Not on Our Watch (22 page)

Our inner circle ‘source’ had told us without equivocation that the bills were indeed in jeopardy. The source had repeated this to us on more than one occasion over the last week, every time we had called in to check on the bills’ progress, in fact. Was George right? Had we just seen our unwavering determination in the face of adversity overcome an obstacle, or had we simply been misinformed of the gov’s intentions?

‘I don’t know, but I’m not looking this gift horse in the mouth.’

‘That’s probably best,’ George agrees.

I thank Mr Danny ‘Batman’ Ocean-Clooney, we BS for a beat, and I take off back for the poker tables to feed the monster, finding the necessary excuse for such activity now by telling myself that I deserve it after all the ‘hard work’ I’ve just done. I know, people, I got problems.

As I’m boarding the plane back to LA, my phone chimes. It’s a text message from George informing me that the governor would like for George and me to attend the bill signing ceremony, an invitation George very willingly will accept. I text back that I am of the same mind and will see him early Monday morning to stand with Adam, Assemblyman Koretz, and George behind the governor in a bipartisan display of hope for a better future for Darfur. And I left Vegas $250 up too. Not bad.

Call for Divestment: Actions You Can Take

1. Educate yourself about divestment and the targeted companies at the Sudan Divestment Task Force website at www.sudandivestment.org and the ENOUGH website at www.enoughproject.org.

2. Research your investment portfolio to see if you have investments in companies that are targeted for divestment, and then pull your assets out of any fund that does. And tell them you did!

3. Join a group that is pushing for divestment at your university (or alma mater), your municipality, and your state.

4. Write to your pension fund manager and demand that your pension fund be free of the targeted companies.

5. Encourage your family, friends, and colleagues to make sure that their investment portfolios are free of those companies.

Strategy Five

CREATING COMMUNITIES OF INFLUENCE—JOIN AN ORGANISATION

Volunteering with an existing non-profit or ad hoc organisation can be an incredibly effective and rewarding way of getting involved. Creating a new organisation may seem intimidating, but keep in mind many groups started small but focused. Often all it takes is the persistence of one person; sometimes friends or colleagues coming together for a single task can develop into a fuller community. Activist associations have often grown to have tremendous influence, usually by working in co-ordination with similar groups. Through such efforts, momentum is built, people see that they are not alone in caring, and powerful networks are created.

Tim Nonn, a stay-at-home editor who was busy raising his five-year-old son, found it difficult to face the suffering of the children in Darfur, Sudan. Instead, he avoided dealing with the issue for several years. One night Nonn was watching
The Charlie Rose Show
and John was on talking about Sudan along with Samantha Power. They told a story about a mother in Darfur walking across the desert for several days with her children after their village was destroyed. Nonn thought, ‘God, some days it feels hard to walk with my son through the grocery store.’ This finally got him motivated to get involved.

He went to his church in Petaluma, California, and gave a sermon on Sudan. After the sermon, Nonn spearheaded an initiative called the ‘Dear Sudan’ campaign from his church to raise awareness about Sudan. The idea was simple: raise enough funds to feed the same number of refugees in Sudan as people in Petaluma (roughly 55,000). By putting it in these terms, Nonn wanted to show people in his congregation what it takes to feed their own community and how hard it would be to feed the millions displaced in Darfur and Chad. ‘We, in a way, try to put it in terms that people in that community can recognise, so they realise what it takes to feed their own community for a day.’ Nonn believes, ‘As individuals, we have a certain level of influence, but as communities we have more influence with our congressional representatives, and as a network of communities we have even more power to not only raise money for the refugees but help create the political will to end the genocide.’

The campaign raised over $10,000, more than enough money to feed a displaced community in Sudan the size of Petaluma for one day. With the encouragement of Susan Sanders at the National Office of the United Church of Christ, Dear Sudan quickly became a national movement, endorsed and funded by many denominations. Its goals have expanded beyond raising money for Darfurian displaced persons and refugees to include ending the genocide and educating the public about the crisis in Sudan. For example, Nonn hosted an essay contest with junior high and high school students asking why they should help the hungry. Congressman Frank Wolf, a longtime and dedicated Sudan advocate, gave them congressional certificates to honour their efforts.

