Unitarian Universalist Church of Ogden

Unitarian Universalist Church of Ogden
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Sermon
Stop Darfur Genocide Now
Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne

Story for All Ages
Special Olympics

Have you heard the Story that came out of the Seattle Special Olympics? For the 100 yard dash there were nine contestants, all of them so-called physically or mentally disabled. All nine of them assembled at the starting line and at the sound of the gun, they took off. But one little boy didn't get very far. He stumbled and fell and hurt his knee and began to cry. The other eight children heard the boy crying. They slowed down, turned around and ran back to him every one of them ran back to him. One little girl with Down syndrome bent down and kissed the boy and said, “This will make it better?” The little boy got up, and he and the rest of the runners linked arms together and joyfully walked to the finish line. They all finished the race at the same time. And when they did, everyone in the; stadium stood up and clapped and whistled and cheered for a long, long time. People who were there are still telling the story with obvious delight. And you know why? Because deep down we know that what matters in this life is more than winning for ourselves. What really matters is helping others win, too, even if it means slowing down and changing our course now and then.

Sermon

We must act now to stop the genocide going on in the Darfur region of Sudan. That’s not subtle, and today’s message will not be presented in my normal sermon style. I usually try to get the congregation to see some issue from a little different point of view and leave the conclusions up to you. Unitarian Universalist sermons are typically not like the old style of sermons where the preacher tells you what he’s going to tell you, tells you, and then tells you what he told you. But today, I can’t pussy foot around. I feel so strongly about this I’m telling you me position right in the beginning. We must act now to stop the genocide going on in the Darfur region of Sudan.

The children in the Seattle Special Olympics who stopped running in order to help their fallen comrade exemplified the Biblical injunction to love your neighbor. You may say that story is too sentimental, that it’s sweet that the children gave up their desire to run a race, but in the adult world, competitive demands would force us to keep running toward our goals – no matter how narrowly defined. But I say those children were not being sentimental; they intuitively acted out the essence of liberal morality – we are all in this race together, and we are at our best when we have compassion for those who have fallen. The people of Darfur are lying on the turf crying, and we, as busy as we are with our lives, need to stop, embrace them and help them to their feet.
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The United Nations calls the genocide in Darfur, which is in western Sudan and spilling over into Chad and the Central African Republic, the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. We have all heard about it; it has been going on for more than three years now. In 2005 the UU General Assembly passed an Action of Immediate Witness to “End the crimes Against Humanity in Darfur, Sudan.” That’s what we do when an issue is urgent and can’t wait for us to deliberate for years before we take a position. With over 300,000 deaths and 2.5 million refugees, it is past time to put a stop to it. The systematic murder, rape, torture, abduction, and displacement is continuing, in large part because the Government of Sudan continues to wage civil war despite its horrible consequences. It refuses to allow UN peacekeepers to join the African Union to protect the civilian population of Darfur. The UU Service Committee has made Darfur the focus of this year’s Justice Sunday because this already horrific crisis only worsens as the killings, rape, and torture get more violent.

A Service Committee report states, “the genocide in Darfur continues unabated, destroying villages and creating a massive refugee and displaced population living at the edge of survival.” And Sudan is not content with forcing people out of their homes. They continue to attack the refugees across the border in Chad. “Amnesty International has documented cross-border attacks into Eastern Chad since late 2005, in which armed Janjawid militias have targeted, killed and forcibly displaced thousands. According to a January 5, 2007 report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, an estimated 20,000 were displaced from eastern Chad in the preceding two weeks, and at least 100,000 have been affected since 2005. Large segments of the Chadian population have been drawn into armed participation in the conflict, and the security of refugee camps has been seriously threatened.” Chad, one of the poorest countries in Africa, has been gracious to the people pouring over its borders, but it has been unable to meet the tremendous need or to stop the attacks.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Harsh conditions threaten the survival of Darfurians who have been driven into the desert and rely on international aid.” The Sudanese government has targeted an ethnic sub-group of its own people for extinction using direct slaughter, starvation and rape. “The destruction by the Sudanese government and it allied militias is organized and systematic.” This certainly qualifies as genocide according to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
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Surely, when crimes against humanity reach the level of genocide, the rest of the world should act decisively to stop them, prevent more deaths, and punish the criminals. Surely, America, which lead in establishing the international court at Nuremburg to bring the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice, would want to show moral leadership by placing itself in the front ranks of countries acting to stop an ongoing genocide. Unfortunately, for us who would be proud to live in such a country but much more so for the Darfurians, actions of the United States have so far not ended the genocide.

