A firsthand report on Darfur: World must act to stop genocide

Atema Eclai, UUSC’s director of programs, spent four days in the war-torn region of Darfur in western Sudan. She was there when the peace accords were signed, and she witnessed the horrors of what the United Nations says is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. She was interviewed by writer/editor Theresa Pease at our Cambridge office.

The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., employs about 40 human rights workers, but as a new arrival I found that colleagues are often on the ground in far-flung places from Indonesia to Arkansas.

One desk that was unoccupied during my first three weeks at UUSC belongs to Atema Eclai, director of programs.

My path has not crossed with Atema’s sooner, I learn, because she has been traveling in Africa, including Darfur, Sudan, bearing painful witness to the ongoing massacre of men, women, and children by armed militias. To date, the genocide is said to have taken more than 200,000 lives, with another 2.5 million people or more displaced.

"Why do people do this to people?" I ask.

She replies, "It is about making the 'other' of people. There is nothing we humans would not do to each other if we make each other 'other' enough. You would do it to me, and I would do it to you."

I want to know what makes someone cross that line.

"It happens," she says, "because fear comes a lot more naturally to us than courage."

From there, the questions flow.

Q. Why did you go to Sudan?
A. I wanted to see with my own eyes what was happening in Darfur. At UUSC, we have a Rights in Humanitarian Crises Program, and I wanted to see how we could best be involved.

Q. Did you go alone?
A. I went with four people from other countries, but it is not safe for me to name them.

Q. Did what you saw in Darfur differ from your expectations?
A. I didn’t have any expectations. When you go to war, you don’t expect—you just go.

Q. What did you find when you got there?
A. I found people dying. I found more dead bodies than I could ever have imagined. I found children starving, men and women malnourished. I talked to women who couldn’t lift their feet to walk because they had been raped that badly; they couldn’t move and were just waiting to die. I met families where the men had been taken, the women raped in front of their husbands, and the young girls carried off on horseback to be used as concubines until they got too exhausted; then they would be killed. In Darfur, they use "disappear" as a passive verb: Many people I met had family members who had "been disappeared," and they don’t know whether they are going to get them back.

Q. Where do such atrocities take place? Are the people rounded up and carried off to die?
A. They die on the streets, in their homes, in their villages—whole villages are burned.

Q. Did you feel personally endangered?
A. I always feel endangered, but that is nothing new. I’ve worked in war-torn situations, and you go into such situations knowing you might die. I do my best to protect myself, of course, but I know that, no matter how protected you are, if someone wants to get you they’ll get you. When I was there, they killed some of the international volunteers, and for the first time I felt I was lucky because I was black.

Q. What went through your head?
A. Questions went through my head: Why? Where are we? Where is Africa on this? Where is the international community? Is the world not looking at this? Are we looking but not seeing? The other thing that came into my head is that the United States has collaborated with Sudan on intelligence projects. Is Sudan getting away with something, is the U.S. not looking at them with a tougher eye because they have participated with us on issues of intelligence? Are they getting a free pass?

Q. What was the most disturbing thing about the experience?
A. This genocide has been going on for three years. I was hoping it may be calming
down, and perhaps inside Sudan things were getting better. I was wrong. People are still fighting, people are still killing, people are still dying.

Q. What do you believe has to happen to turn the tide?
A. The major thing is to keep the hope alive, doing as many things as we can, spreading the word that the situation is bad and that it’s getting worse instead of getting better. The local, international and African communities must work together if anything is to change.

Q. What would you advise sympathetic people to do?
A. Do anything—educate other people, call attention to the situation in Darfur, write about it, send a postcard to your legislators, anything. There is no act too small and none too big. Even one little step helps to create hope, so long as it is keeping Darfur on the front burner. We have to keep hoping, because as we give up hope we are giving up the people of Darfur and after that all the people of Sudan.

Posted May 10, 2006