Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

If you are young and interested in human rights, I suggest you choose a country or people you are interested in and forget all about whether there is any political interest in the United States about their cause and just concentrate on them. Human rights as a field has become so institutionalized and corporatized and dominated by specialists ,sometimes we forget why we became involved in the subject at all and why it is paramount to maintain a deep empathy with those people to whom we relate. Many of the causes I am still involved in date back over twenty years, sometimes longer, and all have maintained their interest to me because of the marvelous people I have met and encountered. Even during very dark days for them, they have maintained relationships and often these have extended to families. In recent years, in fact, I have focused on causes and people that have never engaged the interest of political United States or are removed from some grand strategic design.

One example of how individual interest can make a difference was the case of East Timor. In the 1970s and 1980s, a Washington lobbyist on other matters took a deep and almost obsessive interest in the fate of East Timor. This man was named Bruce Cameron. He would slowly make contact with every possible congressional office of importance and distribute information about human rights violations in the former Portuguese colony, which had been annexed by Indonesia. It wasn't that he was met with hostility; he was met for years with indifference. But after a long time, suddenly the issue of East Timor's independence became the issue and the wider human rights community and foreign policy think tanks became involved. But alot of what was accomplished in large part I attribute to Bruce's lonely but pioneering efforts.

So, today we should honor another such person--Eric Reeves, a professor of literature at Smith College and author of "A Long Day's Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide". A classmate of mine at William College, Eric was a supreme philosophy student and cut a figure like Ludwig Wittgenstein on campus. During the college year, our student body--despite being distracted by Cambodia and Vietnam--came the aid of a southern Sudanese student, whose father had been killed in the then civil war. Whether Eric's later interest in the Southern Sudan came from the plight of Mom Arou at Williams I do not know. Before the entire global community embraced the cause of Darfur, Eric was one of only a few voices sounding alarm about the deteriorating situation in southern Sudan and warning about imminent genocide. At one point, he took a leave of absence from his tenured position at Smith to write about the subject, cajole and plead non-governmental organizations and our government to take action.

In an op-ed in the Boston Globe www.boston.com on August 6, Eric warned about a false optimism on Darfur. He has been right so many times before on the issue so these warnings should be heeded. He notes that the policy debate within the Obama Administration is still intense and that US special presidential envoy Scott Gration, a person close to the President, had argued for the normalization of relations with Khartoum and lifting sanctions and removing Sudan from the State department list of terrorist-sponsoring states. In June Gartion had blundered in saying that genocide in Dafur had ended.

Reeves was alarmed by this testimony. He points out that Khartoum has never lived up to any of its agreements; Egypt and China are still both obstacles to progress; and any ceasefire would demand robust monitoring of the sort that can not be provided by the current UN/African Union peacekeeping force, which is undermanned, underequipped and now has lost the confidence of most Darfuris. On March 4, Khartoum expelled 13 vital international humanitarian organizations and the Obama Administration, according to Reeves and others I have talked to, sadly underestimates the difficulty in generating new capacity on the humanitarian front as we hit the high point in the rainy season and a number of the camps face grave health and sanitation crises. Even in the camps, security is a tenuous, women still face rape, men are tortured and murdered and looting is epidemic.

There simply is no capacity to oversee what Gartion has talked about the "voluntary" return of some 2.7 million dispalced persons languishing in the camps throughout Darfur. They are being asked to return to lands without any protection and land which has already been seized by Arab tribal groups. The infamous Janjaweed have not been disarmed and continue to pose a threat.

Finally, Eric Reeves argues that Gration himself shows absolutely no understanding through his public statements that he comprehends the brutal nature of the regime that rules the Sudan and that they simply can not be cajoled or rewarded to do the right thing. Eric concludes," Any rapprochment that is not preceded by clear and irreversible actions to establish unimpeded humanitarian access, create freedom of movement and deployment for peacekeepers, and meet the critical benchmarks of the north/south peace agreement is doomed to fail." Unfortunately, Eric is right.

But we would not know this or have such advocates for the people of Darfur if Eric Reeves many years ago did not throw himself into the issue. What is most troubling is Washington's endless blindness to how crucial it is in zones of humanitarian crises to insert,sustain and maintain a capacity for humanitarian organizations to service the needs of the displaced, the refugees, the threatened. It is a sure recipe for more death and disaster.