Samantha Power's book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, asks, “What does America do when faced with evidence of genocide?” Unfortunately, although the US has made modest progress in its policy toward genocide, it has consistently refused to take effective action in the face of unspeakable atrocities often committed in plain view. “Despite broad public consensus that genocide should “never again” be allowed and a good deal of triumphalism about the ascent of liberal democratic values, the last decade of the twentieth century was one of the most deadly in the grimmest century on record.” In 1994 Rwandan Hutus systematically slaughtered 8,000 Tutsis every day for 100 days without any foreign interference.

Near the beginning of President Bush’s first term in office, he read a memo summarizing Power's chapter on Rwanda which told of President Clinton's failure to stop the genocide in 1994. President Bush reportedly wrote “Not on my watch” in the memo’s margin. For obvious reasons, word of this was leaked to the press and it became well-known. “Not on my watch” has often been interpreted as a John Wayne moment in which he reacted with a brand of tender toughness or righteous anger. It seemed comforting at the time that he had drawn a sort of moral line in the sand. But now with Darfur happening on his watch, we have to question what he really meant by his note. Is he really prepared to do what it takes to stop the genocide happening now in Darfur? Are we?

Maybe the invasion and occupation of Iraq is a ready made excuse for inaction. But really, America’s leaders have always averted their eyes in the face of genocide, failing to take decisive action to stop any genocide in the last 100 years: from 1915 when the Turks murdered or exiled over a million Armenians, through the Nazi Holocaust in Europe, Pol Pot’s reign of terror in Cambodia, Iraq’s gassing of the Kurds, Bosnian Serbs’ ethnic cleansing of Muslims, to the Hutu elimination of Tutsis in Rwanda. Now it looks as if Darfur has been added to this list.
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Why has the United States failed to take effective action? To be sure we can’t say the U.S. has done nothing about the genocides – sometimes sanctions were imposed and once or twice there was military action. But, as of yet, none of this has been enough to stop or even significantly slow down an ongoing genocide. The most common excuse for the feebleness of the responses is “We didn’t know it was genocide.” This has probably never been true, US administrations have always had intelligence on the genocides, and there have always been calls for action from at least a few in congress. In our age of instant access to information from all around the globe, “We didn’t know” simply can’t be true anymore. In his 1998 Rwanda apology President Clinton suggested they “didn’t fully appreciate” the level of the atrocities. We find it hard to wrap our minds around the unbelievable when survivors report savage killings. But again, this is not a sufficient excuse. We are responsible for our own incredulity. We should replace our ability to conveniently hide behind a lack of information with a bias toward belief when failure to act can have such a high cost in lives.

When U.S. administrations have delayed action while ostensibly searching for more concrete evidence, they have chosen “not to know.” The main excuses the U.S. has given for doing so little cite the futility, perversity or jeopardy of proposed measures. For example, while Pol Pot was slaughtering thousands daily, the U.S., unwilling to act after its decades long involvement in neighboring Vietnam, defended it reticence saying applying sanctions to such a reclusive regime would be futile. They said speaking out against the atrocities might perversely cause the Khmer Rouge to just kill more people. The Carter administration was determined not to jeopardize its relationships with the Khmer Rouge’s allies in the region, Thailand and China. Perpetrators of genocides have learned what they can get away with. They keep a close watch on Washington, and when they hear the futility, perversity or jeopardy excuses, they take it as a clear signal they can continue without interference from the US or the world community.

