MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Jerry Fowler, president of the Save Darfur Coalition, provides an overview of what international activists have done on Darfur and what issues they are currently focusing on.
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention. With me this week is Jerry Fowler, President of the Save Darfur Coalition. Jerry, thank you for joining me.
JERRY FOWLER: It’s my pleasure.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: As some of you may remember, Jerry spoke with us last year just as he was leaving the Holocaust Museum and moving to take over this new position at Save Darfur. At the time, I promised to bring you back, I think within a year, to tell us about the transition, a little bit more about what’s going on at Save Darfur and what we can expect in the future. For people who don’t know, though, we’ll start with the basics. So what is the Save Darfur Coalition?
JERRY FOWLER: Well, Save Darfur is several things actually. First and foremost it’s an alliance of 180 or so organizations of all stripes -- faith-based, secular, civil rights, human rights -- who have come together out of a sense of tremendous concern and outrage at the violence in Darfur, and are working together in order to end it, to promote protection of civilians, accountability, and ultimately peace. So that’s one part of Save Darfur. And in general, there’s this large constituency of which organizations are a part, individuals are a part, super-activists are a part, students are a part. We work with all of these partners to try to push for an end to the crisis in Darfur and a just peace in all of Sudan.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And Save Darfur was born out of an emergency meeting held up in New York, I believe in late summer of 2004, and you were there representing the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. What do you think the organization or the coalition has achieved? It’s been five years now. What have been some of its major achievements?
JERRY FOWLER: Well, as you say, this coalition itself came together in July of 2004 at an emergency summit for Darfur that we held in New York. Even before that, there were people who were speaking out. I mean, it’s not fair to say that nobody paid attention and that the public didn’t pay attention before July of 2004. And it has grown immensely since then. I think during that period the primary accomplishment, and a very, very important accomplishment of this international outcry, has been to keep people alive.
When I first traveled to the region earlier in 2004 and met with refugees who had crossed over into Chad, inside Darfur there were a million or so people displaced, and they were displaced into a desert where they couldn’t survive without outside assistance. And that was one of the things that I really didn’t totally understand. It is difficult to understand until you’re there, I mean, to be in a desert where the daily high is 115 degrees and your food has been destroyed, and your wells have been poisoned or the government is guarding other wells. You can’t survive without outside assistance. The government was basically blocking outside assistance at that point, very, very difficult for humanitarian organizations to get in.
As a result of international pressure, the Sudanese government was forced to allow in a humanitarian operation that has now been quite large and is literally keeping people alive there, now over or somewhere around 2.5 million people who depend upon-- who have been driven off the land. There’s actually more than that who depend upon outside assistance because they’ve been affected by the collapse of the economy, because so many people have been driven off the land. I think that if we gave up, if we closed up shop, if we stopped raising our voices, that that international humanitarian operation would not survive very long. The Sudanese government puts a tremendous amount of pressure on them as it is. The situation is very, very horrendous, and in spite of the pressure and the attention, the humanitarian space now, or humanitarian access I should say, is the lowest it’s been in a couple of years.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And how has the situation, the crisis in Darfur, how has it changed in these five years?
JERRY FOWLER: Well, I think in the period 2003 to 2005, there was a sustained, systematic, direct campaign of violent destruction and displacement by the Sudanese government and militia allies, who are sometimes called the Janjaweed, against specific ethnic groups in Darfur. And in the course of that campaign, either because of the direct violence or because of these conditions of life that I was describing, several hundred thousand people died. They perished. Thousands and thousands of girls and women were raped. And, as I said, 2.5 million people were driven off the land.
I think from the middle of 2005 now, once this incredible amount of destruction and displacement had taken place and the survivors of it are huddled in these immense Internally Displaced Persons’ camps, what they call IDP camps, the nature of it has changed. People are still in a tremendous amount of danger. If they venture outside of these camps they can be subject to attack. The countryside’s very, very insecure, but it’s not the kind of systematic attacks that you had before. Occasionally the government has attacked people in camps, but that happens from time to time. There is occasionally fighting between rebel groups and the government. We’ve seen this recently, within the last couple of weeks, and civilians can be caught in the middle of that. And the government has absolutely no regard for civilian life, and unfortunately sometimes it seems that the rebels don’t either. But in that sense, I think the basic idea that you’ve got a huge civilian population in peril remains the case and the problem. The ultimate author of that peril is the Sudanese government. The actual nature of the peril has changed over the last few years.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: One of the other things that’s changed is the larger Sudanese landscape, maybe not changed enough, but at least it has some major markers that it’s hitting as part of the evolution of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which was signed between Sudan’s North and South. Major elections, national elections, are supposed to happen this year, and two years beyond that the possibility that the South could declare its independence through a referendum. How does Darfur, and the work of advocates on Darfur specifically, fit into this larger Sudanese context?
