By James Bowman on 11.5.07 @ 12:02AM
General Omar al-Bashir must be quaking in his boots.
Near the end of Ted Braun's documentary, Darfur Now, a
student from Los Angeles named Adam Sterling is invited to speak at
the ceremonial signing in Sacramento of a measure he has helped to
push through the California legislature. It instructs California
state pension funds managers to sell any stock they have in
companies doing business in the Sudan. "To the government of
Sudan," says young Adam as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger beams
down at him approvingly. "We're coming! Your genocide will not
occur on our watch, and it will not occur on our dime!" Now I
suppose that disinvestment by the state employees of California --
and other states -- in Sudanese oil is not quite so feeble
a gesture as the petition addressed to the Taliban I was once asked
to sign, pre-9/11, protesting against their treatment of women in
Afghanistan, but it is not far off it.
Can even Mr. Sterling or his celebrity backers, Don Cheadle and
George Clooney, seriously suppose that General Omar al-Bashir, the
Sudanese tyrant and clandestine backer of the Janjaweed militias
that are killing so many of his non-Arabic-speaking people in
Darfur, is quaking in his boots? But of course that is not really
the object, either of Mr. Sterling's crusade or of this movie. The
object is to make progressive-minded people feel good about
themselves. At one point, Mr. Sterling tearfully informs that
camera of the reason for his dedication. "Part of it is guilt. I
don't want to look back in ten years and think I didn't do
everything I could."
Well, not everything. He seems to have given no thought
at all, for example, to turning his powers of political
organization and advocacy to the work of promoting an Iraq-style
invasion of the Sudan to overthrow its corrupt dictatorship and
exterminate the marauding Janjaweed before they can exterminate the
people of Darfur. On the contrary, his opposition to the Iraq war,
advertised along with a number of other approved liberal causes --
"Yes to the Living Wage!" -- on stickers and posters displayed in
his room, suggests that he would be opposed to the only measure
likely to bring any relief to the long-suffering Fur and other
peoples of the region. You can just imagine the reaction if anyone
were to whisper in his ear that the Sudanese people were better off
when they were subjects of the British empire.
Mr. Sterling is one of the film's three heroes. Marginally less
futile than his are the efforts of Luis Moreno Ocampo, an
Argentinian prosecutor who has managed to obtain war crimes
indictments against two Sudanese government officials before the
International Criminal Court in the Hague. Not that he has a prayer
of ever putting them on trial. Yet he remains undaunted. "I believe
because I learned this in my country, that the truth will prevail."
And he remembers his successful prosecution of the former Argentine
dictator, General Videla, as an encouraging lesson. "It happens all
the time. People who have the power lose the power." Well, not
all the time. Sometimes, as in Iraq, only an invasion is
sufficient to dislodge them. Sudan seems to me a lot more like Iraq
than it does like Argentina.
The third hero, Pablo Recalde, is the only one who is really
doing anything very useful. He is the UN relief official in charge
of getting supplies of food to those who have been cut off and
chased out of their homes by the Janjaweed. We see one of his
convoys to the isolated north of the region returning safely, in
spite of the threat of attacks from guerrillas along the way. But
that's the nearest we ever get to seeing anything practical done on
behalf of the threatened population. You'd think that Mr. Braun
might have made more of an effort to show us a rebel leader who
could conceivably be a hero, but the few shots we have of the
rag-tag anti-government forces in the Jebel Marra Mountains are not
calculated to inspire either confidence in their military
capabilities or admiration.
The saddest thing in this sad film is the shots of the people of
Darfur as they wait for Western assistance, imagining what it will
be like when "the white people" come to deliver them from their
miseries, to set up hospitals and dig wells and bring electricity.
They are frankly nostalgic for the days of empire. What Adam
Sterling is really doing with his ostentatious display of
compassion is helping to make sure that that will never happen. One
of the refugee children interviewed for Mr. Braun's camera says: "I
want to be a pilot. When I am a pilot I will fly to America and buy
many weapons." And then, speaking of the Janjaweed, he adds: "Like
they burned us, I want to burn them." Now there's someone who might
get something done.
The movie's theme song by Stevie Wonder that plays over the
closing credits is "Love in Need of Love Today." But love isn't in
need of love. Love is in need of guns.
topics:
Business, Military, Iraq, Oil