Nonn hopes to have 5,000 Dear Sudan communities eventually. ‘Our hope is to reach that critical mass point when there are so many communities who are organising that the movement cannot be ignored any longer and there will be not only a massive relief effort but also a political response. We must find ways to work together; it’s happening on a lot of levels—parents, religious communities—and it’s growing.’

Online organising has been key in bringing people together as well as spreading the message to a diverse audience. Perhaps the most unusual group to emerge has been the Harry Potter Alliance. Created by Andrew Slack of the Late Night Players, the Harry Potter Alliance seeks to motivate Harry Potter fans to take a stand against tyranny, genocide, global warming, and more, using parallels to the book series. Inept political leaders become the Minister and Ministry of Magic, while the oppressive and tyrannical are depicted as Voldemort and the Deatheaters. In May 2005, Slack and his friend, and fellow Harry Potter fan, Justin Oberman created a site, myspace.com/hpalliance, dedicated to discussing the parallels between Harry Potter and social justice. The site took off immediately, so Slack created the Harry Potter Alliance, made up of Potter fans and activists for social justice. With nearly 6,000 members, the group has been able to bring the crisis in Darfur to a larger audience. Through concerts, comedy shows, and even a formal dance, they raised money and informed people through the myth of Potter. ‘I’m aware of how tragic the crisis in Darfur is and how something must be done. We want to connect the apathy around Voldemort’s return to our government’s apathy to the genocide in Darfur,’ said Andrew. ‘When I spoke about this parallel at one of our shows, people in the audience screamed, ‘I want to fight for Dumbledore! Thank you for bringing up Darfur!’’

Andrea Strong, a New York City–based food writer, was provoked by Samantha Power’s article about Darfur in
The New Yorker
and—again—Kristof’s columns to do something positive. She originally planned a single large event, using her connections as a critic, to benefit the International Rescue Committee’s work in Sudan. As two to three restaurants a day were contacting Strong to participate, Dining for Darfur transformed from one event into a nascent organisation. At the first event in April 2006, more than 60 restaurants in New York, California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Miami, and even Tokyo donated 5% of their gross sales (over $29,619) to IRC’s humanitarian efforts in Darfur and on the border with Chad. A Dining for Darfur event in New York in August 2006 raised another $30,000 for IRC, and some restaurants participated in the organisation’s ‘Wine Out’—during the entire month of August profits from specific wines went to IRC. ‘People often feel paralysed and unable to do something when these situations occur. This whole thing has shown me that it’s possible to help and that it feels good in a personal way, even if that’s selfish.’

Janice Kamenir-Reznik, a 53-year-old mom and former lawyer, is the chair of Jewish World Watch, a Los Angeles–based coalition of synagogues working together to mobilize other synagogues, their schools, their members, and the broader community to combat genocide and other egregious violations of human rights around the world.

Jewish World Watch began when Rabbi Harold Schulweis gave a sermon at Valley Beth Shalom in Los Angeles, where he stressed the need to globalise how the congregation thought of themselves as Jews. The words ‘Never Again’ are used as a Jewish mantra, but it must really mean ‘no genocide’ and be applied to all of humanity, not just to Jews. There have been several genocides since the Holocaust, and Rabbi Schulweis felt that his community did not do everything it could in the face of those horrific events. Therefore, he challenged his congregation to form an organisation to educate and act on behalf of Darfur. He proposed the project and asked Kamenir-Reznik to chair the organisation. Since it was launched in October 2004, Jewish World Watch has mobilised the Valley Beth Shalom community as well as 24 other synagogues and reaches nearly 100,000 people, more than half under the age of 17.

