December 19th, 2007 - Nikki Serapio  Permalink  View & Add Comments

Firing back

Every now and then some alleged “analyst” publishes a hit piece against the Darfur activist/advocacy movement and the biggest Darfur umbrella group, the Save Darfur Coalition. The latest comment of note comes from William Reed, whose Op-Ed ”How to Save Darfur” was published in the November 23, 2007 edition of The Washingon Times.

It’s always good to do background research on who’s writing these articles. In this case, Mr. Reed is the founder of the Give Peace a Chance Coalition, an organization which, in February 2005, gave a joint presentation at Stanford University alongside … guess who … the Sudanese ambassador to the U.S. The point of this presentation was to deny all claims that genocide was occurring in the Darfur region.

I remember watching this presentation myself. I was a Stanford student at the time. I remember seeing members of the Give Peace a Chance Coalition talk over PowerPoint slides of smiling Darfuri child after child after child, as if to say, ‘Forget about genocide! Everyone’s completely fine in Western Sudan and Eastern Chad!’

What am I trying to get at? Simply that you shouldn’t accuse the activists if you’re in bed with the murderers.

Imagine that it’s the 1970s. Imagine that you’re reading an Op-Ed that is decrying activists for making allegations against Pol Pot. Imagine that you then find out that the author of this Op-Ed, previous to the Op-Ed’s publication, gave a joint presentation with Pol Pot’s ambassador to deny genocide in Cambodia. While opinion-makers, of course, are free to defend publicly the people whose reputations they’re out to rehabilitate, it’s clear that Mr. Reed does not want you to know that the “Give Peace a Chance Coalition” has coordinated speaking events with Khartoum’s official mouthpieces. And that’s because, genocide-determination or not, the international community has at least come to the consensus that the Government of Sudan bears primary responsbility for carrying out and sponsoring systematic attacks against its own civilians. If Mr. Reed and his group want to stand side by side with the killers of innocent civilians, so be it.

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Here’s my Letter to the Editor response to Reed’s article. The Washington Times published this on November 29, 2007:

What Darfuris Want

William Reed’s editorial “How to save Darfur” (November 23) suggests that the Save Darfur Coalition and other Darfur activist groups are acting like “imperial master[s]” through their advocacy. In lobbing this accusation, though, Reed forgets to heed the one demographic who should automatically have the most say on the Darfur issue—i.e., the people of Darfur themselves.

On-the-ground interviews done by human rights and humanitarian aid groups indicate overwhelmingly that Darfuris want multinational protection and justice in Sudan. That is, Darfuris want peacekeepers to deploy and protect them, and they want the Sudanese Government’s senior leaders to be tried eventually at the Hague—and these are exactly two of the things that the burgeoning Darfur movement in the U.S. and around the world support.

Watch the new documentary “Darfur Now,” and you’ll see a Darfuri woman saying “Ocampo, Ocampo, Ocampo…” This woman has a dream that, one day, International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo will bring Sudan’s genocidal murderers to justice. So, it’s apparent that the Save Darfur movement and the victims of genocide are aligned in heart and mind.

At the end, the Darfur movement is a movement of human solidarity. Reed is completely off-base in dismissing and accusing it.