Harvard backslides on divestment
IN APRIL last year, Harvard University was widely applauded for divesting its $4.4 million holdings in the oil company
Explaining last year's PetroChina divestment, the Harvard Corporation stated, ''Oil is a critical source of revenue and an asset of paramount strategic importance to the Sudanese government, which has been found to be complicit in what the US Congress and US State Department have termed 'genocide' in Darfur." Consequently, institutions with large investments, like Harvard, impose a powerful sanction on the Sudanese regime by withdrawing support for these oil companies. This reasoning is as sound today as it was 11 months ago. Harvard's Sinopec holdings make a mockery of every word in support of human dignity that the university uttered at that time.
The suffering in Darfur continues today just as it did in April last year. Deaths from direct killings are declining to the extent that the genocidal campaign has been ''successful" -- there are few villages left to terrorize. However, as Physicians for Human Rights documented in a report released last month, the systematic elimination of the Darfuri population through the destruction of their livelihoods continues unabated.
With Harvard Corporation members declining to comment, it is difficult to ascertain why they decided to buy more shares of Sinopec -- especially against the backdrop of last year's very public PetroChina divestment. Did Harvard think that the student activists who fought so hard for divestment then would simply lose interest? If so, they vastly underestimated the resilience that students at Harvard and across the nation are showing when it comes to fighting genocide.
The PetroChina decision was rightly regarded as a triumph of student activism. It was also interpreted as a promising sign that institutions like Harvard would not allow themselves to be complicit in genocide. It showed Harvard was willing to use its financial and symbolic clout to take a stand against the gravest of human atrocities. The Sudanese press picked up the story immediately. Seasoned activists noted that ''not since apartheid" had an Ivy League university shown such moral fortitude.
The dominoes did not stop there. Harvard's PetroChina decision set a precedent for other universities, including Stanford, Dartmouth, and Amherst, to divest from companies doing business with the government of Sudan. State governments are also following suit; Illinois, New Jersey, and Oregon divested their pension funds from companies complicit in the genocide and more than a dozen other states are considering similar legislation. More than $6.5 billion has been moved out of Sudan-related stocks in the 11 months since Harvard made its PetroChina decision.
Yet Harvard is now poised to forgo its heroic role in this movement. Its Sinopec holdings, if stable since the last quarterly report, are currently worth nearly double what its PetroChina holdings were worth when divested. Clearly, if students launched petitions, asked alumni to withhold contributions, attended vigils, lobbied faculty, and marched in protest to divest $4.4 million from PetroChina, they will do the same and more to push Harvard to divest over $7 million from Sinopec. Only this time, the university's betrayal and poor judgment will add a new level of commitment to the fight.
Harvard's divestment last year, unlike the universities and states that followed, was limited to PetroChina, thereby neglecting Sinopec and other corporations known to bankroll the genocide in Darfur. It is unlikely that students and supportive faculty will allow the university to get away with another single-company divestment. Having shown its lack of discretion on this matter, the university will be pushed either to refrain from investing in a list of companies known to be supporting the Darfur genocide or to accept broader principles that force the university to divest from any company proven to be complicit in mass atrocity.
Whatever policy is decided upon this time, we can be sure that students will not stop until they achieve an enduring victory. And in the process, they will make a noise that will be heard all the way to Khartoum -- and perhaps even Darfur.
Chad Hazlett is a student at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Rebecca Hamilton is a student at the Kennedy School and Harvard Law School. Both are co-founders of the Harvard Darfur Action Group and representatives of the Genocide Intervention Network. 
