Moving Beyond the G-Word
Anti-genocide activists work to maintain the profile of human rights violations, even if they can’t be called genocide.
By Matt Zeitlin
August 19, 2009
A member of the European Union of Jewish students holds up a placard reading ‘ The United Nations remains silent’ as she joins others in a demonstration against the actions in Darfur outside the United Nations headquarters in Geneva. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)[Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series about the Darfur and anti-genocide activist movement. Read the first part here.]
Nina McMurry, the advocacy coordinator for STAND, the leading student activism group against mass atrocities and genocide, is circumspect about insisting that the situation in Darfur should be called genocide. She says STAND has “changed the way we talk about Darfur,” and “in terms of mobilization, the key is moving beyond the g-word.”
McMurry was one of the many activists at a Washington, D.C. conference this summer called “How It Ends,” where 1,700 students and other young activists gathered to discuss a different ethnic conflict, the situation in Uganda. The Lord’s Resistance Army has wreaked havoc in Northern Uganda by “abducting tens of thousands of children and forcing them to become child soldiers, sexually enslaving young girls, and terrorizing communities,” according to the Enough Project. On the last day of the conference, attendees lobbied Congress on behalf of the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act. The bill would mandate that the administration develop a strategy for providing “political, economic, intelligence, and military support for a multilateral effort to protect civilians and permanently end the threat posed by the LRA.”
The LRA lobby day is perfect example of what a permanent anti-genocide constituency hopes to be. But one lobby day does not a comprehensive activist movement make. McMurry, like other anti-genocide activists, was first inspired to work on the Darfur conflict after she saw Hotel Rwanda, the film about the Rwandan genocide, which discusses Darfur at its end. The challenge for those working in the movement today is maintaining the raw emotional appeal that so inspired the first wave of anti-genocide activists, like McMurry, even as situations on the ground start to change and bring attention to other crimes against humanity.
But other situations are not always easily painted in terms of the good-versus-evil narratives that have been used to describe Rwanda and Darfur. In the words of one activist, “The situation in Darfur never resembled the Holocaust and doesn’t right now.” McMurry’s work is a good example of the type of evolution that will have to happen to the anti-genocide activist movement. The Save Darfur coalition itself is an assemblage of organizations devoted to Darfur, but STAND, the Genocide Intervention Network, and Enough are part of a larger effort to build a “permanent anti-genocide constituency.” These groups work on crimes against humanity and ending and resolving conflicts marked by the targeted killing of civilians. The other conflicts they deal with—Uganda, Congo, Zimbabwe, and Burma—while all certainly horrific, are not considered genocides.
The new ambivalence and doubt about the occurrence of genocide makes organizing and raising awareness more difficult, McMurry acknowledged. She says that many students became involved because they are grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and once they heard of genocide in Darfur, they felt compelled to become involved. John Bagwell, the national student coordinator at Enough, said that the “constituency formed around Darfur was largely because the word genocide was used.”
Bagwell noted just how difficult it is calling attention to conflicts when you can’t apply the word “genocide.” Often large national news outlets only seem able to give one African crisis significant attention. This means, in the short term at least, that trying to focus public attention on African conflicts can be a zero-sum game. When activists and celebrities started raising awareness about Darfur, media devoted less attention to the atrocities in the Congo, where conflict has been raging for more than a decade and has claimed more than 5 million lives. Russell said that activists needed to build up a “general awareness of how these issues interact” and that their understanding of these issues needs to be “complex and comprehensive.”
Although the anti-genocide movement is unprecedented in scope and size, many activists are frustrated today. The difficulties in maintaining the movement are daunting when you look at the political problems in Darfur. There is a joint United Nations-African Union operation in Darfur, but the humanitarian crisis continues and Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, is still in power despite an arrest warrant for crimes against humanity issued by the International Criminal Court.
Darfur activists seem united around the point that the regime in Khartoum can not be trusted and needs to be closely monitored and pressured if there is to be any hope of peace in Darfur, or in Sudan as a whole. McMurry described the government as “serially genocidal” while Reeves said that they habitually operate in “bad faith.” John Prendergast, co-founder of Enough, even went so far as to say that expecting better behavior from Khartoum without real pressure or threat of consequences would be “tantamount to appeasement.”
Activists also agree that there isn’t—and shouldn’t be—a unified Sudan or Darfur policy. STAND’s McMurray thinks that activists need to “move beyond” calling Darfur genocide, but Prendergast insists that it must still be called genocide and continue to hold attention on the problems that still exist there.
For many, Darfur has an exceptional pull on the conscience, but there is evidence that the work of groups like STAND and Enough have actually lead to an increase in awareness and involvement in conflicts other than Darfur. Enough’s Bagwell thought the “How It Ends” conference was an example of a positive outgrowth of the Darfur movement. He observed that many of the activists who attended it were there “because their friends were involved in Save Darfur” and that the effort to bring attention to Uganda is just one of example of causes “that have grown up in [the] past few years around this movement.”
Matt Zeitlin is a staff writer with Campus Progress and a sophomore at Northwestern University. Follow him on Twitter.
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Today, over 800 student activists converged on Capitol Hill for the largest lobby day to prevent genocide in history.
The students were marching to the Hill at 8:30am to meet with their elected officials and to push Congress to implement the recommendations of the Genocide Prevention Task Force (GPTF) report. As part of an innovative partnership between STAND, the student led division of the Genocide Intervention Network, and WITNESS, the international human rights organization that pioneered video advocacy, the student activists collected 500 video messages from their student body and community. For the first time, these messages were edited to create individual videos for Senators, which the students began hand-delivering to them this morning. View personalized videos for Senators: hub.witness.org/STAN...
With this campaign we are seeing the ‘YouTube generation’ in action – and today, we’re seeing them change how citizens are lobbying Congress. Less than a month after the Obama administration unveiled the Sudan policy review, these students are reminding their elected officials and President Obama of the moral and political imperative to bring peace in Sudan today and ensure that other similar conflicts don’t occur in the future.
— Ashley Patterson - Nov 9, 02:12 PM - #