literally, in urgent need of water, medicines, health care, because they were displaced from their homes. Then, Jerry, I would say, within a year, and partly again tracking work that the Museum was doing, we came to the conclusion that you could not—if you had a conscience—provide humanitarian relief to victims of a genocide without engaging in a massive education and advocacy effort to stop that genocide. We have been able to get support for doing that work from our board and from donors and supporters, and as you say, moved into it in a big way and the more of it we have done, and the more dramatic—and I really believe that that is the right word—the comprehensive response from the American Jewish Community, the more we felt compelled to do.
JERRY FOWLER: Now, your efforts are in some way reaching a new high point. This Sunday, on April 30th, there will be a rally on the National Mall and a companion rally at the Golden Gate Bridge. People are coming from all over. Constantly, people are coming up to me and saying that everyone they know is coming! This is not just people in Washington; people in Philadelphia, in New York. What do you expect is going to happen on Sunday?
RUTH MESSINGER: I suspect that there are going to be lots of people coming; lots more than I can account for now. We are talking about the people you and I know. One of my most moving emails was from a synagogue in Seattle in which they said, “We have organized,” and this, Jerry, we had nothing to do with, “a demonstration in Seattle in sympathy with the demonstration in Washington, and the congregation is going, as are many other people, but meanwhile, we are sending twenty-six people by airplane to Washington, D.C. to be with you.” There are these spontaneous other rallies popping up across the country, and there are people coming from very long distances. We know there are several buses coming from Detroit and Cleveland where people obviously have to get on the bus at midnight. I expect there to be a lot of people from every spectrum, every part, and all denominations in the Jewish community. At the same time, I am increasingly convinced that there are church groups; there are African American organizations in the Baltimore-Washington area. There is this wonderful memo that you probably saw that went out through the United States Council of Catholic Bishops. I think there are going to be people from many other places around the United States who are there.
JERRY FOWLER: What do you expect to achieve from these rallies? What do you expect these rallies will achieve?
RUTH MESSINGER: I think that the biggest thing the rally will achieve has already begun to happen, and that is clear evidence to our elected officials that this is an issue that they have to pay more attention to. Members of Congress and the White House now know that there is a growing bipartisan, interracial, interfaith coalition of people demanding that our government take whatever steps it has to taken in order to stop this violence. That is a major goal.
I want to say that I also believe that part of the impact of this rally will be to remind a lot of people, and to show some others, that there is still the capacity in this country for a citizenry to become outraged and go to Washington to express their outrage.
JERRY FOWLER: As the government see this and feels a greater urgency and need to take action in response to this public constituency, what are you saying needs to happen on the ground in Darfur? Not just on the ground in Darfur, but in regard to stopping the genocide?
RUTH MESSINGER: The official call we have most associated ourselves with is to take this 7,000 person African Union troop force and make it much larger which means a multi-lateral force with support from many different countries, not solely in Africa, with resources that are paid for by those countries that have a great deal more money so that, for example, they have helicopters, and so that they are given a mandate, which of course involves United States and United Nations negotiations with the government of Sudan; a specific mandate to protect the people of Sudan. As you know there are lots of other steps along the way—there is talk of a no-fly zone, there are tougher sanctions that our government has just begun to talk about. It seems to me that I am sure of one thing, and that is the United States has the strategic, diplomatic, financial, and the military resources to stop this violence and end this genocide.
JERRY FOWLER: Do you get the sense that as the United States government gets more active, if it commits more resources that other countries will go along?
RUTH MESSINGER: I am absolutely convinced that it is necessary; it may not be sufficient, but it is necessary. In order to get western powers to take the situation in Sudan and, by the way, as you said, it is not just Darfur, it is the entire situation in Sudan much more seriously, the United States has to make this a place where it is prepared to exert moral leadership.
JERRY FOWLER: April 30th is, as I said, going to be a high mark, but I guess our hope would be that it is not the high mark. What do you think is ahead for this growing public movement?
RUTH MESSINGER: I think that all of us, including of course, the Museum, who are part of this coalition, have to immediately start articulating next steps; next steps for further action to get our government to do the right thing; next steps to build a broader constituency in the United States; next steps to impact more these other countries that are themselves, for sure, not yet doing enough, either by pressure on their embassies or by communications with their citizenry to push their own governments to respond.
JERRY FOWLER: Ruth Messinger is President of American Jewish World Service. Ruth, thanks so much for being with us today.
RUTH MESSINGER: Thank you very, very much Jerry.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, visit our website at www.committeeonconscience.org.