The organisation focuses on activities in three areas: providing public education, advocacy, and refugee relief work. It provides a curriculum to teachers in Catholic, Jewish, and public schools in addition to sending guest speakers, putting on community events, and making presentations. Through petitions, letters, and postcards, Jewish World Watch works to influence policy makers. The organisation has raised up to $150,000 for the International Medical Corps and its work in Darfur. Every $50,000 will stock medical clinics in Chad for refugees from Darfur. JWW funded two medical clinics that can service 400 patients a day. Another $50,000 funded the building of ten water wells. This money was mainly raised by children in schools in the LA area. To achieve its goals, JWW has collaborated with Stop Genocide Now, Camp Ramah (a Jewish summer camp), and other religious organisations of different faiths.

Kamenir-Reznik says, ‘At the end of each day, I think about another 80 or so people we’ve touched or who read the article we got in the paper, and I can say today, this is what I did to force an agenda. If I do enough for a long enough period of time, I can influence public policy. “Do unto your neighbour as you would have them do unto you.” I am taking words of the Torah to the road and applying them.’

Perhaps the greatest challenge in creating a community of influence on issues like Darfur is sustaining energy and activism that can lead to lasting change. We’ve experienced periodic spurts of activism on Africa and atrocities, but not a sustainable long-term movement to hold politicians accountable for responding to and, ultimately, preventing mass violence against civilians wherever it occurs. Early in 2007, ENOUGH launched with the goal of building such a movement.

ENOUGH is a collaborative effort between John’s employer, the International Crisis Group, and the organisation Gayle Smith works for, the Centre for American Progress (CAP). The campaign emerged out of a couple of meetings that brought together a number of individuals from disparate backgrounds, united in their motivation to do more about Darfur and other crises.

Gayle and John have been friends for 20 years and were colleagues in the Clinton White House. As activists, they always dreamed of making atrocities prevention mean something to more Americans. As Gayle told us, ‘When I was in government, there was not a united constituency that pushed the US to lead on these issues. There is a low level of understanding, a high level of indifference, and a sense of intractability about conflict and atrocities in Africa.’

John and Gayle developed ENOUGH with support from Humanity United, an initiative started by Pam Omidyar in 2005 to help end mass atrocities, human trafficking, and slavery. Pam hosted a seminal meeting in Las Vegas, bringing human rights advocates from around the world to brainstorm on how to build a wider and deeper movement to confront and prevent mass atrocities. The other key meeting in the creation of ENOUGH was the meeting we both attended in New York that Don writes about at the end of Chapter Nine. Political strategist Tom Sheridan, Pam, and Randy Newcomb, a member of Pam’s team who travelled with us to northern Uganda in 2005, helped devise the strategy for ENOUGH. The focus of the organisation is to provide training, strategic support, and field-based policy recommendations to the diverse groups all over the country that are the building blocks for action on the issue of genocide and crimes against humanity, while working with others to build more cohesion and unity of purpose around the goal of creating a bigger, more effective movement over time.

‘Right now it is not clear where the responsibility lies in the US government for failing to respond to atrocities,’ Gayle told us. ‘What we need is more than incidental responses by activists. We need sustained pressure to change policy at a structural level and to invest more resources in fighting the conditions that give rise to crimes against humanity in the first place.’

Indeed, enough is ENOUGH!

Join an Organisation: Actions You Can Take

1. Learn about ENOUGH (www.enoughproject.org) and the other organisations working for change.

2. Volunteer and attend meetings of organisations that have chapters in your area.

3. Encourage your family, friends, and colleagues to make the same commitment.

4. Start your own organisation.

5. Co-ordinate with other groups to amplify your efforts.

Strategy Six

‘KEEP PUSHING AND PUSHING’—LOBBY THE GOVERNMENT

Beyond writing a letter or signing a petition, meeting with and personally talking with elected officials at the local, state, and national level is a way to give a face to the anti-genocide movement and to have a greater impact on the discussion. It may seem daunting at first, but making an appointment by yourself or with a local group to meet with your elected officials when they are visiting their constituency offices can be a fruitful endeavour. These officials are there to listen to you as a voter and constituent; you have a right to meet with them and tell them what you think they should be doing. That is the way the democratic political system works. If you don’t use it, you lose the ability to influence it.