JERRY FOWLER: Well, that’s a very important question, and I think it’s-- as a general matter, we have to keep in mind that the problem of Darfur can’t be resolved unless the larger problem of Sudan is resolved, and vice versa. And there are local aspects, Darfur aspects to the problem, involving resources, relationship between groups, and the Sudanese government has been very assiduous at exploiting those local problems and pitting groups against each other. That in fact is a strategy that they used with tremendously devastating effect in the South during the long war, as you say, in the Southern part of the country.
The larger problem of Sudan is really one of the center against the periphery. What people have responded to in Darfur, what they were responding to in Sudan, is basically that power and wealth has been concentrated in the hands of a minority elite based around the capitol of Khartoum. And in some ways, the so-called Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which resolved the war in the South, provided a framework for addressing that basic inequality in power and wealth. But it was an agreement between, not even as you just said the North and the South, it was an agreement between one political party in the North, the National Congress Party, which has controlled the government now for 20 years after taking power in a military coup, and it was a very narrowly based part of this elite at the center, and then a group called the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement, which is a Southern rebel movement. So even though the agreement is comprehensive in the sense of providing a framework for transforming the country and the relations of power and wealth, it is only between two parties. And the one party in particular, the National Congress Party, its main objective is really to perpetuate its hold on power. I think moving forward, the rest of the peripheries have to be incorporated into the CPA, and particularly Darfur, where the violence has been the most acute.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: By that, do you mean opening up the CPA process for new negotiations, or some sort of participation in elections? How would you bring these other groups among the periphery into that process?
JERRY FOWLER: Well, I think there are a variety of ways that it could be done. I think that the conception at the time that the CPA was negotiated was that elections would be a way to bring about this transformation, that if you have full and free elections that were full and free and fair, that involved the participation of all different groupings, that that would contribute to this transformation. Now there’s some doubt about when these elections will happen. You’ve got the situation in Darfur, which makes it very difficult to imagine that you can have meaningful elections there, so it throws a lot of this into doubt. I think the mechanism of integrating Darfuris into the CPA, integrating people from Eastern Sudan into the CPA, is not one where there’s a readily easy answer, but as there are negotiations to resolve the conflict in Darfur, this ultimate need has to be kept in mind.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And a final question. I’ll sort of ask it the inverse way. I mean, what do you think that international activists can achieve? I mean, it’s clear, and I think a lot of credit should be given to the international movement for the aid effort, which as you said, has stemmed the dying in Darfur, not necessarily altered the conditions that people live in, but stemmed the dying, which is something that cannot be minimized in its importance. What are the achievable things that activists should be working on today and over the next year?
JERRY FOWLER: Well, I think to speak in broadest terms, what is achievable is a furtherance of what has been achieved, which is to put the needs of civilians into the mix of governmental responses to the crisis in Darfur and to Sudan more broadly. I think too often what we see is that various governments have different kinds of interests in Sudan, whether it’s the Chinese government’s interest in oil, whether it’s the U.S. government’s interest in counterterrorism, whether it’s other interests of influence or resources or politics. Governments generally don’t have an interest in protecting human life, and I think what international movement has done is created a political interest in protecting human life, because it’s shown that there’s a constituency of conscience -- a constituency that will speak out from conscience and say that when human beings are targeted for destruction, we can’t stand idly by. And of course we’re frustrated that we haven’t achieved more, more quickly, but the fact is the situation could be much, much worse. As we move forward we can keep that aspect, the needs of the civilians, in the forefront of the minds of governments, our government, other governments, the Sudanese government.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And-- sorry, I promised already it would be a last question, but a final one. Do you have any immediate agendas or proposals that you’re putting, particularly to the new U.S. government?
JERRY FOWLER: Well, we think that for the Obama administration, a window of opportunity has opened up to finally end the crisis, end the genocide instead of manage it from week to week and month to month. That’s a combination of the political capital-- or the opportunity is a product of the combination of President Obama’s political capital, the honeymoon that any American president would have, but in particular, the extent to which this president has captured the imagination of people abroad and governments abroad, especially in Africa. And the fact that the Sudanese government’s feeling more pressure than it has before, especially with the impending possibility -- maybe by the time you air this, the reality -- that the president of Sudan will be indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. What we want is a sustained, diplomatic initiative, what my colleague John Prendergast has called a peace surge, to finally end the crisis. The first step that the Obama administration needs to take is to appoint somebody who is in charge, an envoy who is in charge of Sudan policy, who’s got the stature, the mandate and the authority to drive U.S. policy on Sudan, to negotiate with key players abroad, especially China, but key players in Africa, key players in Europe, to have a coordinated diplomatic effort to finally bring this crisis to an end.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Jerry, thank you very much for joining me today. Of course listeners can always find out more about what Jerry and the Coalition are doing on their website, so...
JERRY FOWLER: SaveDarfur.org.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC:
JERRY FOWLER: Thank you, Bridget.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/conscience. There you’ll also find the Voices on Genocide Prevention weblog.
