Authors: Don Cheadle,John Prendergast
9pm now and the last stragglers are driving off as Cindy and I stuff the oversized boxes into her compact car. We’re playing a king-sized game of Tetris like a mutha, but we manage.
‘Don’t you feel like your mission has already started?’
‘What mission?’
‘To get the story out to as many people as you can. What you just did in the store, wasn’t that a part of it?’
‘I guess so.’
‘It’s similar to what you were saying about the stories that
Nightline
will bring back except you’re not waiting for the show to air. You are the storyteller. You are being active now.’
That one word stopped me from telling her that I had only an hour ago seriously contemplated fatalism. One word snapped me to attention: Active. Steven J. Brown, political lobbyist turned hedge fund manager, had mentioned the word before to me, almost as an aside. ‘Being an activist for Africa is no small thing. Are you sure you’re ready?’
No, I wasn’t ready, and I wasn’t one, given that the word ‘activist’ in my mind was reserved for people who would possibly put themselves in harm’s way to defend justice. I wasn’t
there
. Activists always took up the gauntlet for the rights of the meek over the tyranny of the strong. The reward for activists could be a paradigm shift toward justice, true, but often as not the result could be professional suicide, if they were lucky, with grave bodily harm or death never completely off the table. I wouldn’t cast myself in that movie. My idea was to gain insight, leverage celebrity, and keep it movin’. I feel for the people, but my own family serves as my chief and primary concern. I was hardly anybody’s activist. But I was active. Active begets activism and creates an activist? No. It’s got to be harder than that.
At my sister’s home, the conversation and conversion continued. ‘You’re not going into any real dangerous areas, are you?’
‘There’s no way we’d get clearance if we were. These are all congressional members travelling and we have a military escort
and
we’re going to have news cameras with us. I don’t think anything’s going to happen.’
‘You should bring cameras to the camps. Individual video cameras.’
‘Why?’
‘So that the Darfurians can film what is happening themselves. What would be the impact if the Internet was suddenly flooded with all these home movies of bombers doing runs on their villages or Janjaweed attacking children and women, everybody running for their lives? All of that?’
I needed to think on that for a minute but answered immediately anyway, Joaquin Phoenix’s character in
Hotel Rwanda
leaping to mind.
‘Everyone would probably be shocked. Some would be outraged. Few would act.’
But her question sent me down a tour of tangents. Would footage from the Nazi Holocaust, if it were to have been strewn across some information highway equivalent to the Internet in the 1940s, have ended that genocide? It would have been as ghastly a sight as any horror movie that’s come out in the last 20 years, more so for being real. Could we have stood by so long then? When I was in junior high school I saw the Holocaust-themed documentary
Night and Fog
. It messed me up. The prisoners in those camps were on a one-way trip to death by work, starvation, medical experimentation, or execution, and everyone in that auditorium knew it but them. I wished I could go back in time and scream at them, ‘Those are not the showers! Rush those guards! They’re lying to you!’ I have never been as affected by images in my life save for a
Frontline
documentary on Rwanda I saw many years later. Moving pictures.
But more recently, did news footage of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia play any role in the United States’ decision to intervene? 50 years after the rise of the Nazis, we were as a people familiar with the existence of ethnic cleansing, even if we didn’t know the particulars of the Bosnian conflict. Did the 1992–1995 audiences of news watchers in any way shame policy makers around the world to action, the echoes of Russia and Germany reverberating in their hearts and minds?
Perhaps it is a quantitative question, however, and the numbers of dead and dying in this current ethnic cleansing are perceived as being simply too small to get involved. Or could it be the Darfurians’ international position that is the real impediment to action? The government of Sudan has simultaneously been labelled by the US an ally in the war on terror as well as a purveyor of modern genocide; the extreme opposition these viewpoints occupy has created a skewed impression. The US and other Western nations have also claimed that it is loath to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign state, a fair-weather policy at best when, no matter the possible implications and political intricacies, the West
does
choose to intervene when a boon can be derived. What boon then beyond justice can be derived from Darfur? In the face of all this, what good could images really do?
Cindy’s question also got me thinking about the 1935 movie
Triumph of the Will,
which Leni Riefenstahl shot, documenting the Nazi Party’s rise to power. Intentionally or not, that work promoted the perceived and then fully realised power of the Nazis. But could it in some way work in reverse? Could genocide footage from Darfur and Chad showing that the strength
these
purveyors of death enjoy lies in their ability to act with impunity—not from their power as a truly formidable force—could this inspire other nations to act? Would we challenge cowardice as readily as we were emboldened to face down tyranny?
Though it seemed like only seconds I had been ruminating on all this, it must have been longer.
‘You falling asleep?’ Cindy asked.
‘No.’
‘Where’d you go?’
‘Everywhere.’
9am now, post shower and cold cereal, and it’s time to make my way downstairs to load my pillowed-under eyes and oversized boxes into the waiting van. I board the already full bus that would be shuttling us to the airport and on to our private military escort plane. Several members of Congress are in attendance. Jim McDermott, a Democrat from Washington State, has spent much of his time in Congress dealing with African affairs. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, is sitting near the back. Over her shoulder sits Diane Watson, another Democrat from California. Both of them are on the House Committee on International Relations Subcommittee on Africa. Betty McCollum, Democrat from Minnesota, is here as well. She also has a seat on the Committee on International Relations, where she promotes US leadership to confront the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Last but not least is California Republican Ed Royce, the then vice-chairman of the Subcommittee on Africa. He is a strong supporter of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which reduced import quotas on African goods as large parts of the continent began moving toward free markets and political democracy. And then there’s me, starring in the grown-up version of
Sesame Street’s
‘one of these things is not like the others.’ I hope to God nobody asks me a question about Chad or Darfur and my answer reveals my absolute ignorance on the subject. Just in case, I’ve front-loaded the complimentary response: ‘I’m here to learn.’ It’s hardly a lie.
