Thursday, March 29, 2007

More on China and Darfur

Last weekend, Globe reporter Kevin Cullen wrote in Ideas about the nascent movement to use the '08 Beijing Olympics to pressure China to use its influence over Sudan to stop the humanitarian disaster in Darfur. (China is Sudan's biggest economic and diplomatic supporter.)

A lot has happened since Sunday -- in Boston, D.C., and in China -- so Kevin checked in today with a follow-up dispatch:

From Beacon Hill to Capitol Hill, human rights activists were pushing politicians this week to increase the pressure on Sudan to stop a counterinsurgency war in Darfur that has killed an estimated 400,000, which President Bush has called genocide -- and to push China to use its influence over its allies in the Khartoum regime to stop the killing.

On Thursday, actress and activist Mia Farrow and Eric Reeves, the Smith College literature professor who has become the nation's leading advocate for Darfuris being slaughtered by janjaweed militia, urged Massachusetts legislators to divest state pension funds from Sudan.

"No one is safe in the Darfur region of Sudan," said Farrow, who earlier in the week had back-to-back op-ed pieces in the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal, the latter of which took Hollywood director Steven Spielberg to task for his visiting China to help the government there prepare to stage the ceremonies for the Olympic summer games in Beijing next year.

At approximately the same time Farrow and Reeves were testifying before the Joint Public Service Commitee at the State House, John Shattuck, the CEO of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, and former assistant secretary of state for human rights under the Clinton administration, was testifying before the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Shattuck told the committee the US was losing credibility on human rights because of policies toward detainees since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

In a telephone interview, Shattuck said the committee expressed "great interest in a diplomatic initiative" aimed at China modeled on Reeves' idea of shaming China by linking its complicity in the Darfur genocide to the Beijing games -- the so-called Genocide Olympics campaign.

"It's a moment of movement," Shattuck said, referring to the push for divestment on Beacon Hill, and the push for official US pressure on China from Capitol Hill.

Farrow, who has made four trips to the region and met with some of the 2.5 million refugees from Darfur, acknowledged her public rebuke of Spielberg won't endear her in Hollywood.

"I won't be doing a Spielberg movie any time soon," she said in an email to the Globe, "But I'm on Darfur time -- 10,000 a month are dying. Time to burn a bridge or two."

China this week said it had found a new, potentially large domestic source of oil. China's need for oil -- it gets about 10 percent of its crude from Sudan, which amounts to 70 percent of Sudan's oil exports -- is seen as one reason it is reluctant to criticize the Khartoum regime.

This sudden, unexpected claim has led some human rights activists to hope that China will be more likely to pressure its friends in Khartoum to allow a UN and/or African Union peacekeeping mission in to stop the killing and protect humanitarian workers who have mostly withdrawn from the region.

Posted by John Swansburg at 06:58 PM

Print | E-mail to a friend | Permalink | Subscribe via rss