Maw Books Blog

Not On Our Watch, The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond by Don Cheadle and John Prendergast is by far one of the most important books that I have ever read. If you’re not sure about what you can do to help in Darfur, you MUST READ this book! It’s like the ultimate handbook to what you can easily do to make a difference.

I can not express to you how important I feel this post is. Please take some time and read it. I apologize in advance for how lengthy this post is. Totally out of the norm for me. I’ve hopefully, broken it up into easy to read sections.

Not On Our Watch was co-authored by Don Cheadle, the Academy Award winning actor and John Prendergast, an amazing human-rights activist, co-chair of the Enough project, and special adviser to Congress. I was amazed with how much information Not On Our Watch contained. From the history of Darfur, why the genocide is occurring, why Americans don’t know about it, why the government isn’t doing anything to stop it, and very specific ways that you can make a difference.

First off, let me assume that you don’t know what’s going on in Darfur and start with a very brief statement. According the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide is defined as including any of the following five criterias:

• killing
• causing serious bodily or mental harm
• deliberately inflicting “conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
• imposing measures to prevent births
• forcibly transferring children from a targeted group

Darfur is located in the western region of Sudan, bordering Chad and is roughly the size of Texas. Since February 2003, Darfurians are being systematically displaced and murdered at the hands of the Janjaweed, a government-supported militia recruited from local Arab tribes. More than 400,000 have died and more than 2 million have been displaced.

And now let me make another assumption. Perhaps you are thinking, another conflict that I need to be worried about. In Africa? Isn’t there always something going on in Africa? It’s hopeless. This is what the authors called “conflict fatigue,” meaning that because the sparse and sporadic news coverage of Africa focuses solely on crises, we have begun to dismiss the entire continent as hopeless. “So, when wars erupt and their attendant human rights abuses emerge, the response - if there even is one - is often tentative and muted, and conflict-ridden countries easily descend into a free-fall. ” Good news come out of Africa every day. Let’s not find ourselves tired about thinking about Africa. “By giving peace a chance, we give millions and millions of Africans a chance.”

Elie Wiesel, author of Night and survivor of the Nazi Holocaust writes in the forward:

I am writing this now because in Darfur, Sudan, families are being uprooted and starved, children tormented and murdered in the thousands, and women raped with impunity. The world knows that the non-Arab peoples of Darfur are dying by the thousands, yet, in the eyes of the victims, the world remains indifferent to their plight.

{ . . .} Remember: silence helps the killer, never his victims.

Darfur is today’s capital of human suffering. Darfur deserves to live, and American citizens are providing it with reason to hope. Not to help, not to urge our elected officials to intervene and save innocent lives in any manner possible and needed is to condemn us on grounds of immorality. Our failure to speak out to end the ongoing genocide in Darfur would place on the wrong side of history. And that thought must seem intolerable to all of us.

Don Cheadle and John Prendergast urge each of us to join in the movement to end genocide in Darfur and around the world.

You are probably asking but does one person really make a difference?

The answer is YES!

Here are Six Strategies for Effective Change that YOU can do:

• RAISE AWARENESS

  I could not get over the following statistics: During June of 2005, a full two years into the Darfur crisis, NBC aired five segments and CBS aired none on the genocide but during that same period aired more than 300 reparts on Tom Cruise and Katie Holms. Fox news seemingly did better at 41 segments on Sudan but 1,752 stories on Michael Jackson. In total, top television networks aired 62 times more celebrity gossip than on the genocide in Darfur.

  Surprising? No.

  Sickening? Yes.

  What this means is that people can not be expected to care or act upon something that they are not aware of. Therefore, the need to raise awareness.

  Not On Our Watch suggested the following actions that we can take to help raise awareness:

  1. Educate yourself about Darfur and the world’s other most urgent crises at www.enoughproject.org
  2. Talk to you family, friends, and colleagues about these crises and what we can do to help end them.
  3. Host a screening of a documentary about Darfur. See a list of those documentaries here.
  4. Write a letter to your newspaper or local TV news asking for more coverage of Darfur and other areas that need your help.
  5. If you are a blogger, blog to end genocide on leading blog sites!
  6. Invite a speaker to your house of worship (and I’ll had here or workplace) to talk about Darfur and what must be done to end genocide and mass atrocities worldwide.
  7. Join/start prayer groups or promote interfaith events.
  8. Organize a vigil, fast, or protest to support stronger action to stop crimes against humanity.
  9. Wear the cause: purchase T-shirts or green wristbands and give them as gifts.
• RAISE FUNDS
  
