Following the Footsteps of Genocide—Mia Farrow and Darfur

One late evening earlier this month in New York’s Central Park, Mia Farrow sat on the stage of the Delacorte amphitheater, her trademark blond hair loose to her shoulders on either side of her face. She wore khaki pants and a black t-shirt with DARFUR printed in large white letters across the front.

In her palm she held a small piece of melted rubber that she brought back from her latest trip to Africa, only a few days before. It had been a child’s shoe. For the hundreds in the amphitheater, having just witnessed a powerful reading of In Darfur, a play byWinter Miller, Farrow in a few words made the implications of that small object heart-wrenchingly obvious.

“He or she must have run.” Farrow said. “I don’t know what happened to this child or if this child even exists anymore.”

The tragedy that befell that child, his or her family and their village is one story out of millions. Since the genocide began in Sudan in 2003, an estimated 450,000 people have been killed and two million are now displaced within Darfur, having been forced to flee their homes. Others sought refuge in Eastern Chad, but the violence escalated and followed them across the border. The power to put an end to the conflict exists within the international community. The political will to do so does not.

Mia Farrow’s message: It is up to us as citizens to force the world’s most powerful nations to act.

She mentioned the privilege that an acting career has given her of using her notoriety to raise awareness of humanitarian issues. She has spoken out for children’s rights as UNICEF goodwill ambassador. Now she’s raising her voice over the issue of genocide in Darfur and its expansion into Chad and the Central African Republic. “I made a pest of myself to Samantha and John too,” Farrow said, referring to Samantha Power, Harvard professor and founder of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, and activist and author John Prendergast who joined her at the event. “I wanted to inform myself. I had to. Once I did, I knew that I had to do my utmost to help these people. My utmost.”

Farrow said she had “shunned interviews almost my whole life. Now I’ve done over 2000 of them. I’d never been online before, now I have my own website and I take 30,000 people with me every day to witness what is going on.” Farrow’s blog chronicles her trips to the region, with pictures and stories of a tragic reality that too many Americans cannot even begin to contemplate. She’s bridging the “so what?” factor—reaching an audience able to gloss over a 30 second segment on the evening news—with a name or face or place that makes the horror of genocide personal to all of us.

In March, Farrow and her son Ronan had an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal that called attention to the role of China in the Sudanese genocide. “The Genocide Olympics” described how, as the number one buyer of Sudan’s oil, China has made itself the most accessible ATM for the Sudanese government. This image is hardly in keeping with the Olympics values that China is promoting in preparation for the 2008 games to be held in Beijing.

A key collaborator for China in redefining its image is Oscar-winning director, Steven Spielberg. He is slated to direct the opening ceremony. In “The Genocide Olympics,” the Farrows asked him directly if he wanted to risk being remembered as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games, a reference to the brilliant German filmmaker who is now remembered almost exclusively for the propaganda she produced to accompany the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

It would be an ironic and tragic label for the man who brought us Schindler’s List. Four days after the op-ed appeared, Spielberg wrote a letter to the Chinese president asking him to use China’s unique relationship with Sudan to force an end to the human suffering there. Farrow’s website features a section where those concerned can write letters of protest to the companies sponsoring the Beijing games as well as to Spielberg, who has not entirely withdrawn his artistic participation. By naming those silently complicit in the genocide, Farrow is helping to focus public outrage. There are people who must change their minds, she tells us, and each of us has some power to make that happen.

At the Delacorte, Farrow told the story of her meeting with Ounda Fatih Younnis Hannon Tarbush, the leader of 20,000 Darfurian refugees in Chad. Four years ago, Sudanese government soldiers and Arab militia—the Janjaweed—attacked Moeger, his town in Darfur. Men, women and children were shot indiscriminately. Those that could ran and hid in the bush.

Ounda, who had a pregnant wife and three small children to worry about, helped to collect some 4,500 survivors—those who had managed to hide and others not too badly injured to travel. They made their way across the border to the Goz Amir Darfurian Refugee Camp in Koukou. But the camp has been attacked twice by Sudanese Arabs swarming into Chad. Ounda told Farrow the refugees from his village didn’t know the terrain well enough to run. So during the last attack, they sat and they held each other and waited. “We were thinking, no hopes for us,” Ounda told Farrow. “No hopes for us.”

But Farrow insists there is still hope. The Darfurian people cling to life and ask for the help of the international community—to create a peace that does not get crushed under the hooves of Janjaweed horses.