The trip had been described as a fact-finding exercise, which was exactly the type of trip a neophyte like me needed. I had only just begun to investigate the situation and was familiar with only a few of the players involved in the conflict. I knew I had much to learn. But then something happened as I began to take stock in my travelling companions. My seeds of fatalism began searching for purchase: ‘What knowledge could this fact-finding trip
really
yield, and to what end?’
The die had already been cast for Darfur policy-wise, hadn’t it? Weren’t we actually going to bring back incontrovertible evidence of ‘genocide,’ so named by the US government because of the mountain of evidence, of an incontrovertible nature, that already existed to support the finding? It was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma of diplomatic doublespeak. Yet here we were, on our way. It didn’t add up. The congressional members couldn’t have been counting on free publicity to highlight their empathetic and compassionate souls, given that the trip had been planned for months and
Nightline
had only recently agreed to accompany us (cutting it very close to the wire, in fact). So why were they going? Maybe what made the trip inviting was the fact that it was politically safe for the representatives on both sides of the aisle; these people hailed from a government that had used the word ‘genocide’ while referring to Darfur yet ignored all international conventions that called for direct action against it. This mission could be the perfect opportunity for a politico to pick up compassion points without being saddled with the need for results. For a fledgling fatalist, scepticism was as comfortable as an old shoe, and I had gone from enthusiastic participant on our journey to pessimistic passenger in only the time it took to walk down the bus aisle.
Dammit! Now I gotta take this long-ass trip with these people who aren’t really looking to change the game, they just want to assuage their guilt and have the opportunity to claim the moral high ground come election time. ‘At least we’ve gone to Africa to see the horror up close.’ I can hear them now.
Whoa. I can hear
me
now. I had just ‘themed’ them. I let their new moniker roll around in my mind for a hot second. I was good with it, but I always allow for the fact that I could be wrong.
After the short bus ride, ‘them’ and I board a military charter, rounded out by an automatic weapon–toting security force. Nice. We’re headed first to Entebbe, Uganda, and eventually to Chad.
Before long the film
The Battle of Algiers
begins to play over the cabin’s television screens. It is an amazing movie about the Algerians’ fight for freedom against the French in the 1950s, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why we were watching it on this trip. True, the CODEL was going on to Algiers after Chad and Sudan, but the subject matter of this film jangled greatly out of tune with the mental profile I had compiled of my travel companions. We were flying to be witness to the ravages of genocide in Darfur, accompanied by sound and pictures of young, brown men and women, not cardboard caricatures but human beings depicted evenly, preparing bombs to explode in markets, restaurants, and bars. I thought my
head
would explode. Maybe the people on this CODEL were different. Maybe they were about opening their eyes to seek understanding, to move toward positive change. Maybe these people were actually trying to do something here. Could they be ‘Us’s?
When we landed in Entebbe to refuel, our group went into the airport’s waiting area, where we met a marine unit stationed in the region, shocked as hell to see ‘that guy that came out in
Boogie Nights’
ambling around trying to get cell phone reception. We took some pictures together; I finally found a T-Mobile–friendly corner, and a short time later we hopped back on the plane to finish the last leg of our trip.
January 2005
Chad
As our transport slowly taxied down the runway, I peeked out the window and found two things that stood in stark relief against the dusty tarmac: the
Nightline
camera crew filming all the proceedings and a long, stringy-haired, six-foot-and-change white man strolling casually up to the plane like he was walking down the street to the local convenience store to get the paper. John Prendergast looked right at home.
I first met John in November of 2004 at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, which was hosting a screening of
Hotel Rwanda
. Sophie, Paul, Tatiana, and Terry had all assembled for the event, with hundreds in attendance. Bonnie Abaunza, a seriously dedicated human rights advocate working with Amnesty International, was navigating us through the maze of people and making sure we were meeting the folks we needed to, when she brought me over to John, hanging out with his running buddy, and US ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, Pierre-Richard Prosper. I only mention height because within five minutes of our meeting these two ‘important’ people, the conversation devolved into a healthy round of trash-talking about basketball. They’d heard tell of my basketball prowess—a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing—and proceeded to look down on me (literally), recounting tales of hardwood heroism, challenging me and any other human being I knew to a game of two-on-two. I told them that I knew Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, and many of the Lakers and Clippers but would only need to pull somebody from my weekend crew to face down a couple of Beltway braggers who clearly only had height going for them. Needless to say, we were fast friends. Segueing out of ball and back to matters at hand, John downloaded me on his extensive experiences in Africa and said he wanted me to consider him an ally-in-service for whatever Africa-related task I might take up. I pocketed the info, and when the Darfur trip arose, he was an early call.
Now, seeing him confidently rolling up, throwing his arms open wide with a ‘Buddy!’ and no apparent worry clouding his mug, I was sure I was in the company of another ‘Us.’ Seconds later our ‘Us’ would be complete as Paul Rusesabagina, smartly dressed as always, stood nearby with a ‘My friend!’ of his own to welcome me. I’d known he would be accompanying us, but I was still completely blown away. This man had come through a fire that most would greatly resist even mentally replaying, never mind reliving through the experiences of these people we were about to meet. If he could bring himself to this task, who was I to entertain fatalism? I was humbled in the company of all that had made this journey—people committing much more than empty sentiments to try to change for the better the world in which they lived. It would most probably be a thankless job and one with a most uncertain outcome. But standing on the ground in Chad, I found myself smiling, happy to be among doers, lucky to be pulled into the current of Us.
John’s Path