  To accomplish anything always takes money. Organizations working to raise awareness and humanitarian workers are in constant need of money to meet operating costs. And those costs aren’t being met. In fact, daily rations are being cut to well below the minimum required to stave off malnutrition.But does your donation really make a difference? Does your money go to waste? Not On Our Watch made a good point that in the last twenty years aid agencies have really improved at better targeting their resources to the truly needy and much less waste and overhead. You can choose to make your donation to a organization and campaigns that gets to the root cause of the conflict so that humanitarian aid will become unnecessary or to humanitarian groups themselves.There were a lot of great and specific examples of what you can do to raise funds and that it doesn’t matter how young or old you are.
  
  Not On Our Watch suggested the following actions that you can take to help raise funds:
  1. Make an individual or family donation to humanitarian, human rights, or advocacy organizations. You can find a list of these organizations at www.enoughproject.com
  2. Urge your employer to make a contribution to one or more of these organizations, or place one of these organizations on its United Way designated charities.
  3. Organize a fund-raiser in your community by hosting a dinner, a concert, an auction, a fun run, or a fast.
  4. Link to the organizations you support from your personal home page or your blog.
• WRITE LETTERS
  
  Don Cheadle and John Prendergast urges each of us to remember that are congresspersons are our representatives, not unreachable decision makers and that we need to take advantage to our democracy. However, you choose to do it (fax, email, phone, postcard, letter) politicians take notice when people take time to write personal letters. This is what I loved about Not On Our Watch. Not only did the authors tell us what we needed to do but also gave us sample letters that we can use as a basis for our own letters. Everything is laid out to make things easy and simpler on us. After that, there is no excuse.
  
  Not On Our Watch suggested the following actions that you can take in regards to letter writing:
  1. Write letters to urge your representatives to take specific actions for Darfur and other crises.
  2. Ask your family, friends, and colleagues to write letters to their elected officials. And hound them until they do so.
  3. Sign or start a petition calling for greater accountability for those responsible for genocide and other crimes against humanity. And present it to your local congressperson.
  4. Thing big! Start a letter-writing campaign at our high school, university, house of worship, or office.
  5. Write a letter to the editor of your local paper and support specific policies while targeting specific elected officials.
• CALL FOR DIVESTMENT
  
  So what is divestment? It’s a calling for the removal from school, state, and personal pension and mutual funds of assets that are tied to the Sudanese government. Basically, “foreign direct investment is a lifeline that helps keep its war machine afloat.” It was this exact same type of pressure that helped free Nelson Mandela and end apartheid in South Africa.By divesting from companies that with ties to Sudan, “you send a clear message that the actions of perpetrators of mass atrocities and the companies that support them are intolerable. ”
  
  Not On Our Watch suggested the following actions that you can take in regards to divestment:
  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.
• JOIN AN ORGANIZATION
  
  Starting your own organization can be overwhelming. Many organizations already exist that you can join. One persons persistence and people coming together for a greater cause and a single task can develop into a large community. There are periodic spurts of activism but a sustainable long-term movement is needed to hold politicians accountable for responding to mass atrocities.
  
  Not On Our Watch suggested the following actions that you can take in regards to joining an organization:
  
  1. Learn about ENOUGH (www.enoughproject.org) and the other organizations working for change.
  2. Volunteer and attend meetings of organizations that have chapters in your area.
  3. Encourage your family, friends, and colleagues to make the same commitment.
  4. Start your own organization.
  5. Coordinate with other groups to amplify your efforts.
• LOBBY THE GOVERNMENT
  
  I particularly liked this quote by Mukesh Kapila, the former UN humanitarian coordinator for Sudan:

  People can show solidarity by not forgetting. One of the most terrible and depressing things when you are a refugee or an internally displaced person from a war like this is you feel completely forgotten. You feel that you are stuck there somewhere in a camp in the middle of nowhere and the world has simply passed you by. And that, more than anything else, takes everything away from you. So help; don’t forget; and bring pressure on the authorities to do what must be done.

  Meeting directly with your elected officials may seem daunting but has a greater impact on the discussion. They are there to listen to you as a voter and you have a right to meet with them and tell them what you think they should be doing.
  
