Ending "the world's hottest war"

Can a citizens movement enlisting the likes of George Clooney, Angelina Jolie and Don Cheadle finally stop the genocide in Darfur?

By Mathieu von Rohr

Read more: Politics, George Clooney, News, Africa, Angelina Jolie, Sudan, Darfur

June 13, 2007 | John Prendergast felt a familiar sense of outrage that morning, the same feeling of indignation that has driven him all these years and made him into the man who wants to save Darfur, the Congo, Uganda and, if possible, all of Africa. At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Darfur in April, the same government officials were at it again, making vague comments, rambling on about a "plan B," and debating sanctions against Sudan that the United States could impose if the country continued to reject a United Nations peacekeeping mission to Darfur.

"They simply don't get it," Prendergast said afterward. "We need to hit this regime now. We must stop barking if we don't bite."

At 43, Prendergast is a tall, slim and athletic man, with long blond hair and a scruffy beard. As America's most prominent expert on Africa, he flies with Angelina Jolie to the Congo, does the talk show circuit, travels for weeks on end through the continent, and meets with rebels and top government officials.

Prendergast was the Africa expert on the National Security Council under former President Bill Clinton until George W. Bush replaced Clinton in 2001. He then joined the International Crisis Group, an independent think tank, and became the man who explains Africa to Americans, starting with the crisis in Darfur.

His strategy paper, "The Answer to Darfur: How to Resolve the World's Hottest War," lies on the table in front of him. The contents are, of course, nothing new, says Prendergast. The problem is not that no one knew what to do in Darfur all these years. The problem is that no one did what needed to be done.

The Darfur conflict is one of today's most complicated and brutal wars. For many in the West, it is the typical African war -- remote, cruel and difficult to comprehend. And the questions facing policymakers are myriad. First and foremost is why the West should get involved, especially given the risks of any military intervention. It is likewise unclear how the United Nations can be expected to succeed where the world's superpowers have failed. Indeed, the international community has a long list of failures in Africa, including Congo, Somalia and, now, Darfur.

The Darfur region in western Sudan is roughly the size of France. Over the past four years, government-supported Arab militiamen, the Janjaweed, have fought African rebels and repeatedly attacked the civilian population. Mounted on horses and camels, the Janjaweed have systematically destroyed over a thousand villages, while killing and raping the inhabitants. More than 200,000 have died in the fighting while a further 2.5 million refugees have fled.

The international community condemned Sudan. It issued threats. It called for Sudan to disarm the Janjaweed. It passed resolutions and created a peacekeeping force. The United States even described the situation in Darfur as "genocide." Yet the international community has failed to stop the killings -- and the Darfur crisis has slowly become a symbol of its ineffectiveness.

That's why people need to take a stand, says Prendergast. Things will only improve if citizens around the world demand that their governments take action. It is those citizens that Prendergast now spends his time trying to mobilize.

Prendergast wears a zippered, wool sweater in his tiny office on the fifth floor of a gray building on Washington's K Street lobbying corridor. Cardboard boxes, loose papers and business cards are piled high on every available surface. "I've got a lot of junk here," he admits. "We moved into this office three years ago. I really don't know what's in all these boxes." He never had time to unpack.

He's been busy mastering the balancing act between policy wonk and liaison to entertainers-turned-activists. Prendergast has just returned from Rwanda, where he met with President Paul Kagame. His eighth and most recent book, "Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond" (Hyperion), which he co-wrote with "Hotel Rwanda" star Don Cheadle, features an introduction by two U.S. presidential hopefuls, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and Sen. Sam Brownback from Kansas. Prendergast's columns appear in theWashington Post and Foreign Affairs. He testifies at congressional hearings. And when George Clooney called for intervention in Darfur during a speech to the U.N. Security Council last September, it was Prendergast who helped make his appearance possible.

In short, he seeks to translate complicated politics into a language for the masses. He is an analyst and an activist in one.

Today's mobilization for the issue of Darfur is the largest citizens' movement since the anti-apartheid campaign of the 1980s, he says, and one of his jobs is to provide information and analysis to the public. "We need to do it in a way so they're not overwhelmed, so they don't think it's too far away, so they actually feel like they can be part of the policymaking process," Prendergast says. The days are over when a handful of politicians could determine foreign policy on their own, he adds. "We need a citizenry, large groups of citizens, who stand up and tell the governments: That needs to be done. We need citizens taking control of our foreign policy."

Now Prendergast has launched another campaign: "ENOUGH -- the project to abolish genocide and mass atrocities." It's an initiative that goes beyond just Darfur, looking also to northern Uganda and the eastern part of Congo, where militias are fighting over natural resources. "I killed a bunch of birds with one stone," he says of the initiative.

He wants to popularize ideas generated by the think tanks and believes they should be able "to consume more readily" what he and the others have worked out. Most important, though, is that they should act. Prendergast says it's all about citizens' stopping politicians from letting something like Darfur happen again in the future.

The Darfur conflict began in 2003, largely unnoticed by the general public. In southern Sudan, a civil war that had raged for 20 years was finally coming to an end -- a war that saw the rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Army fighting against the central government headquartered in the northern part of the country. It was a war that the West often characterized as a religious conflict between Muslims and Christians, but in reality, the rebels wanted to take power and share in the southern region's rich oil reserves.

"The big mistake that was made," says Prendergast, "was in the north-south peace talks. The Darfurians were begging to be part of the process. They said, 'Look, our issues are the same.' But the U.S. didn't want to hear about it. They were like, 'It's a north-south war, and everything will fall into place if we solve it.' They were so fundamentally misled about what was the truth about Sudan. It's not a north-south war as we now know very well. Rather it's a center-periphery-conflict. A small group of people in the center are fighting against those people who are demanding their rights and their part of the pie. And so, the political opposition in Darfur ended up taking arms, because they felt the only way they could get into the negotiations was if they shot their way to the table."

For decades, there had been eruptions of violence between the ruling Arab elite and the non-Arab African population. But then it escalated. In the spring of 2003, African rebels attacked military bases of the Sudanese army. In response, the government provided arms to the Arab Janjaweed and deployed its air force in support.

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