“The real reason the United States has not done what it could and should have done to stop genocide was not a lack of knowledge or influence but a lack of will. Simply put, American leaders did not act because they did not want to.” I feel sure that no US President has ever wanted genocide to happen. But just as surely their policies have always pursued two objectives – first, to avoid the costs of getting involved in conflicts far from American soil and second to avoid the costs to their political futures of not getting involved. Obfuscating the facts, denying that getting involved would be in America’s interests, claiming there is no good way to intervene - all serve both purposes. American policy has been clear – stay out of the genocide prevention business. So far, our leaders have been very successful at avoiding the stigma that should attach to such a cold-hearted position.
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Right now, by going on about all the problems facing those of us who would show compassion toward our suffering fellow human beings, I’m afraid I may be playing right in to this defeatist mindset. Telling you how difficult it has been to get the U.S. to take effective action, is like playing the “Ain’t it awful,” game. By doing that, we can commiserate with each other, but it doesn’t fix anything, and it just adds to the Compassion Fatigue, the feeling that we are tired of hearing about all the overwhelming problems in the world.

But, I want to counter that helpless feeling by telling you we can make a difference. The United States helped broker the 2005 peace agreement in the 20 year civil war between northern and southern Sudan and has influence with the Sudanese government in Khartoum. According to a recent article by Alex de Waal in The Nation magazine, “Having initially seen the Darfur conflict as little more than an irritating sideshow to the North-South war, the [Bush] Administration was pressed by an unprecedented mobilization of college students and community groups, who branded Darfur "the first genocide of the twenty-first century" and insisted that the United States had a responsibility to stop it. This mass movement scored some impressive victories: Colin Powell labeled the Darfur killings "genocide" in September 2004, the case was referred to the International Criminal Court by the UN Security Council in March 2005 and the White House handed down an instruction that there should be a peace deal and that the small African Union peacekeeping contingent should be upgraded to a sizable UN force.”

College students and organizations like the UU Service Committee, Amnesty International, SaveDarfur.org and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum have already made a difference. The UU Service Committee has launched a campaign called “Drumbeat for Darfur,” to help move people into action to keep the pressure on the Bush Administration. Don't let compassion fatigue keep you from participating in the political process. Genocide is a complicated problem with no simple answers - and I don't have them all here today. it may take a long time, but all of us know in our hearts it must be stopped in Darfur and each time it begins in the future.
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I close with words I’ve paraphrased from the UU Service Committee Justice Sunday sermon by Rev. Dr. Terrence Ellen, entitled “Drumbeat for Darfur.”

“For us Unitarian Universalists, there is even further reason to be in the forefront of humanitarian relief for Darfur. Recently, two of the founders of the UU Service Committee, the Rev. Waitstill Sharp and Martha Sharp, were honored for their work in helping to save Jews during World War II with the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel.

The design for our flaming chalice symbol came out of their office in Lisbon, but more importantly, they went to extraordinary and dangerous lengths to get every sort of help to those endangered by the Nazis — Jews and non-Jews alike. They stayed in Prague long after the Nazis had trashed their offices, and Martha left one day before being called to the Gestapo headquarters for questioning. Their courage and dedication has earned them this high honor. It has also left for all of us an example of what real commitment to human rights in a time of disaster means. As they are honored for lifting high our humane ideals, so we are challenged in our own right.

The Sharps are no longer alive, but we are. So I want to ask each one of us here this morning… [to imagine the people of Darfur right here beside us.] At this moral moment, seeing their need, we are, as Bill Sinkford put it in his pastoral letter to us, “the only hands on earth.” We need not go directly into danger ourselves like the Sharps did, but we can choose to step outside our business-as-usual comfort zone and support in every way possible those who do. The people of Darfur are present with us, asking by their plight whether we choose to be neighbors, begging us to bring relief to the slaughtered and raped and starving and forsaken people of Darfur.”

Remember what Unitarian Universalism stands for.

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