i-ACT team works hard to make World Refugee Day live video feed the best it can be in one of the most remote places in the world. Our friends here bring the world to Djabal, and into their hearts.
Today is Father’s Day. Around the world families will come together to celebrate the men who have given so much to their children. Looking out across yesterday’s World Refugee Day celebration, I didn’t see many men, it was mostly the colorful scarves of women and children. The men who did survive the violent attacks on the villages and made it here, tell us stories of not only the horrors of violence, but of the emotional struggle to continue to survive away from their own homes every day. Their eyes say alot.
This Father’s Day we are asking you to write an open Father’s Day letter to the editor to your LOCAL PAPER. Tell them of the stories you have learned and of the Darfuri fathers you have personally connected with. Ask President Obama, a father himself and the father of our country, to work to bring justice and peace to our beautiful friends.
Yesterday was World Refugee Day, and the people of Camp Djabal’s lives were intertwined with people from around the world in real-time. It was without a doubt the most important work I’ve ever done in my life. I haven’t had time to really process or absorb what I have been taking in on this trip, at least not as deeply as I know I eventually will.
Today is Sunday, Father’s Day, and I’m thinking of my Dad. I didn’t send him a card or a gift, but I know he knows I’m thinking of him. Yesterday morning in the hours before the start of the live video broadcast we sat on a mat and spoke with a group of men that are father figures of the camp. They told us about what they left behind in Darfur, and how they describe the beauty of Darfur to their young children so that they have at least a basic description of a home that they have never seen with their own eyes. They told us unanimously that there can be no peace in Darfur with there first being Justice. There was no debate, and they did not hesitate to state with complete confidence that everyone shared their non-negotiable demand for justice and accountability for Omar al-Bashir and all who have committed genocide and crimes against humanity. They voiced their support for the ICC and Luis Moreno Ocampo’s work.
I sat in awe listening and studying the faces of the men, astonished at how much pain, suffering, and evil their eyes had seen. We shared a mat on the ground. They shared their pain from the past, and their hope for the future. This was now on my shoulders. Focused and determined. It’s a weird metaphor, but one that I think people reading this will understand: This conversation was like the most inspirational pre-Superbowl motivational speech ever given by a coach to his team. Except, they didn’t know they were giving it. The conversation was totally impromptu, we didn’t plan on having it, it just happened… the way all things have happened on our trip. It happened for a reason. I left energized and focused on the task ahead — make sure that the stories of these men and those of the other people in the camp are beamed live across the world for all to see and hear.
The team here on the ground has been wracking its collective brain with a simple question, how do we get people to care? I know, it’s not simple at all. So, we make it more manageable and ask, how do we get enough people to care just enough? Care just a little?
And from caring, to action.
“Out of the entire population of US, how many people do you think have called the White House?,” Ian asked. It has to be a fraction of 1%, is my guess.
Samantha Power, genocide scholar and now with the Obama administration, summarizes her key findings from researching for her book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide”:
Despite graphic media coverage, most American policymakers, journalists, and citizens are extremely slow to muster the imagination needed to reckon with evil. Ahead of the killings, they assume rational actors will not inflict seemingly gratuitous violence. They trust in negotiations and traditional diplomacy. Once the killings start, they assume that civilians who keep their heads down will be left alone. They urge cease-fires and donate aid.
It is in the realm of domestic politics that the battle to stop genocide is lost. American leaders interpret society-wide silence as indifference and reason that involvement carries steep risks while non-engagement is safe. Lawmakers, editorial boards, nongovernmental groups, and ordinary constituents do not generate sufficient political pressure to change that calculus.
The U.S. government not only abstains from sending its troops, but it takes very few steps along a continuum of intervention to deter genocide.
U.S. officials spin themselves (as well as the American public) about the nature of the violence and the likely impact of an American intervention. They render the bloodshed two-sided and inevitable, not genocidal. They insist that any proposed U.S. response will be futile, and may harm the victims and jeopardize other precious American moral or strategic interests. They brand as “emotional” those U.S. officials who urge intervention. They avoid use of the word “genocide.” Thus, they can in good conscience favor stopping genocide in the abstract, while simultaneously opposing American involvement.
The suffering that has been experienced during the last years in Darfur is far from an abstract. It is very real. I know that you care, since you’re here in our website reading this. How do we get more to care? How do we win the battle?
Yesterday was World Refugee Day. My friends got to speak to the world. Directly to anyone who logged in. To anyone who was following any of the many twitter updates. To anyone who was on the live chat - anywhere in the world. We had spent the days leading up to WRD preparing for the live video feed to Washington DC and then for the several hours of live video feed to the world.
We walked the camp, back and forth in the sand and the heat. We talked with refugees, asked them to gather their friends to be included and to control the crowd, and we tested tech equipment. We slept on the floor of an office, quite comfortably actually, and had only a few moments of down time and sleep over the past week.
It was all worth it. Broadcasting the voices of the refugees to world, live, offering interactions and question/answer sessions, all of this is why I am here.
At the end of the day, during the sunset over Djabal, Annette Rehl from UNHCR was saying the closing words for the day. This is when it hit me. The power of what we did today and possibilities for the future. The possibility that the world’s most vulnerable can participate in the conversations and peace processes that affect their lives most directly is real. It is very real. This is why I am here.
Thank you to those who tuned in, and if you didn’t get a chance, please check out the “on demand” or archived footage of the day. You will see all our friends speaking to the world.
i-ACT podcast
Today is Father’s Day. Around the world families will come together to celebrate the men who have given so much to their children. Looking out across yesterday’s World Refugee Day celebration, I didn’t see many men, it was mostly the colorful scarves of women and children. The men who did survive the violent attacks on the villages and made it here, tell us stories of not only the horrors of violence, but of the emotional struggle to continue to survive away from their own homes every day. Their eyes say alot.
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