  Not On Our Watch suggested the following actions that you can take in regards to lobbying the government:

  1. Find our your representative’s record on Darfur. Visit www.darfurscores.org to learn about each member of Congress’s individual voting record.
  2. Make an appointment to see your national representatives when they are in your area, or get a group together and travel to Washington, D.C. for a lobby day. Making an appointment to meet with Congress isn’t as tough as it sounds. You voted for them and you have a right to tell them exactly how you feel about the issues that matter to you.
  3. Visit city council members and state representatives and encourage them to divest and pass a resolution urging stronger action to end genocide in Darfur and atrocities wherever they occur.
  4. Urge your elected officials to speak publicly about Darfur.
  5. Keeping sending those personal letters to Congress, the president, and key officials like the secretary of state, secretary of defense, and national security adviser.

Don Cheadle and John Prendergast state the Three P’s of genocide prevention:

• Protecting the People
  
  “The inability to protect human life when threatened en masse is the most significant failure of the international community.” Sometimes we can protect people without the use of force and other times force is necessary. The book goes into a good explanation on this and states “The key to protecting civilians from atrocities is supporting international institutions to enhance their capacity to do so and building the political will in the international community to take the necessary action.
• Punishing the Perpetrators
  
  So indictments are raining down on those responsible for carrying out the genocide in Darfur. The most recent came just this past week on July 14th as Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir was formally charged with genocide. Having these men actually turned over to the International Criminal Court for prosecution is a whole other ball game.Another fact that I found horrifiying is that the United States has the best intelligence in the world, but does not assist the ICC in indicting these war criminals. “We need to shame the U.S. government until it provides help to the ICC” and make those who are perpetuated war crimes pay.
• Promoting the Peace
  
  “U.S. influence and diplomacy can have profoundly positive consequences in resolving deadly conflict, and the most cost-effective initiative the U.S. could undertake in the entire arena if foreign policy worldwide would be to put a few more seasoned peacemakers in action in conflicts around the globe.”

Not On Our Watch is full of content rich details that I just wish I could transfer everything that I learned from my brain right into yours. The appendix alone (which I wish I could just copy word for word for you) is worth having because of the very specific ideas and ways listed to help us help Darfurians. The book is not without it’s personal touch and stories. I was surprised with just how easy it was to read given how content rich it really was. I wouldn’t hesitate picking this book up even if you don’t read it cover to cover.

I have also been watching a lot of documentaries lately about Darfur. I’ll talk about two of those documentaries when I read the books that they are associated with but I wanted to mention these other two here. The documentary Darfur Now was excellent. It featured several American activists (including Don Cheadle), the ICC prosecutor, as well as several others. The other documentary I watched was ABC News Nightline The Sudan, which I believe is the documentary that Cheadle mentions in Not On Our Watch. I highly recommend seeking out both of these documentaries.

Here is a quick preview of Darfur Now:

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Website and links mentioned in Not On Our Watch:

www.notonourwatchbook.com
www.enoughproject.org
www.savedarfur.org
www.crisisgroup.org
www.sudanreeves.org
www.darfurisdying.com
www.genocideintervention.net
www.deomocracyinaction.org
www.beawitness.org
www.sudandivestment.org
www.standnow.org
www.darfurreachanddevelopment.org
www.darfurscores.org

Links on this blog:

Darfur Book Recommendations
Book review of The Translator by Daoud Hari
Book review and author interview of The Sudan Project by Melissa Leembruggen

So I leave you now with these words from the book and my closing (but not my last) thoughts:

No personal action is too small. For the sanctity of the human race, it is imperative that we not stand idly by as innocent civilians in Darfur and other war zones continue to be victims of unthinkable brutality.

Take a stand. Raise your voice. Find out how you can make a difference. The time to act is now.

After reading this book, others, and watching a lot of documentaries about Darfur lately I feel like I have to do something! I have come up with what I feel like is going to be an amazing awareness and fund raising campaign. I am so excited! I get all emotional just thinking about it! It’s going to take a while for me to set up, all of August in fact. So let me just say this, in September I will be reading and blogging for a cause. Please, please stay tuned! I’ll be announcing details the later half of August. You do not want to miss this, even my mother said she was proud of me after I told her what I’ve been brainstorming. And I still get warm fuzzies when Mom says she’s proud. Can’t wait!

What about you? What is one, little simple thing that you think you can do? Will you make a difference?

P.S. If the formatting is all funny, I’m sorry. I tried and tried to make this post come out right but every time I saved it defaulted to really weird alignments that I never could fix. Basically, this means I have no clue what it’s doing. Let’s see what it looks like after I hit publish, because I’m not sure I want to go back for the billionth time and refix it.